Straight From the Horse’s Server

Sometimes the content of a leaked document is so on the nose in confirming your assumptions you have to wonder if it isn’t a hoax. Which was the first reaction I had reading this document from Wikileaks’ Hillary Clinton email archive, before I realized the archive was obtained directly from the State Department via FOIA request. Still, it’s posted without

Iran’s nuclear program and Syria’s civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about — but cannot talk about — is losing their nuclear monopoly. 

An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today. If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself. 

Back to Syria. It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel’s security — not through a direct attack, which in the thirty years of hostility between Iran and Israel has never occurred, but through its proxies in Lebanon, like Hezbollah, that are sustained, armed and trained by Iran via Syria. 

The end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance. Israel’s leadership understands well why defeating Assad is now in its interests…

Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel’s security, it would also ease Israel’s understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that military action could be warranted. Right now, it is the combination of Iran’s strategic alliance with Syria and the steady progress in Iran’s nuclear enrichment program that has led Israeli leaders to contemplate a surprise attack — if necessary over the objections of Washington. With Assad gone, and Iran no longer able to threaten Israel through its, proxies, it is possible that the United States and Israel can agree on red lines for when Iran’s program has crossed an unacceptable threshold. In short, the White House can ease the tension that has developed with Israel over Iran by doing the right thing in Syria. [emphasis added]

That Israel and “tension” in the relationship drive policy and override our own national interest is a given. The prospect of refusing Israel outright is unthinkable. On our side it’s all about negotiating a better deal in our share of improving Israel’s position, as determined by Israel. In the case of Iran and Syria, that position is Israel’s nuclear “monopoly”–why Pakistan doesn’t count I don’t know.

And we negotiate poorly, to say the least. Here we are on the verge of intervening directly in Syria after having provoked its civil war as part of the broader neocon project (“seven countries in five years)–Hillary’s own contribution being the Libyan disaster, which is cited approvingly in this email from 2012–ultimately just to dissuade Israel from going off too soon on Iran, and setting off a broader war in the region, attacks on US troops and terrorist attacks in the US and Europe. The irony is that it’s Israel’s aggressive tendencies that threaten US interests and lives.

Anarcho-resistance

Local free weekly Willamette Week reports on ICE coming after criminal “dreamers” in Portland:

The largest reported deportation sweep in the U.S. under President Donald Trump of previously sanctioned immigrants known as “Dreamers” took place last weekend in the Portland area. In the last week, federal immigration agents arrested three people who had been given limited amnesty under President Barack Obama, according to multiple sources. 

The three people had at one time all registered with the U.S. government under an Obama-era program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which allows undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as children to legally remain here. 

One, Luis Gerado Zazueta, had not renewed his DACA paperwork, says his immigration attorney, Maria Zlateva. Another, Emmanuel Ayala, had gone in for fingerprinting to renew his DACA three days before his arrest, as first reported by local Spanish-language talk show Cita Con Nelly. 

The arrests of the Dreamers added to a growing sense that the White House is targeting so-called “sanctuary cities” like Portland for crackdowns on undocumented immigrants. Two of the DACA arrests came Sunday morning, a day before U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared his Justice Department would no longer award millions of dollars in grants to sanctuary cities that decline to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

I’ve never seen it mentioned but doubt it escaped Latino activists that daca means “hand it over” in Spanish. One of the dreamers detained because of a drunk driving conviction is a local activist with Latino Network, a city of Portland program to train Latino activists, indoctrinate city employees in Theory and steer city contracts. From the city’s website:

Latino Network’s (LN) mission is to provide transformative opportunities, services and advocacy for the education, leadership and civic engagement of our youth, families and communities. LN’s Diverse Civic Leaders Academy works with young emerging Latino leaders to build leadership skills, organizing capabilities, and develop capacity. Trainings focus on the systems of oppression; gender justice; leadership skill building; conflict resolution;economic, environmental and social sustainability; civic engagement; and community organizing techniques such as volunteer recruitment, base-building, meeting planning, turn-out and facilitation. Workshop trainers from government, the non-profit, and private sector provide expertise and give participants the opportunity to learn first-hand from those with real-world leadership experience.

Additionally, participants work with the Center for Intercultural Organizing (CIO) and their PILOT immigrant and refugee participant group on a series of co-trainings to build a cross-cultural coalition. Puentes, or Bridges in Spanish, is an organizing project where we build capacity and develop leadership opportunities for low-income Latinos to be leaders who advocate for the health, well-being, safety, and quality of life of their community. Trainings are on civic engagement, capacity building, leadership development, and involvement in local government, such as testifying to City Council and participating in city and county commissions and boards. Additionally we hold Living Room Dialogues whereby communities work together to dissolve stereotypes, gain deeper understandings and increased collaboration. Dialogues take place between Latinos and members of the police force and between Latino immigrants and the Anglo community. Discussions took place with government officials on the ways to meet the community’s employment and contracting goal. This resulted in government agencies requiring interested prime contractors to attend a mandatory prebid meeting in the Cully neighborhood, the first time a mandatory prebid meeting has been held to support local hiring and minority business contracting.

Room for one more just opened up at the Diverse Civic Leaders Academy, at least. The activist’s arrest moved the already worked-up ACLU and others to louder protests, but at this point their histrionics–it’s amazing what happens with a little change in policy–can only fortify the deterrent effect of real enforcement:

Romeo Sosa, director of the Portland Voz Workers’ Rights Education Project, which runs the day labor center on Northeast Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd., says the increase in reported ICE activity in public places spreads fear and encourages self-deportation. “It’s an intimidation tactic,” he says. By making its agents visible on the streets, ICE hopes “people will be afraid, and they’ll pack their stuff and leave the country.” Some, Sosa adds, have already done so.

Of the three arrested the activist has a drunk driving conviction, one has a minor weapons charge (brandishing a knife it appears) and one has a marijuana possession charge. It appears about a quarter of those arrested nationwide have no particular conviction cited by ICE. Recall President Trump seemed to soften on “dreamers” early on.

The Weekly:

ICE now labels Multnomah and Washington counties as “non-cooperative jurisdictions” and intends to publish a weekly report of how many immigrants wanted by the agency were not handed over by county jailers as a result of sanctuary policies approved by state and local elected officials. 

The first such report, released March 20, was a mess of jumbled statistics and drew swift criticism from local officials in counties labeled “non-cooperative.” The ICE report named Washington County as one of the “highest volume” sanctuary jurisdictions, as it received seven ICE “detainer” orders demanding the transfer of immigrants in local custody during the week of Jan. 28 through Feb. 3. 

This seemed to imply the county protected seven foreign criminals from deportation that week—even though not all of those individuals had been convicted of a crime, nor had their immigration cases been adjudicated. The report also noted that because local law enforcement does not typically inform ICE when denying a detainer, the numbers essentially represented guesswork by ICE personnel. [emphasis added]

Well then, no shit, as they say, it’s guesswork. It’s also notable that before Trump the feds had simply given up issuing detainers to uncooperative jurisdictions in an environment of non-enforcement, making it a mystery just how many criminal aliens have been released by preening local authorities much less their impact. And it’s beyond me what the point is in the following paragraph:

Two immigrants held in the Multnomah County Jail on charges of assault and amphetamine possession were listed in the report—although their alleged crimes were not necessarily any more serious than those of the approximately 1,200 other inmates in county custody on any given day.

And the city wants to help those mere muggers and meth heads:

City officials have taken actions, from creating a training program for city employees to providing $50,000 toward the legal defense of immigrants’ cases. 

But that isn’t enough for the sort of activists the city is employing at the Diverse Civic Leaders Academy:

But advocates argue the city could go further—by making fewer arrests for low-level offenses, for instance.

Law and order will have to be suspended until this law and order craze blows over.

Zombie Justice and Middlebury

Aside from being an honest and exemplary researcher and author with invaluable insight, Charles Murray has done everything right. He’s played by the rules. He opposed Donald Trump for all the right reasons; his opposition has been unrelenting. According to one of his tweets he was opposed to Donald Trump before he was born, or before Trump was born; I don’t recall. Whatever the case Charles Murray has declared himself Oceania to Donald Trump’s racist Eastasia.
He opposes Trump despite the fact–not lost on his tormentors–that Donald Trump is the only candidate to seriously address the social and economic degradations Murray has waged a lonely lifetime campaign documenting.

Not good enough.

At least no longer. Before Donald Trump it would have been enough to condemn Donald Trump. And condemnation of Trump is a shibboleth for passing the gates of respectability. But the election has expanded the Pale of political correctness, not just by including all Trump voters as white nationalists, but by netting all of them in a web of intersectionality, whereby they are guilty of all trangsressions against the progressive order. Not just racism and “Islamophobia”, but sexism, “transphobia” and, new one, Russo-philia. Trumpism is the sin that contains all sins.

Can’t say they’re wrong. These pieties make up an integral whole. What holds them together–whether it makes sense, is good or bad–is beside the point. They reign, and, before Trump, reigned with sleeping confidence. We see that in the panic and chaos that’s accompanied its waking. There are a great many, and many of them young, among Trump supporters who see and oppose the same whole. My racism is related to my transphobia for the same reasons it is in the minds of my opponents: I see anti-racism and trans rights as separate fronts in the same war.

Before Trump Murray had established a sort of detente with the opposition, whereby he was allowed to speak and, more importantly, others were able to hear him, as long he submitted to a sort of heckler’s qualifier:

Absent an adequate disciplinary response, I fear that the Middlebury episode could become an inflection point. In the twenty-three years since The Bell Curve was published, I have had considerable experience with campus protests. Until last Thursday, all of the ones involving me have been as carefully scripted as kabuki: The college administration meets with the organizers of the protest and ground rules are agreed upon. The protesters have so many minutes to do such and such. It is agreed that after the allotted time, they will leave or desist. These negotiated agreements have always worked. At least a couple of dozen times, I have been able to give my lecture to an attentive (or at least quiet) audience despite an organized protest.

The condemnations of his work as “racist” were always about assertion in the The Bell Curve. But as transgressions go it was the Big One, the Ground Zero of political and cultural sin, leveled against a group that is the original model and well-worn template of the ever-growing complex of hierarchical victim identities, by which our notions of racial equality are still measured and judged: black America. The sanctity of black intellectual equality with and moral superiority (as evidenced by their lack of material equality) over white America will not be questioned.
It makes cynical sense that each new group added to the hierarchy of grievance should adopt the template that’s worked so well for black Americans. It works. And it’s destroying us. That Islam is a “religion of peace” will not be questioned. That there are an infinite number of genders will not be questioned.

But Murray’s distanced himself as much as he can from those conclusions and he has done everything expected of him by his detractors: he downplayed the significance of those findings, he’s ignored the implications and opposes any political movement that frankly acknowledges them. Not good enough. His first, cardinal sin–doing honest scholarship–cannot be erased by the venal sins of prevarication and silence in the face of catastrophe.

And Murray’s detractors are right. It isn’t enough for Charles Murray to genuflect. It isn’t enough for him to ignore his own findings, findings for which he’s already paid a price in appeasing their long fury. If it’s the progressives who want to hold Murray to account so be it. There’s no one else to do it.

It’s not fair. It’s never been fair. Charles Murray should have been allowed to publish his work without calumny. His invaluable contributions to our understanding–The Bell Curve outlined for us years ago the economic stratification that lead to the Donald Trump revolution– For this he’s been pilloried, contained and now driven from public. So to lament that interregnum between stages of physical insecurity, to detest me, to detest Donald Trump more than the mindless, mentally disturbed thugs who silence you is, now that things have changed, not good enough, Professor Murray.

Berkeley

Amazing raw video of the last stand of free speech at Berkeley (I think the “Free Speech” sign the counter-protesters captured goes up in flames at about 35 minutes) yesterday.

I didn’t know what to make of the police tactics. Here they’re like a school of fish massing outside of two larger ones. But I watched it all the way through and noticed the two arrests recorded near the end are of the two most aggressive counter-demonstrators from earlier in the recording–the guy in the green cap even starts in on one of the white SJWs alongside at one point. Intimidating black ghetto types seem destined to play a role in the street tactics of the revolution.

 
Deplorable News Network

Still Life and Live Painting

“Is that the Whiskey Bar back there?” I asked the only other guy to turn up at the wrought iron gate leading to an alley behind the bar I’d found locked earlier.

“Yeah. You don’t go in this way though. The front doors open at ten.”

“I see.”

Someone had told me the event began at nine, so arriving a half hour late to convey a casual attitude was now arriving a half hour early, conveying the bored desperation of a loner, or revealing it, if you want the truth.

We talked for a bit; he seemed to take me for just another regular or would-be regular. Doesn’t he see how old I am? Probably, but not just how old. But one thing about Portland, it’s less weird here for someone my age to show up at a club. At least I think so, and have been told as much; I haven’t any real frame of reference. I hadn’t been out to a proper nightclub in over a decade, I surmised.

“Wednesdays are a little weird.” He said.

“I don’t know. A friend of a friend is doing some thing here, so I came out. I thought it started at nine.”

Turned out he was one of the artists for the live-painting event.

“So you know Tasha, then?”

“A friend of hers from work. I’ve never been here before.” I don’t know why I felt the need to explain myself.

Another guy showed up, a friend of the first. He immediately starts in about his new tattoo, a calf-job under a sheen of Vaseline. He doesn’t know how many tattoos he has. Maybe forty. More and more people claim to have lost count.

“I have no ink.” I confess at some point. I’ve been talking to the second guy as if I belong here–he has no idea who I am and takes it for granted. Turns out he’s another one of the artists; he’s the third. I help him carry his stuff–an unremarkable pattern on a canvas with which I assume he’s going to do something interesting, some effect-lights, materials. I skip the cover charge by playing roadie like this.

“You need a stamp.” The first artist said, just after I had decided I would go back up front and do this, and that it would be a good move, for which I would now get no credit.

He doesn’t know how to take me, I can tell. No one does. But I’m more at ease having established rapport already, and with two of the performers, such as they were. The place is nearly empty, and that’s just as well, too; the music is typical current club dance music, which I have no ability to categorize. Even when I stayed current with electronic music years ago I could not, would not, bring myself up to speed on the categories. I could not tell jungle from house, and still can’t. Drum and bass is easy enough, though I don’t really understand that it’s all built around the “amen chorus”. I recognize it when I hear it. The music is as seductive as it is idiotic, throbbing through the empty club.

About a half hour in the turnout was looking to be poor for the night. A pair in animal pajamas danced at one end of the floor, a guy who looked to be in his thirties, wearing a warm-up jacket is doing break-dance moves at the other.

The friend who invited me showed up. She’s young, very young. Immediately it’s awkward. I had expected a full house: I would see her, maybe not right away, we’d chat a little and that would be it. I would see her a couple of times more in the evening, have the friendly, shallow exchange I was good at, and that would be it. Now, here I am, having arrived early, the place is empty and she can’t escape me, maybe she didn’t even expect me to show up in the first place. To top it off I went in for a hug, that she did not intend, awkwardly and all but forcing it on her, spilling my beer in the process. I feel compelled to mention the awkwardness. But it’s okay. I tell her I’ve been hanging out with the artists, maybe that will help. It’s okay. I’m not a stalker! I’m not a weirdo! She shuffles off with an apologetic air.

Later I see her at the bar and recover somewhat. It’s all like a journey back in time; nothing has changed from the days when all this meant something. Nothing is on the line now–I’m just trying to get out of the house–but it feels more fraught than ever. Just like years ago, in my head it’s a campaign of reverses, advances, uncertain meanings, like a war with an opponent who may not even care that one’s being waged. Nothing changes, even after everything has changed.

The friend of a friend shows up later–I do not know her well–and there’s a quick embrace. She sees it; good, see, I’m not a stalker! I’m not a weirdo! I just don’t know how to act. I never learned how to act–that is I don’t know how to behave–I’m acting all the time, even when I’m alone. Was it still the goal–was it ever the goal–behind all of this, “going out”, meeting people, love, sex, relationships, that one should meet someone with whom they no longer had to act? Or was it just me? I don’t think I had even the good sense to pursue that hopeless goal with real conviction. If it happened, it happened, I thought, as I thought about everything else. Whatever the case, I never found it.

The first two artists made desultory and indistinguishable changes to the mostly complete canvases they brought in; there was no relation to the music. I had seen something years ago on television where a guy did a quick painting of Jimi Hendrix to a playing of some Hendrix standard (probably “Purple Haze”); by the time the song’s over he’s finished. I had thought this would be something like that, gimmicky as it was it would be worth seeing. Tasha does much better, opening up a sketch book and improvising ink-drawings from scratch, showing more talent and imagination than the other two.

The place never filled up, but that’s okay; I got to talk to a young beautiful woman for much of the night. It’s also okay she had nothing better to do and I served as a sort of backstop to a disappointing evening. She tells me all about herself, the way people do to half-strangers; I don’t know. I’m consumed with how I’m perceived by everyone, right now it’s this person who in a few short months will be gone from my life like countless other people I never really got to know. They so outnumber the true intimates, who are so few and precious, that any single one of them–this charming, beautiful, messed up kid whose only interest for me lies in this selfish need–feels like a dread weight I can no longer carry. I wonder if this is cause or effect of my solitary life.

 She invited me to hang out with some of the other youngsters after, but I thought it would be better to quit while I was ahead. Later I excused myself and fumbled the goodnight, just as I fumbled the hello, knowing the quick hug was probably out, but the awareness of it was there in the air. I don’t even like the quick hug routine so much–I just don’t know how to act.

I spent the next day in a typical psychological funk–a day shorter than last time–ruminating over how I came off, how pathetic it is that I care, how it probably means nothing to these other people whose image of me is so important and so meaningless at the same time. Plus ca change.

But I will get out of the house more, and drink less.

 

Punk and Politics

I was at the bar at Kelly’s Olympian in downtown Portland for three pints of Irish stout before I realized the leftist fundraiser in the next room was already in progress. Unaware of the live show annex next door, I had thought they were going to set up somewhere in the back of the bar. Why I didn’t take note of the muffled, loud, obviously live music coming through the wall is just my oblivious nature. I walk about in a bubble; my consciousness barely extends beyond arm’s reach even, or especially, when I’m out. But I still long to get out, even if only to trade escaping myself for escaping other people. Sometimes you long to be alone in the midst of the crowd, if only to fool yourself that you’re not really alone.

On the televisions at the bar it’s all sports, you wouldn’t even know it was Oscar night. I’m in that awkward limbo of waiting for someone and feeling as if I need to justify my presence to people who are barely taking notice of me. The bar is unpretentious enough. Occasionally I can’t help but look at the television in front of me showing professional basketball. The players look more alien than ever, radiating the same dull and sullen hostility I recall, and though I can’t hear it, I know the announcer’s repartee is an incongruous, oblivious counterpart of white earnest cluelessness. Baseball is available at the other end of the bar for a dignified alternative, but I’m intent on not sitting here watching television, so I keep looking around, looking to the door, smiling at the waitresses.

After figuring out the show was already in progress I waited through a few more songs before seeking it out. The show was almost over so the Nice White Lady at the door waved me in.

I went inside to find a tight middle-aged punk band playing for maybe a dozen people. They later claimed to have raised a couple hundred for the ACLU.

The angry refrain: “our town”, presumably intended for Donald Trump and reactionaries like me, makes the only discernible lyric. I imagine the song might as easily as not be something from their past initially intended to parody the territorialism of working class whites, now being repurposed to rage against the intrusion of Trump and his working class white support.

Territorialism is very much a feature of the politics and culture of the city now. I’m welcome as long as I keep my mouth, mostly, shut. But that’s okay. I’m not a proselyte. I’m a witness.

Tonight it’s a “live painting” at the Whiskey Bar. Should be interesting.

I believe children are the dystopian future

“We need to be allies to children. Children do not have the capacity to articulate their feelings, they do not have power over their own beings to come to the rallies…they are not in control of their own destiny. They need to see you, transgender children need to see you, transgender children, even those who are not out yet, need to see you, they need to know that you are there and that you will fight for them and that they can talk to you. Immigrant children, and children, I work with children, I work with children who are homeless in the city, I work with children who face food insecurity in the city, I work with children who come up to me every day and tell me they’re hungry, I work with children who do not have a bed to sleep in at night and it is the last goddamn thing that breaks my heart that the one thing in this world that keeps these children going, their parents, they now fear will go away.” 

The above is from a vigil the day after Donald Trump’s election at Portland’s downtown riverfront park. Children as political allies is somehow not controversial, at least where the epic struggle for bathroom equality is concerned.

The swiftness with which children have become props in the transgender rights movement demonstrates how little resistance there is, still, to cultural Marxism. Concern for children, real, feigned or imagined, naturally finds its way to the forefront of social manias such as the transgender fad we’re experiencing now. It recalls the the satanic abuse panic of the late eighties/early nineties that reached its nadir with the McMartin Preschool trial. But in that earlier case concern for children was the catalyst; now it the putative concern for children comes not as a catalyst but as one component, of questionable validity, of a movement dominated and driven by grown men carving out their own grievance identity.

The trans movement’s conspicuous concern for children seems of a different order than the earnest if naive parents and police who–perhaps sublimating broader, and I think legitimate, fears about children and modern decadence–were led to believe in a vast network of satanic cults operating out of America’s preschools (whatever Pizzagate is, and it does look at the least bizarre, it probably doesn’t lead to your neighborhood daycare), but, to the naive who actually think they’re protecting trans children against some onslaught, perhaps it’s no different.

Now that generation of kids who were the subject of their parents’ coddling and concern in the eighties and nineties–coddling that did nothing, by the way, to halt our slide into decadence–are parents. The social milieu of the post sexual revolution has beaten out of them, as much as it can, any residual traditional morality or resistance to the miasma of popular culture that exists today (google searching the literature on moral panics yields an entire literature devoted to ascribing all of it to moral paranoia of the sexually hung-up in outdated Kinsey-ian thought-language) with the time-tested tools of ridicule and pseudo-scholarship. This started long before Reagan, whose election was in some part a reaction to social decay and as we see now did nothing to slow, much less arrest, its progress.

But you can’t obliterate human nature; there’s probably a genetic, biological component to a parent’s concern for the moral behavior of children. Why would biology program us, amidst all this biological yearning to pass on genes, to be indifferent toward whether or not our daughters are sluts and our sons are gay? Where does a parent now, surrounded by propaganda demanding that feeling in his gut at the sight of psychological disorder is just his own psychological disorder? For the most part he smiles and pretends that nothing is wrong, all the while hoping it will not touch him, not touch his family, and that his children will be more or less “normal”–most people still are, after all–and, maybe even bear him healthy grandchildren.

But what do you do when the only place to sublimate your fear of a thing is in the service of that thing?