Boris, Bad? Enough!

Dear Weekend Jolter,

It's not as if there aren't plenty of big stories and issues this side of the pond to merit top-of-the-fold attention (admittedly, Weekend Jolt has no "fold") in the new edition of this Humble Missive. But let us all face the fact: British politics has been a historic concern to NR (also admittedly, our offices have always been stinking with Brits, and of course us "stinking" in the non-olfactory, good sense, although there was that one intern . . .). And then there's this: Brexit / May / Johnson / Farage / Hannan / No Deal / EU waxball has great implications for we Vespuccians.

So: Mr. Boris Johnson, the New York-born Prime Minister, finds himself in a titanic constitutional / political battle with Remainers, some being in his own party, and many others being Britain's Marxist-led Labourites (whose ranks include many Brexit reneggers). Our Madeleine Kearns wrote early in the week, trying to make sense of the madness and chaos. From her analysis:

Do Johnson or his aide Dominic ...

September 07 2019

VISIT NATIONALREVIEW.COM

Boris, Bad? Enough!

Dear Weekend Jolter,

It's not as if there aren't plenty of big stories and issues this side of the pond to merit top-of-the-fold attention (admittedly, Weekend Jolt has no "fold") in the new edition of this Humble Missive. But let us all face the fact: British politics has been a historic concern to NR (also admittedly, our offices have always been stinking with Brits, and of course us "stinking" in the non-olfactory, good sense, although there was that one intern . . .). And then there's this: Brexit / May / Johnson / Farage / Hannan / No Deal / EU waxball has great implications for we Vespuccians.

So: Mr. Boris Johnson, the New York-born Prime Minister, finds himself in a titanic constitutional / political battle with Remainers, some being in his own party, and many others being Britain's Marxist-led Labourites (whose ranks include many Brexit reneggers). Our Madeleine Kearns wrote early in the week, trying to make sense of the madness and chaos. From her analysis:

Do Johnson or his aide Dominic Cummings have any tricks up their sleeves? Do they know what they're doing? Addressing the House of Commons, Johnson said:

Everyone will know if the Right Honorable Gentleman [Jeremy Corbyn] is the prime minister, he will go to Brussels, he will beg for an extension, you will accept whatever Brussels demands, and we'll have years' more arguments over Brexit. And by contrast, everyone will know that if I am prime minister, I will go to Brussels, I will go for a deal and get a deal, but if they won't do a deal we will leave anyway on 31 October.

The people of this country will have to choose.

Of course, he is not really addressing the House here. He is addressing the country. And if the latest YouGov poll figures are anything to go by, the Conservatives are set to win a general election. This is something former Labour prime minister Tony Blair, of all people, warned pro-Remain MPs about: An election could seriously backfire.

As the British constitution (paradoxically) crumbles under the weight of its non-existence, Johnson's leadership style is one of "never, never, never give up." One of "keep calm and carry on." One of single-minded determination, initiated and sustained by a commitment to direct democracy. When you look to his heroes, you start to see what he's up to.

Related: Morning Jolt author and all-hailed colleague Jim Geraghty took to his daily treat to provide a round-up of various takes on the high-stakes game Johnson has unleashed in Parliament. From his take:

One of the bigger and thornier questions is how you handle the border between Northern Ireland, which as part of the United Kingdom would no longer be part of the EU, and the Republic of Ireland, which still be part of it. During "the Troubles," the border crossings had checkpoints manned by the British military. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 started winding down the sectarian tensions in Northern Ireland, and by 2005, the situation had improved enough for the checkpoints to evaporate. (Within the EU, you can travel from one country to another with no real interruptions; the trains from Germany to Austria don't even announce when you've left one country and entered another. Picture taking Amtrak to Toronto.) People on both sides of the border, who have gotten used to traveling freely and easily over the past 15 years, worry about the return of customs inspectors and police and waiting in line.

But Daniel Hannan warns that if the British government takes the "no deal" option off the table, the European Union will take the country to the cleaners in the negotiations in the aftermath — after all, the U.K. would have effectively promised they would never walk away from the negotiating table. "[Members of Parliament] know that taking "no deal" off the table means taking Brexit off the table. All the E.U. has to do to keep us in is offer intolerable terms. Let's call this what it is: an attempt by MPs, despite everything they promised, to overturn the referendum."

Not-so-cheerio, eh? Well, if cheerio is what you want, then you need to come on NR's 2020 Rhine River Cruise. Now, on with the Jolt!

Editorials

1. Hong Kong's chief executive, Carrie Lam, has withdrawn the legislation that sparked the relentless, massive pro-democracy protests. We wonder, anxiously, what this drama's next chapter will be. From our editorial:

It can be safely assumed that Ms. Lam makes no significant move without approval from Beijing. Why would Party leaders be willing to withdraw the bill? Perhaps they want calm — or less turbulence — in the lead-up to October 1, on which date the Party will celebrate the 70th anniversary of its dictatorship. Also, Party leaders may want to split the Hong Kong movement: Some elements will be satisfied with the withdrawal of the extradition bill; others will want more.

It seems that most do want more. The withdrawal of the bill might have been satisfactory a few months ago, but the movement has since broadened in scope. Protest leaders want an independent investigation of recent police abuses. They want amnesty for arrested protesters. They want Hong Kongers to have the right to elect legislators, and the chief executive herself, or himself.

Is that asking too much? In the context of the People's Republic, almost certainly so. What will people on the Mainland think? If Hong Kongers have those privileges — rights — why not other Chinese?

Par-teee!

I want to encourage those of you who believe the Buckley Legacy is something very much worth protecting to join National Review Institute in Palm Beach this October 30 for the 2019 William F. Buckley Jr. Prize Dinner, honoring Rush Limbaugh and Gay Gaines. The gala goes a long way towards helping NRI stand athwart the WFB legacy yelling, Enhance! So do think about being part of a certain-to-be super event. Get more information here.

Half a Score and Seven Links Ago

1. Kyle Smith, masquerading as the super-brainy Tom Nichols, expertly exposes an expert, the super-brainy Tom Nichols. From the parody:

Perhaps you've read my latest published piece in USA Today, an urgent plea for people to leave their shoes on when flying. I am a noted authoritarian — sorry, I meant authority! — on what other people are allowed to do when I'm nearby. This, too, is conservative. I keep a bust of Lenin on my desk in case I forget that the Kulaks can be liquidated if they get too uppity.

You may have noticed that I have many times urged Democrats not to compare Trump to Hitler, when I haven't myself been comparing Trump to Hitler, saying he's borrowing Hitler's tactics, calling his voters Hitler lovers, saying Hitler would be pleased by Trump rallies, or predicting that the GOP will nominate Hitler next. Honestly, you folk of feeble minds don't understand that when a true expert walks among you, showering the world with his golden wisdom to the tune of some 286,000 tweets, he will sometimes sound like what a person of lesser mentality might term a fool. They called Einstein a fool when . . . . I'm not sure when, but probably they did. You look it up. I'm busy.

What keeps me busy is telling everyone on Twitter that Trump is, like, a Russian asset or something. Sure, this has become harder for most people after the Mueller report kind of ruled that out, but when your brand is super-duper macho expert on all things, you can't back down from things you said with so much manly confidence so many times. "Unfalsifiable proposition," you say? Peabrain. I operate at a realm beyond the reach of your sissy logical fallacies. I could explain it to you, but your cranium would probably explode. (Cranium means brain.)

2. Michael Brendan Dougherty scores an act of liberal-journalism political activism (translation: twisting and torturing facts). This is the story of a tweet-contortionist — Bloomberg Law's Ben Penn — and Trump nominee (Labor Department) Leif Olsen. From the piece:

Sometimes one suspects there is a problem of reading comprehension at work in cases like these. Certain reporters and outlets suffer from a rare form of colorblindness when it comes to conservatives who are being sarcastic or satirical. The fact-checking site Snopes has found it impossible to acknowledge that the Babylon Bee, a Christian satire news site, is, in fact, satire. Criticized for its apparent lack of common sense, Snopes has gone so far as to commission opinion surveys about paraphrased Babylon Bee stories to prove that people are mistaking its satire for real news. But of course paraphrases remove the satirical context, so any such survey is therefore useless. In other words, a fact-checking enterprise created fake news in order to justify treating obvious satire as deliberate fake news.

At other times — and this is one of them — clearly the motive is ideological hostility.

Earlier this year, New Statesman reporter George Eaton interviewed Roger Scruton on a number of topics. Scruton is a philosopher and conservative thinker of great renown, and he had been put on a government commission dedicated to the building of more beautiful public houses. Scruton had, at one time, been the wine critic of the left-leaning New Statesman. Eaton, having won the man's trust, then butchered his quotes, put them in a different context, and created a social-media uproar that led to Scruton's being sacked from his position.

3. Like Rodney Dangerfield with his kids, wife, and doctor, Jay Cost says the Constitution gets no respect from MSNBC young'un Chris Hayes. From the end of the piece:

I do not like it when the Constitution is attacked in this way, but not because the Constitution is perfect. It is far from perfect. Nobody understood that better than Madison, who was at first deeply frustrated by the finished product. Yet when he started to see the criticisms of it, he noticed that they were scattershot, parochial, and sometimes even contradictory. He realized that the choice facing the country was not between the Constitution and some other alternative, but between the Constitution and chaos leading toward disunion.

I think the same holds true today. We should respect the Constitution if for no other reason than that it may be the last thing still holding us together. Such respect does not necessitate that we blindly accept the institutions it bequeathed us as they are. But we should thoroughly understand it before we criticize it, because it deserves better than facile straw-man attacks — especially when, as in the case of the Electoral College, there are alternative remedies that could be pursued within its framework.

4. Andy McCarthy takes on Jerry Nadler and his Impeachment charade. From the piece:

Most of the impeachment quasi-action is in the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.). We have to qualify the word "action" because, while Nadler claims to be conducting an impeachment inquiry, his committee has never actually voted to have one.

This reflects the political needle Democrats cannot thread.

Their control of the House hinges on 41 seats that, after the 2018 victory, they hold in Trump-friendly districts. Constituents in those districts do not want Trump impeached. Even most of those opposed to Trump take the sensible position that he should be opposed at the ballot box, and the country spared a rabidly partisan, substantively scant, and inevitably futile removal effort. And because, unlike in 2018, the president will be on the ballot in 2020, the pro-Trump voters will be out in force. An unpopular impeachment push could spell electoral doom.

5. Neil Gorsuch — yeah, that guy — discusses why it ain't a good thing to disregard the separation of powers. It affects real people, and he presents a number of such cases. From his essay:

Miguel Games-Perez. A federal prosecutor charged Mr. Games-Perez with "knowingly violat[ing]" a statute that makes it a crime to be (1) a felon and (2) in possession of a firearm. But the prosecutor failed to produce any evidence that Mr. Games-Perez knew he was a felon. In fact, at the time of his earlier conviction, the judge expressly (but erroneously) told Mr. Games-Perez that if he agreed to plead guilty (as he eventually did), he would leave the courtroom "not convicted of a felony." Still, rather than concede its inability to prove an essential element of the crime charged, the federal government invited judges to rewrite the law. The statute would be a better one, the government essentially told the Tenth Circuit, if it required the prosecution to prove only that Mr. Games-Perez knew he was in possession of a firearm. My court, relying on circuit precedent I thought mistaken, agreed. And so Mr. Games-Perez was sent to federal prison for violating a "statute" effectively written by judges rather than legislators, one neither Mr. Games-Perez nor anyone else could have found and taken notice of in the United States Code before the conduct leading to his "offense."

6. Madeleine Kearns shares some shero worship for the dying Magdalen Berns, a tough feminist who has been giving gender extremists fits. From the Corner post:

Of course, it would be absurd to suggest that a person's value can be measured by their online presence. Nonetheless, Berns is a captivating and insightful speaker. And her YouTube channel — with over 30,000 subscribers and hundreds of thousands of views — continues to be a great source of inspiration and clarity for those trying to resist gender extremism. At one point, she piqued the interest of Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling who was subsequently attacked by activists for following Berns, a supposedly "proud YouTube transphobe," on Twitter.

Berns has also exposed the bully-boy tactics of well-known gender extremists. For instance, as Berns lies dying, Rachel McKinnon — who won the women's cycling world championship despite being a man — tweeted that Berns is "a trash human" and "maybe [should] live by the maxim whereby 'Don't be the sort of person who people you've harmed are happy you're dying of brain cancer.'" McKinnon has previously attacked the tennis star Martina Navratilova for her views on men competing in women's sports in similarly unpleasant terms.

Berns certainly pulls no punches on gender extremism. "You don't get 'assigned' reproductive organs," she says in one video, "males are defined by their biological sex organs. Likewise, homosexuals are people who are attracted to the same biological sex." But she delivers her message with common decency and sense. Not to mention humor.

7. Kevin Williamson drops the remote to write a piece urging conservatives to watch more television (and less cable news). From his essay:

Margaret Thatcher famously insisted that the facts of life are conservative. Great art — even merely adequate popular art — begins with those facts of life and the timeless truths embedded in them. Hence a piece of highbrow television such as The Wire, which was created by a by-the-numbers progressive but could have been written by Charles Murray and Thomas Sowell and produced by the Manhattan Institute, exploring the serial failure of institutions (city government, labor unions, public schools, the media) in a largely black city with a Democratic monopoly on political power. The show's creators did not intend to create a conservative critique of the failures of urban progressivism, but they could not help themselves.

The same phenomenon is observable all over our popular culture: Christopher Nolan's Dark Knight trilogy reimagining Batman as a kind of esoteric Straussian who (in a series beginning just a few years after 9/11) countenances torture and illegal extradition methods to protect a public that must be kept in the dark about how hard things get done, who faces off against an Eastern terrorist cult targeting New York City, an amped-up version of Occupy Wall Street, and, most famously and perhaps most immediately relevant, an unhappy loser who shows that he can shut down a city with "a couple of bullets." Or consider Skyfall, with its Royal Doulton bulldog draped in the Union Jack, its conservative organizing principles ("Sometimes the old ways are the best") and dramatic retreat to the family homestead, its unabashed invocation of "patriotism" and "love of country." The Walking Dead ends up being an extended exploration of Mancur Olson's "stationary bandit" and the tensions between democracy, the rule of law, and the practical necessities of physical security — with an ode to property rights and free trade thrown into the bargain. Breaking Bad was a reimagining of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a meditation on the seduction of evil, and it ends with the most forthright of confessions: "I did it for me. I did it because I liked it." If a conservative social critic had tried to write a series about how to be an unhappy young woman, the result would have been something quite like Girls, or maybe Fleabag. The theme of Stranger Things is not so much "Winter is coming" but "Winter is already here, and always has been, if you know how to look."

Why is it that our popular culture is at the moment so interested in such subjects as the problems of governance, democratic fragility, and institutional failure? Look around you.

8. More Williamson: He finds Joe Biden and his forked tongue unfit for POTUStry. From his piece:

Biden lies about matters great and small. He lies about his trip to Afghanistan. He lies about the death of his wife and daughter. He is wildly dishonest about his role in the Iraq War and the 1994 crime bill, landmark moments in his legislative career that later became political liabilities. And whatever the state of his brain today, he was not senile back in 1987, when he plagiarized the words of Margaret Thatcher and Neil Kinnock for his own speeches. Like his lies, his plagiarism is part of a lifelong habit: As recently as this year, he was filling out his policy papers with uncredited — stolen — material from advocacy groups.

The United States has become an empire of lies. We are governed by liars chosen on the basis of lies, and the worst partisans have begun openly to admire the lies, so long as they are skillfully constructed and delivered. The lowest among us enjoy being lied to and celebrate it. Entire political careers are based on lies — and policy initiatives, too.

But if not the serial liar Joe Biden, then whom will the Democrats choose? Elizabeth Warren, who has misrepresented her supposed Native American ancestry? Kamala Harris, who has lied about murder in order to serve her own political ends? Robert Francis O'Rourke, who cannot tell the truth for five minutes about basic and fundamental questions of public policy?

9. Frederick Hess profiles New York City's crusade to dumb down education for smart kids by attacking gifted-student programs. Folks, this is socialism. From the beginning of the analysis:

America's schools are today consumed by a push for "equity." Unfortunately, it's looking like some of those who claim to be champions for equity may be more focused on mounting an ideological campaign against educational excellence. Take last week's development in New York City, where a panel appointed by Mayor Bill de Blasio to promote "diversity" issued a report that publicly called for the elimination of the city's programs for gifted and talented students.

The 39-page report, by de Blasio's hand-picked "School Diversity Advisory Group," offers a stark reversal from former mayor Michael Bloomberg's push to expand choices for families by, in part, dramatically increasing the availability of programs for gifted and talented children ill-served by conventional classrooms. In New York City, students as young as four can register to take the gifted and talented assessment. Any student who scores above the threshold is eligible to apply for gifted programs.

Taking aim at gifted programs, the Advisory Group's report thundered, "The existing use of screens and Gifted and Talented programs is unfair, unjust and not necessarily research-based. . . . These programs segregate students by race, class, abilities and language and perpetuate stereotypes about student potential and achievement." The report called for the dropping of admissions screening tests on the grounds that they unfairly favor children whose families have more resources. The panel recommended phasing out the city's gifted programs by placing a moratorium on new programs and not allowing existing ones to admit new students or to group by academic ability. It would bar programs from taking even student attendance into account when determining admissions.

10. The world will not abide a Moon with creepy crawly Tardigrades: Robert Zubrin reviews the . . . lunacy . . . of planet bossery and how that impedes exploration. From his piece:

At the core of the planetary protectionist prosecution's case is the claim that delivering a milligram of dormant tardigrades to the Moon constituted "harmful contamination" of another world, which is forbidden by the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. But this is nonsense, because while it is conceivable that the tardigrades might have survived the crash, and even remain revivable for several years on the Moon in dormant dehydrated form, they cannot metabolize there, as there is no liquid water on the lunar surface. So until and unless someone goes there and collects them and takes them into a lab for scientific study, they are just so much dust.

Moreover, the Beresheet mission was hardly the first time anyone delivered microorganisms to the Moon. In fact, the Apollo missions left not milligrams, but kilograms of live microbes on the Moon in bags of human feces. This was an intelligent thing to do, since by leaving wastes behind the astronauts were able to return with more Moon rocks, which, pound for pound, are worth a lot more on Earth than manure. But it wouldn't matter if they hadn't, because as soon as the astronauts opened the door of the Lunar Module, millions of microbes were released on to the lunar surface, millions more hitched rides outside on spacesuits, and billions more were sent back down after the Lunar Modules left behind in orbit eventually crashed onto the Moon. Furthermore, even if, at great expense, those releases could have been prevented by engineered solutions, it still would have been impossible to conduct the Apollo missions within planetary-protection guidelines since it could never have been guaranteed that the Lunar Module would not crash, an event that would have released microbes all over the landscape.

Monica Grady, a leading astrobiologist with the U.K.'s Open University at Milton Keynes, acknowledged this history, but commented, "You might say [planetary protection] was broken in 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were there, which is true, but since then we've become much more aware of how we should preserve these planetary bodies.

11. WalMart gets woke. David French thinks the disease is here to stay. From his article:

Responding to the recent string of mass shootings — including one in a Walmart store in El Paso — the company announced that it was ending sales of handgun ammunition and ammunition for AR-style rifles. The company's CEO also called for a debate on renewing an assault weapons ban and for strengthened background checks. Walmart had already largely stopped selling handguns and so-called "assault weapons," and now a company born and bred in deep-red America was decisively breaking with the culture that was indispensable in making Walmart the mightiest retailer in the land.

Woke capital is here to stay, and Walmart proves it. At first glance, Walmart's decision is mystifying. What's next? NASCAR going all-Prius to save the planet? Even if you grant the reality that Walmart has grown far beyond its original red-state base, why would the company want to alienate half their customer base?

But that's old America-style thinking. This is new America, and new America is in the grips of profound negative polarization. "Negative polarization" means, simply, that Americans who participate in politics are motivated more by distaste (more like disgust) for the other side than they are by any particular affection for their own. Indeed, affection for politicians on your own side is often dependent on the level of disgust they can display for your opposition.

12. Europe and the U.S., whatever their current antagonisms, needs to focus on strategic cooperation, especially, write Scott Cullinane and Dalibor Rohac, over one common threat: China. From the analysis:

As of late, European leaders have started responding in kind. Talk about Europe's strategic autonomy is commonplace, and German chancellor Angela Merkel has, at least rhetorically, lumped the United States and China together as global rivals to Europe. The Trump presidency has played a salutary role to the extent to which it has provided an overdue geopolitical wake-up call to Europe. But the specific ways in which Europeans are responding to that wake-up call might well damage the partnership.

Yet whatever one thinks of the current U.S. administration, the interests of the United States and Europe are closely aligned on what is arguably the most important geopolitical issue of our age: China. In fact, they also coincide with the interests of other democracies affected by China's behavior, such as South Korea, Japan, and Australia. All face the same set of challenges from an assertive China: industrial espionage and intellectual-property theft, mercantilist economic practices that are only rarely challenged at the World Trade Organization, and China's increasingly aggressive military posture in Asia.

It is a paradox that at a time when the case for more coordination between democracies on questions of trade, energy diversification, regulating emerging technologies, promoting human rights, and other issues seems overwhelming, China has been successful in exploiting Western disunity. In Europe, the Chinese government ruthlessly targets the "weakest links" — Italy, Hungary, the Czech Republic — to co-opt the political class through promises of cheap money in the form of infrastructure investment and business opportunities.

13. The Family — the five-part Netflix "docuseries" that intends to expose the Evangelical Right — doesn't really expose all that much, says William Nardi. From the story:

Based on the book of the same title by Jeff Sharlet, the series is centered around a prominent behind-the-scenes player in the religious Right named Doug Coe, an ordained Presbyterian elder and lay minister who died in 2017. The stated goal of Coe's organization, referred to as either "The Fellowship" or "The Family," is to "make leaders Christians and to make Christians leaders." Records from the group show that Coe wanted to ally Jesus's flock with "wolf king" personalities for mutual gain. In a sermon, Coe even likened their group to a mafia and many of its members refer to it that way.

With Trump in the White House, the filmmakers portray the group as if it's at the height of its power, well on the way to establishing a "New World Order." The series builds as it investigates other figures associated with the group, trying to determine if there is a moral line that even they won't cross.

Beginning with a group of young men being groomed for leadership positions at a Fellowship-owned estate, Sharlet says he joined them to learn about Christianity. Describing a lack of clear theology, and a strange cult-like devotion to Coe, Sharlet alleges that the group censured a former member who left to console his fiancée after she had been sexually assaulted.

14. Dep't of 1619: Rich Lowry refuses to turn a blind eye to the project's gaping problem with perspective, which might tarnish the goal of recasting the USA as a country founded on slavery. His piece, "Five Things They Don't Tell You about Slavery," is a must-read. From his analysis, here's part of Number Three:

Islam was a great conveyor belt of slavery

"Long before the establishment of African slavery in the Americas," James Walvin writes in his A Short History of Slavery, "Islamic societies were characterized by the widespread and generally unchallenged use of slavery. Indeed slavery was commonplace throughout Arabia well before the rise of Islam. But as Islam spread between the eighth and 15th centuries, and especially to black Africa, it extended and confirmed the commonplace use of slavery and slave trading."

According to Walvin, Muslim slavers transported enslaved Africans across vast distances — via overland routes — "long before the European pioneers in the Americas began to consider the use of African slaves as laborers in the American settlements." The routes across the Sahara, he adds, "survived from the seventh to the twentieth century, and millions of Africans were force-marched along them from their homelands to the slave markets to the north."

This story is relevant to the nature of slavery in the Atlantic world. At first, slavery in the Muslim world wasn't race-based, but that changed. Davis writes: "The Arabs and other Muslim converts were the first people to make use of literally millions of blacks from sub-Saharan Africa and to begin associating black Africans with the lowliest forms of bondage."

15. More Kyle: He sings the praises of the new documentary Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice. From the review:

As she racked up platinum albums, Ronstadt never fully bought into the rock ethos. She hated the heels she was told to sing in, and kicked them off onstage. She couldn't figure out what to wear, and settled on a Cub Scout outfit. Since she wasn't a songwriter, some of the pressure was off her, but because she didn't write the anthems of her generation, she never confused herself with a deity. All around her were people convinced that they were specially chosen, and they were all men. (Two of her backup musicians, Glenn Frey and Don Henley, got to like each other in the $12 motel rooms they stayed in while touring with her, and decided to form their own band.)

Seen in a 1977 interview in Malibu, Ronstadt offers an insightful tour d'horizon of the rock scene from a quizzical distance: "Rock and roll stars tend to end up isolating themselves more and more and more, thereby increasing their own feelings of alienation and anxiety," she says. So they turn to drugs "and destroy themselves. It's just very silly . . . they lose the ability to focus on themselves as a person, rather than as an image, and that's very dangerous." Yet everyone around them considers it their job to indulge every whim, which "weakens them as people and eventually it weakens them as musicians." Five years after sharing these thoughts, she released her last rock album, Get Closer. "The nature of being a pop star," she said, "is that you get these things that are successful and you have to sing them over and over and over again until they start sounding like your washing machine."

16. Armond White comes out swinging for Bottom of the 9th. From the beginning of the review:

Bottom of the 9th comes to home video this week just as the new movie season begins. This second-chance paradox makes up for the neglect of film critics who failed to give the movie the attention that it deserved when Bottom of the 9th debuted. A rare, affecting baseball film, it's also an unapologetic, unhip redemption tale — which is to say that the attempt of Sonny Stano (Joe Manganiello) to regain the baseball career he lost because of a youthful indiscretion depicts values that run counter to the behavior currently celebrated in our cynical culture.

Sonny's predicament — and film critics' general indifference to it — prove Bottom of the 9th's special relevance. We see how Sonny, once a promising teenage baseball prospect, served a 20-year conviction for manslaughter, gets released and paroled, and then gradually recovers his love of the game, achieving a more mature sense of self.

Critics could have encouraged social consciousness and enticed viewers by comparing Sonny's life to the Trump administration's First Step Prison Reform. They didn't. Ironically, the Trump bill (HR 6964) and its open-hearted White House signing ceremony received almost as little coverage from the #Resistance media as Bottom of the 9th itself did. But the film's relevance goes deeper than politics.

17. Last but not least . . . WJ has given repeated short shrift to Brian Allen, the exceptional art critic. Now, if he had gone to the Museum of the Cat, you would not be reading about him today. But he rightly and recently went instead to the Museum of the Dog in NYC (at the American Kennel Club's hq) and liked what he saw there (alas, the works of Cassius Marcellus Coolidge seem not to be up to his snuff). From the piece:

Anyone who has seen the Westminster Kennel Club Dog show — next to the Kentucky Derby, America's oldest sports event — knows that the dog-breeding world is an intense one. Anyone who has seen the 2000 film Best in Show knows it's idiosyncratic. Dog breeding is fascinating, with meticulous standards and aristocracies for every breed. Americans might not have a nobility but our dogs do, though the populist in all of us loves a happy, scrappy mutt.

The niche world of dog painters, until recently, was dominated by women. Starting in the 1860s, French art schools like the Académie Julian in Paris catered to women, and places like the Royal Academy in London and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts offered women's classes. Professional success, though, was nearly inaccessible, undermined by prejudice and stereotypes. Dog painting was an exception. The field was not so much marginal as intimate and private. American and British middle-class culture embraced dogs as something more than, well, dogs. They were part of the formula for making domestic bliss, and domestic bliss was a woman's jurisdiction. Female artists could find patrons when they painted portraits of babies but also of dogs.

Par-two-tee!

If you are pro-life, a fan of Rich Lowry, or a fan of Helen Alvaré, or of both, and in NYC on October 10, please do come to the Human Life Review's Great Defender of Life Dinner.

And, Par-threee!

Intercollegiate Studies Institute (a close NR friend for over six decades — Bill Buckley was ISI's first president!) is hosting its 14th Annual "Gala for Western Civilization" in Philadelphia on September 19. The honoree is Roger Scruton, who announced that he has been stricken with cancer and cannot attend — but in his place, to discuss the legendary conservative's importance to political philosophy, with be our dear pal, NRI fellow John O'Sullivan, and philanthropist Rebekah Mercer. Do consider attending (ISI's galas are always primo affairs). Get more information here.

The Six

1. At Gatestone Institute, Amir Taheri has guidance for Doanld Trump about which Iranian leader is worth talking to, and not talking to (and it ain't Rouhani). From his piece:

As early as 2004, both the British and the French saw Rouhani as the man capable of delivering what Rafsanjani and Khatami had promised but failed to deliver. The horse on which John Kerry put his bet was Muhammad-Javad Zarif, whose team of “New York Boys” provided Rouhani with a “liberal” varnish.

Western analysts and their imitators inside Iran missed two crucial points.

The first was that, like most revolutionary regimes, the Khomeinist outfit had no mechanism for reform in the direction desired by the Iranian middle classes and the Western powers. Thus, even if its leaders tried to introduce reforms they would be doomed to failure. Lenin tried that in the 1920s with his New Economic Policy (NEP) that, instead of liberalizing the Soviet system, produced Josef Stalin. Mao Zedong’s reform project, known as “The 100 Flowers,” morphed into the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, millions of deaths and further hardening of the Communist regime. Khomeini himself attempted a similar move with his 8-Points reform project in 1981, leading to mass executions in 1988. In the Islamic Republic, the number of executions and political prisoners has always risen under “reformist” presidents such as Khatami and Rouhani.

The second point Western powers ignore is that Iranians today are divided into two broad camps, obviously with subdivisions within each camp. One camp consists of those, perhaps even a majority today, who are disillusioned with the Islamic Revolution and seek ways of closing its chapter as soon as possible. The idea of “change within the regime” appeals to some among them but has never offered a credible political platform from which to attempt a seizure of power within the regime.

2. At The Imaginative Conservative, Nayeli Riano reflects on Jesuit scholar John Courtney Murray's important 1960 book, We Hold These Truths, and its continuing relevance. From the essay:

Murray's work is hardly a tumbleweed of early-twentieth-century Catholic social thought. Though it initially helped to reconcile Catholicism and the religious pluralism that our nation champions, it is also a work that deals deeply with that taboo concept of today: patriotism. Not patriotism in the way we envision it, as pride in one's country, but a patriotism that is locked in arms with a civic sense of duty and obligation to one's country. This latter form of patriotism begs for a return to civic knowledge, even historical knowledge, that calls to mind the wisdom and uniqueness of the American Founding—and acts upon it to restore what I call the American civic psyche.

Murray is one writer whose work can begin to elucidate on the importance for this historical and civic patriotism, since only with this psyche are people from various backgrounds, faiths, and philosophies able to contribute to their nation's mission without resorting to a form of "civil war." He opens his work by reminding us that our Founding Fathers' endeavor is not over. To paraphrase Murray, the United States of America, as it was "immortally asserted" by Lincoln, is dedicated to a proposition that sustains itself on the moral spirit of its people. In philosophic terms, a proposition needs to be demonstrated; in mathematics a proposition is often a statement of an operation to be performed. Thus, Murray wrote, "The American Proposition is at once doctrinal and practical, a theorem and a problem. It is an affirmation and also an intention. It presents itself as a coherent structure of thought that lays claim to intellectual assent; it also presents itself as an organized political project that aims at historical success." From this assertion he concludes that "neither as a doctrine nor as a project is the American Proposition a finished thing." We cannot take its historical success for granted.

3. At Reason, J.D. Tuccille says there is growing support among Americans for school choice. From the report:

As the father of a kid who has attended a charter school, was homeschooled for five years, and is now enrolled at a private high school, I have an obvious enthusiasm for education options beyond what’s offered by government schools. So, it pleases me to see that public support continues to grow for vouchers and tax credits that would help families pay tuition at independent schools, and for charter schools that enjoy a significant degree of independence while still being publicly funded.

Drawing on in-house polling, Harvard University’s EducationNext finds steadily rising support for both education options and public schools. But the data comes with interesting caveats that suggest affection for government schooling and its minions takes a hit the more people know.

“Support for school vouchers has shifted upward,” notes the organization, “and tax-credit scholarships along the lines proposed by the current administration now command the support of a sizable majority of adults.”

Vouchers make per-pupil funding portable so that families can use the money to pay tuition at schools of their choice. EducationNext asked respondents about both targeted vouchers, intended for low-income families, and universal vouchers usable by anybody; pollsters found increasing enthusiasm for both. Targeted vouchers win the support of 49 percent of those polled, with 55 percent supporting vouchers that would benefit all kids.

4. In The National Interest, Gordon Chang discusses what it will take for the U.S. to "win" a trade war with China. From his analysis:

Trump's revolution has yet to succeed. It is hard to believe Chinese ruler Xi Jinping, who has made his admiration of Mao public, would ever accept fundamental economic reforms or even stop stealing. In these circumstances, therefore, decoupling makes sense.

Xi is the one who started decoupling with policies pushing foreign companies out of China, and now Trump is pulling them out with tariffs. Beijing and Washington, in what increasingly looks like a death match, are restructuring global trade.

Companies are moving factories out of China to avoid the "trade war"—each month brings additional prominent names fleeing Chinese soil—and at least at the moment, it is hard to see these businesses returning. "We've created high hurdles to get back to the way things were, and that means we're probably not going to," Scott Kennedy of Center for Strategic and International Studies told the Times. "I think the relationship now is essentially in free fall."

The free fall worries many and angers policy elites, but an irreversible weakening of a predatory communist state looks like a good thing to everyone else. After all, why should the world help fund a Chinese system that is not compatible with the notions that underpin global commerce?

Market participants never like disruptive policies, but a reordering of global trade is now occurring and that will change history. That, for Donald John Trump, is what winning looks like.

5. At The College Fix, Anthony Kronman laments the decline of excellence at his old stomping grounds, Yale University. From his column:

In the late summer of 2015, the Yale Daily News carried a story that caught my attention.

Yale undergraduates live in residential units called "colleges." The story reported that the "master" of one of these had decided to change his title on account of what he judged to be its offensive connotations. Some students had complained that it reminded them of the plantation culture of the Old South. The master of Pierson College sympathized with their complaints. He said he understood why black students in particular might be sensitive to the use of the term and that he wanted them to feel equally welcome at Yale, whose traditions retained many of the cultural trappings of the almost exclusively white, Anglo, male school that it had been for nearly all of its first three hundred years. To avoid even the possibility of giving offense to those who might associate his title with the racism and hierarchy of the antebellum South, the master of Pierson announced that in the future he would refer to himself not as a master but by some more neutral term instead . . .

The Pierson master who gave up his title could not possibly have thought that he might be confused with the owner of a Mississippi plantation. What really disturbed him, and his students, was not race but rank. It was the aristocratic implication, however slight, that men and women can be distinguished according to their success not in this or that particular endeavor—the study of computer science, for example, or Greek philosophy—but in the all-inclusive work of being human. This idea has been accepted by many cultures of the most varied sorts. It has been joined with other beliefs, some pernicious and others benign. But at the most basic level, it runs against the grain of America's democratic civilization. It seems—it is—antidemocratic. Any institution that embraces the idea of aristocracy, even in the most modest and qualified terms, therefore puts itself at odds with our civilization as a whole.

6. There are many worse things than being a sucker for anything written by Helen Andrews, who in the most recent First Things pens a review of a new book, The Socialist Manifesto. From her review:

In the spring of 2019, even the staid old AFL-CIO began to dabble in guillotine imagery. The occasion was a dispute between Delta and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers. The airline had issued a flier reading: "Union dues cost around $700 a year. A new ­video game system with the latest hits sounds like fun. Put your money towards that instead of paying dues to the union." The AFL-CIO responded by tweeting an image of a flier reading: "A guillotine only costs $1200 to build. Delta's CEO made $13.2 million dollars last year. Get outside with your buddies, share some brews—sounds like fun." Five days after sharing the guillotine meme, the AFL-CIO posted a video in which a self-described "marxist, roofer" gives a two-minute lecture about class and exploitation, which it tweeted with the comment: "We all need to seize the means of production."

Bhaskar Sunkara has written a manifesto for our socialist moment, a moment he did much to create as founder of Jacobin magazine. He has not entirely succeeded in capturing the spirit of his influential quarterly between hardback covers, partly because so much of the Jacobin experience is visual. Its signature style is an eye-catching cross between an IKEA catalogue and a Brian Eno album cover. The front of the Spring 2019 issue, about the housing crisis, looks like a page of futuristic real estate listings with descriptions like "[rose emoji] comrade citizens [rose emoji] register for summer beach house cozy & sunny" and "public pool ~~~gym [arm emoji] newly expropriated."

Sunkara preserves this whimsicality in his book's first and most ambitious chapter, "A Day in the Life of a Socialist Citizen," a vision of our cooperative future through the eyes of a worker at a pasta sauce plant owned by Jon Bon Jovi's family. He describes two alternatives to capitalism. The first is a Nordic-style social democracy in which you, our factory worker, enjoy a cradle-to-grave welfare state, and "even though having children isn't for you"—Sunkara knows his audience—you "look forward to your frequent vacations." The second alternative is democratic socialism, which differs from social democracy in featuring worker control of firms and government control of investment. The rest of the book is a breezy tour of the history of socialism from Engels to the present day, in which Sunkara dials down the playfulness, though perhaps not enough in his chapter on "Iron ­Felix" Dzerzhinsky.

Baseballery

Sixty years ago this coming week, the Pittsburgh Pirates' ace reliever and forkball expert, Elroy Face, saw his spotless 17–0 record finally give way to the odds: On September 11, during a Friday night game in Los Angeles against the Dodgers, in relief for starter Bob Friend, he couldn't hold a 4–3 lead, giving up two runs in the bottom of the ninth. It was his only loss of the season (indeed, counting his 1958 record, Face had 22 consecutive wins, and his defeat at the hands of the Dodgers was his first in 99 appearances), which Face finished with a historic 18–1 record, a 2.70 ERA, and 10 saves in 57 games.

Despite the record, Face considered his performance in the following season superior: In a league-leading 68 appearances, he registered 24 saves. Three of those were three of the Pirates' four wins in the dramatic 1960 World Series, the Bucs' first World Championship since 1925 (Face's best season was 1962, when he led the league with 28 saves and had an ERA of 1.88).

Stumbling upon the sole 1959 loss, it was registered as a blown save, and it turns out Face had nine of those over the season, although four of them were "blown wins." All of which got this pea brain thinking: Who had the most blown saves in a single season? Turns out five hurlers have tied with 16. The first to earn that ignominious distinction was Gerry Staley, a one-time ace of the Cardinals' staff (he was 18–9 in 1953) who also had a stellar season in 1959: By then a reliever for the Chicago White Sox, he helped them take the AL pennant with a league-leading 15 saves (he added one in the World Series against the Dodgers, but also gave up a tie-breaking homer to Gil Hodges to lose the must-win Game Four).

Staley's blown anti-heroics came the next year, when he chalked up an excellent 13–8 record for the Sox, plus 9 saves. But in the blown category: There were 16, two of which were blown losses. Not all the blown news was bad though: Staley did register four blown wins.

Back to Face and the epic 1960 World Series and Game Seven: Three men — Face, his teammate Harvey Haddix, and Yankees reliever Jim Coates — all blew saves in that contest. But Haddix ended up with a blown win, even though the Bronx Bombers touched him for two runs in the top of the ninth to tie the game. Which, as The Bronx knows, was untied by Bill Mazeroski in the bottom of the frame with his famous lead-off walk-off homer.

A Dios

God grant me humility (you'd think I'd have it already given the puss staring back at me from the mirror every morning!). And God grant all of you who need solace, solace, who need wisdom, wisdom, who need strength, strength, and who need your necks unstiffened . . . unstiffeningness.

The Blessings and Bounteousness of the Almighty on You and All Those You Love and Cherish,

Jack Fowler, who can be reached with diet suggestions at jfowler@nationalreview.com either before or after he breaks the scale.

ADVERTISEMENT


Top Stories

The Brexit Saboteurs

Kyle Smith

Parliament has effectively stripped the United Kingdom of all its negotiating leverage and made it probable that nothing like a clean break with the EU will occur.

The Aspirational Asceticism of the Progressive Elite

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Fewer children, less protein for them, more deaths from heat exhaustion, and less travel isn't a morally superior future; it's just a parsimonious and more impoverished one.

Econ Students Debunk Study Showing Drastic Rise in Hate Crimes Following Trump Rallies

Jack Crowe

A study purporting to show area hate crimes tended to spike following Trump rallies is fatally flawed in its methodology, according to a new analysis by two Harvard economics students.

ADVERTISEMENT

What Motivates Democrats: Stopping Climate Change, or Ending Capitalism?

Mario Loyola

Many advocates of extreme measures to fight global warming are not motivated not by geophysics, but use green concerns as a cover for anti-capitalist projects.

Weird and Fantastic Modern Art in Dijon's Consortium

Brian T. Allen

The exhibition has no austere theoretical severity. There's much to admire in its occasionally wacky juxtapositions of line and color. It's not Morning in America art, to be sure, but it does make the viewer happy.

The Truth about Huey Long

Ellen Carmichael

The myth of Long's assassination is just one in a long line of tales meant to lionize the former governor and U.S. senator, painting over his lengthy track record of corruption and brutality in his pursuit for power.

School Integration Draws Scrutiny — From the Left

John Hirschauer

More than fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, the Left has yet to make up its mind on the question of integration.

Pro-Life Group Sends Cease-and-Desist Letters to YouTube, Pinterest Alleging Censorship

Mairead McArdle

Live Action, one of the nation's leading pro-life organizations, is fighting YouTube and Pinterest over alleged discrimination against the group's anti-abortion posts.

ADVERTISEMENT

JOIN NRPLUS

PIC_WFB-022718.jpg

All Our Content. Fewer Ads. Members-Only Privileges.

NRPLUS is everything you would associate with a digital magazine subscription, and a whole lot more ─ including up to 90% fewer on-site ads, access to our private Facebook group, full commenting privileges, and invites to our writer/editor conference calls.

SEE MY OPTIONS

Photo Essays

ADVERTISEMENT

ADVERTISEMENT

 
 
 
Learn more about RevenueStripe...
national review

Follow Us & Share

19 West 44th Street, Suite 1701, New York, NY, 10036, USA
Your Preferences | Unsubscribe | Privacy
View this e-mail in your browser.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Breaking: Left-Wing Black History Children’s Book Distributed by Simon & Schuster Is Heavily Plagiarized

FOLLOW THE MONEY - Billionaire tied to Epstein scandal funneled large donations to Ramaswamy & Democrats

Adam Schiff & Gavin Newsom are about to get vetted by Peter Schweizer…