Mrs. Davis

Russia’s Long Road to the Middle East

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An interesting article in the Wall Street Journal (not behind paywall).

What caught my eye was this:

While the U.S. backed Arab monarchies and Israel, the Soviets sided with leftist regimes in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya and South Yemen, which became the Arab world’s only Marxist state.

Hmm…. what else do these places have in common? Is what is going on over there as much the death throes of communism as the birth of radical islamism? We can see what is happening in Venezuela. Cuba may be able to minimize the effects if it can find a way to generate the tourism and other industries Puerto Rico has not. North Korea will be worst. But the entire Soviet Bloc has not fallen, only the European part.

Further,

Russia was too busy trying to prevent the breakup of its own rump post-Soviet state, bloodied by separatist uprisings in Chechnya and other Muslim regions. Mr. Putin successfully pacified those borderlands

Well, if Russia created the problem, and Russia has demonstrated that it can fix the problem, what is the matter with allowing Russia to do so?

Is Trump the Alinskyite Radical in this election?

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Allowing a stupid person to demonstrate their stupidity by asking them a hard question does not confer responsibility for their stupidity upon the questioner.

By choosing to hold a rally at UIC, Trump knew that he could get his enemy to demonstrate who they are and what tactics they prefer. It does not make him responsible for what they chose to do. And what he ultimately chose to do was prevent violence, not promote it.

Trump was pushing a negative so hard it became a positive and allowed him to ridicule his opposition. BLM, OWS and SJWs are being turned into the Bull Connor of the 21st century by their own actions. Trump is just giving them the opportunity to reveal themselves. Then he makes them live by their own rules. On Hardball:

MATTHEWS: When you set up rally in Chicago where it’s mostly Hispanic and blacks, you knew there would be a lot of people that have the time to come out and protest your situation. It was no surprise here, was there in what happened? Given the venue of your event,

TRUMP: It shouldn’t matter. You’re the first one to say it. It shouldn’t matter whether it was whoever lives in the city. It shouldn’t make a difference. Whether it’s white, black, Hispanic, it shouldn’t matter.

MATTHEWS: They don’t like what you’re saying. They don’t like what you’re saying.

TRUMP: We shouldn’t be restricted from having rally here because of ethnic make up or anything like that. I’m somebody that feels strongly it shouldn’t make any difference. You usually feel that too. I’m surprised you’re bringing this up because it shouldn’t matter,

Do you believe those were spontaneous responses? You can almost see Trump restraining him self from saying, “Alinsky…You magnificent bastard. I read your book.”

Look at Alinsky’s rules and recall how many of them have been observed by Trump thus far. Trump stopped the War on Women by applying Rules 2, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 12 to Hillary through Bill Clinton, with a big assist from Bill Cosby. He froze his 16 Republican competitors to the point where none of them could effectively respond to him.

Cruz is still my preference, but should Trump win the nomination he will give a master class to whom ever the Establishment grants the Democrat nomination in the tactics they have used to dominate the national debate for the last 30 years. And should Cruz prevail, he would do well to learn from Trump’s demonstration of Alinskyite tactics.

* RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.”
* RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.”
* RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.”
* RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules
* RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.”
* RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
* RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.”
* RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.”
* RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.”
* RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
* RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.”
* RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.”

Where’d I leave my sunglasses?

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We let the Saturday/Sunday WSJ opinion pages remain unopened as we have errands to do and our local paper has dispensed with its Sunday edition to deliver its scant weekend advertising edition on Saturday. So this morning I ate my eggs accompanied by a whimpering Peggy Noonan.

She sounds like an out of phase boomer crying “Has anybody here seen my old friend Jeb?” because her Republican party is shattering in her mind. So long has she lived in the comfort of her subservient cocoon that she cannot imagine that the shattering of the chrysalis will allow the emergence of the beautiful and powerful butterfly instead of the inert pupa to which she had become accustomed. Instead the agent of that shattering, Donald Trump, is seen to be destroying the comfort to which she had looked forward in her old age.

I also saw the returns for yesterday’s contests where Cruz won two and narrowed The Donald’s margins in two others while leaving Rubio and Kasich far behind, clutching for straws. We now have the two man race. Bad news for the Donald because he now faces the candidate most likely to reveal the true emptiness of the man behind the curtain. And the candidate most likely to present a clear choice for voters in November.

And on the other side, the Bern won 2 of 3 which will force Hillary to rededicate herself to leftism past which she will, if still free, be forced to defend in the autumn against Cruz painting the future in bold colors.

Who ever became president in 2008 was doomed to preside over 8 terrible economic years. The withdrawal of the boomers from economic productivity into dependent consumerism was inevitably about to begin, our financial institutions were in disarray, and a vibrant China was eating our lunch as had the Japanese in the 1970s and 1980s.

The next president, whoever it is, will face far less difficult prospects. Boomers will continue their decline into consumption, but they will begin to abandon the jobs to which they have so bitterly clung to the X’ers and Millenials who so desperately need them. Our financial institutions, while still unreformed, are stronger than any others in the world. China faces interesting times, and our adversaries in Russia, Arabia and Persia will struggle with the onslaught created by one of the 20th century’s greatest unsung heroes, George P. Mitchell, father of fracking. Who knows, there may be enough wealth to cover Social Security, if not Medicare.

What remains unstated in all of Noonan’s and others’ commentary is that this election has the opportunity to be a revolutionary generational transfer of power. The Donald, having done the prophetic work of Jeremiah, has paved the way for Cruz, the new Josiah, to rediscover the law of old and restore it to guide a new age. An age in which Republicans have an embarrassment of talents and the Democrats none. Should Cruz gain power there is greater than normal reason to expect his redirection of the nation could be sustained simply because of the lack of opposition talent and the gift of fracking. After the last 30 years, we can at least pray for it.

No one can know the future, and there are some reasons why this may not be it, but for this afternoon, I can at least try to remember where I left those sunglasses.

Who is giving Apple legal advice?

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The government is asking Apple to give it the password to Syed Rizwan Farook’s iPhone and iCloud account. Apple is refusing to do so based on its First Amendment rights. This seems to me to be a very weak argument. Just ask Judith Miller. And there really is very little difference. Apple will have to spend $100,000 to comply and all Judith Miller needed to do was name a source. But Apple’s case involves a national security threat to each and every American whereas Judith Miller’s involved only an implausible threat to Valerie Plame who chose to garner all kinds of media attention thereafter. If there were a safe deposit box the government wanted opened, it would go to a court and get an order for the bank to drill the locks out so that the box could be removed. The bank would comply. Apple will lose.

And if Apple does not lose, the matter will go, as its pleading requests and as it may, even if it loses, now that Apple has made such a ruckus, from the fairly rational precincts of the judiciary to the fully irrational floor of the Congress. Let’s suppose that before legislation is completed there is another domestic terror incident in the US and the terrorist used an Apple iPhone. What kind of legislation would Apple get after that? While not yet widely known, Apple has likely put a back door into every Chinese iPhone via a Chinese designed chip added to the iPhone at China’s insistence for phones sold in the PRC. If this is confirmed, Congress would go even more non-linear.

And what other things might the government do if Apple were to prevail? Well, in the extreme it could ask GCHQ or some other foreign service to crack the iPhone in general. No device is uncrackable. It could also signal the Chinese that it would not be aggressive in pursuing IP violations by China in the case of Apple products. Apple is refusing to cooperate with its government in the first responsibility of that government, to protect its citizens. There would be consequences. Is it really good legal advice to let your client take such risks?

Apple should have quietly cut a deal with the government that would offer its customers the maximum security and quietly complied with court orders until a truly offensive order was received. Barring that, Apple would have a far better argument saying that ordering it to break its phones would lower their value to customers, lowering Apple’s revenues, and lowering Apple’s market cap. This would constitute an uncompensated taking by the Federal government of enormous monetary value from every Apple shareholder for which Apple should be compensated.

With existing technology, you have no privacy. Products are in development that will allow retailers to know how long you look at an item on a shelf, if you pick it up, if you return it to the shelf, how long you look at it and if you buy it. And if you wear an iWatch or other wearable, it will know how much your pulse and bp increased at each step of engagement. If you use gmail, as almost everyone seems to, Google knows the content of every email you send and receive. Who is more likely to release or resell your email, Google or the FBI? The Silicon Valley forces lining up against the government are the most probable threat to what you think is your privacy. It’s been almost 20 years since Scott McNealy said “You’ve got no privacy. Get over it.”

Apple will be made out to be protecting the ability of terrorists to communicate in secret. We are at war with these terrorists. They will kill any of us where ever they can. Article III, section 3 of the Constitution states,”Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort.” That sounds a lot like what Apple is seeking to do under protection of the first amendment’s emanations and penumbras.

Tim Cook is engaging in the same kind of magical thinking that has dominated the boomer elite and led to so many tragedies for the last 24 years. Losing wars has consequences.

Trump and Reagan

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Happy New Year to all. And it promises to be at least an interesting one.

I found this fascinating post from a series of links starting at Instapundit and it made me want to gel some thoughts that have been swimming in my head about our clown-genius, Donald Trump.

Trump is no dummy, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding. He appears the way he does because that’s the way he wants to appear. He groomed that appearance for 14 years on the Apprentice show. Sort of the way Reagan groomed his appearance in 8 years of speaking to factory and community audiences about the virtues of the free enterprise system on behalf of General Electric. A lot of people like Trump. The show lasted 14 seasons even though I never watched a second. But a lot of people did. As a result, people see Trump as the reality candidate as opposed to all the other inside the beltway political candidates. Even the outside the beltway governors are seen as inside politicians. People want a genuine leader and not an artificial politician fabricated by political consultants. Warts are part of reality.

Starting in 2011 Trump began appearing on Fox and Friends every Monday morning, practicing his pitch and getting feedback, just as Reagan did on his daily radio broadcasts from 1975 to 1979. This routine communication with the people gave them greater insight into the concerns of regular people. You can’t get that by spending all your time talking to other politicians about the political minutiae of the moment. On air you have to talk about what people care about or they won’t listen. Both started early on their soft campaigns to reach the people directly. Each was dismissed as an airhead actor (Bedtime for Bonzo?) or a billionaire buffoon. Neither was.

The difference between them is that Reagan was an ideological communicator whereas Trump is a pragmatic entertainer. Each was appropriate to his time. The vast majority of the electorate was literate in 1980. Not so much any more. Little of our information is gathered from print. Reading is rational, viewing is emotional. Clinton and especially Obama have governed as entertainer in chief as opposed to commander because of their desire to dispense goodies to the people so they will be loved as they weren’t by the fathers who abandoned them, their unrealistic view of our enemies and disdain for the military, and their desire to distract the populace from the serious matters they ignore. Heck, No Drama Obama ran as a blank slate. Or was it an empty chair? So the people are prepared for an entertainer in chief. And Trump would be entertaining. But I am beginning to believe there is much more to him than “You’re fired!” We’ll know much more about that when he selects his running mate.