The death of expertise continues apace

We know Donald Trump despises the UN, so I’m interpreting this as an act of spite: he’s appointing to the post of UN Ambassador one of those interchangeable blonde Fox News talking heads, Heather Nauert. She’s not a diplomat, she’s had no real training from the State Department (she has been a spokesman), and she seems to be prone to gaffes. But we all also know what Trump considers “qualifications”.

She has been a strong defender of Trump’s at the podium, something he has clearly noticed.

She’s excellent, she’s been with us a long time, she’s been a supporter for a long time, Trump told reporters on Nov. 1.

Sycophancy has replaced competence as the key requirement for high positions in government. The other day I saw a Jordan Peterson clip in which he was babbling about how Western culture was a meritocracy and how hierarchies in society were a reflection of degree of competence. I laughed. He has no idea at all.

New York Times, goddamn

Ross Douthat has written an essay in praise of George Herbert Walker Bush, and WASP values, and the New York Times published it. No editor stepped in and said, “this is absurd” and refused to taint the opinion pages with more garbage. The publisher didn’t worry about the reputation of the paper, and suggest that maybe something so bigoted shouldn’t be run. Nope. They just went with it. I guess since they already gave ol’ Catholic argle-bargle Douthat a column, they were already wrecked, so let the guy babble.

So they’ve published a column about pinin’ for a White Aristocracy, which was so good and kind and generous and self-sacrificing.

So if some of the elder Bush’s mourners wish we still had a WASP establishment, their desire probably reflects a belated realization that certain of the old establishment’s vices were inherent to any elite, that meritocracy creates its own forms of exclusion — and that the WASPs had virtues that their successors have failed to inherit or revive.

Those virtues included a spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety that went beyond the thank-you notes and boat shoes and prep school chapel going — a spirit that trained the most privileged children for service, not just success, that sent men like Bush into combat alongside the sons of farmers and mechanics in the same way that it sent missionaries and diplomats abroad in the service of their churches and their country.

The WASP virtues also included a cosmopolitanism that was often more authentic than our own performative variety — a cosmopolitanism that coexisted with white man’s burden racism but also sometimes transcended it, because for every Brahmin bigot there was an Arabist or China hand or Hispanophile who understood the non-American world better than some of today’s shallow multiculturalists.

And somehow the combination of pious obligation joined to cosmopolitanism gave the old establishment a distinctive competence and effectiveness in statesmanship — one that from the late-19th century through the middle of the 1960s was arguably unmatched among the various imperial elites with whom our establishment contended, and that certainly hasn’t been matched by our feckless leaders in the years since George H.W. Bush went down to political defeat.

Seriously? Noblesse oblige is unironically presented as a virtue? And enacting laws that oppressed the poor and gave them more tax cuts is called personal austerity?

Oh, my. When was the last time we had a wealthy white man running the country…oh, look, right now. No, he means the last time a True White Old Rich Guy, not this nouveau riche pretender, was in charge and leading us “virtuously”. That was in ancient times, way back in 2008, when the son of the guy he’s eulogizing stepped down from the throne. The last time we had a WASP running the country, not counting the crass toad now in control, was a whole ten years ago, and we’ve been missing them because we feel, at some level, that their more meritocratic and diverse and secular successors rule us neither as wisely nor as well.

Right. I think he meant to use the singular rather than plural — “successor” — because it was one black (i.e., diverse) guy, who actually did a pretty good, if imperfect, job as president, and was definitely superior to either Bush. Yet somehow Douthat wants to imply that Obama “ruled us” neither wisely nor well?

Just the use of the phrase rule us is rather revealing, don’t you think?

Douthat does have some regrets. He thinks the WASPs should have done a better job of training the next generation, maybe, If ethnic balance is important to meritocrats, they should engineer it into the system, raising up a few brown people or Jews to follow in their righteous path and preserve the domain of the upper class. But the bottom line is that we need an aristocracy.

If we would learn from their lost successes in our own era of misrule, reconsidering this idea — that a ruling class should acknowledge itself for what it really is, and act accordingly — might be a fruitful place to start.

The only virtue of an aristocracy is that, because they set themselves apart, it makes it easier to tell who deserves to be put in the tumbrel.

P.S. to Ross and the New York Times: You know that WASP is an acronym for White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, right? It’s a reference to race, ethnicity, and religion, and that whole column is about saying one race, ethnicity, and religion should be allowed to rule the country. You did notice, didn’t you?

Where were the freeze-peachers when Minnesota Republicans took over?

I am amused. This is so typical. When the Republicans took over the Minnesota House, they installed a button to silence opposition.

The outgoing Republican speaker of the Minnesota House had the power to silence debate with the push of a button. His Democratic successor says one of the first things she’ll do when she takes over is remove the master mute button.

The GOP leadership quietly had the button installed on the back of the rostrum after the 2015 session came to a particularly raucous end. Labeled “chamber mute,” it silences the microphones at all of the other lawmakers’ desks simultaneously. Democrats became aware of it when Speaker Kurt Daudt pushed it during an acrimonious debate in 2016. They’ve been stewing ever since.

Now if only they could install a mute button to shut the electorate up — you know they want to.

There haven’t been any examples of media hagiography of awful people lately, have there?

I wouldn’t know. I was in the gym yesterday (it’s become the only place where I’m subjected to broadcast media) when I saw Karl Rove and other awful people from the 90s who I’ve tried to forget, and my brain shorted out, I saw a Tunnel of Light open before me, and my short-term memory flitted away like a cloud of butterflies. Still, I’m sure this is referring to something.

Former Cold War CIA director & tool of the elites writhes in Hell today

George HW Bush is dead, and there is no hell, so the best I can hope for is that he faded away on his deathbed despairing that his legacy, what there is of it, was thrown away by his fuckwit sons.

This is why I can never be president. Barack Obama was far more charitable and generous and diplomatic in his remarks.

One thing I’m hoping for is that Trump will deliver a eulogy. I’m expecting something that compares the relative sizes of their electoral college votes and inauguration crowds.

Tragedy strikes the NRA

Oh no! The NRA’s income is plummeting!

The nation’s leading gun-rights organization saw its income drop by $55 million last year, after a record-breaking 2016 in which the group and its political affiliates spent unprecedented sums to elect President Donald Trump.

The National Rifle Association of America reported $98 million in contributions in 2017, down from nearly $125 million in 2016, according to new tax records obtained by The Daily Beast. Nearly one-fifth of its contributions last year came from a single anonymous donor, who chipped in nearly $19 million to the group.

Although, to put that in perspective, their total income was $312 million, so they haven’t gone broke yet.

If you’re concerned about the future of the NRA, I like Betty Bowers’ solution:

News from the soybean prairie

I am deep in the Upper Midwest. I am in that part of the country where you can drive for mile after mile and see nothing but fields of corn and soybeans stretching to the horizon, and where sometimes that drive will take hours because of all the combines and grain trucks plodding along the highway. Bad news about the crops trickles reluctantly into our local newspapers.

After President Donald Trump imposed tariffs on about 800 products from China and China responded with a 25 percent tariff on American goods, many of them agricultural products such as soybeans, it appears soybeans grown this year in the county may not be headed to China this fall.

The loss of an important market has implications for farmers, grain elevators and down the line, businesses in ag-centric areas such as Stevens County.

“Any issue with tariffs making it more difficult to trade our resources such as soybeans and other ag commodities does put a stress on the market,” said Rob Fronning, vice president of insurance and commodity marketing education with Ag Country Farm Credit Services. Fronning covers a territory that includes Stevens County. Fronning said some analysts have said the tariff will cause an $11 billion hit to farmers.

“Normally at harvest, 70 to 80 percent of the soybeans are brought to the elevator. If there is no market…,” CHS New Horizons manager in Morris Terry Johnson said. “The problem for all elevators is the soybean market normally goes to the West Coast and on to China. Now, there is not a new crop market.”

This is a problem everywhere in the country.

Across the United States, grain farmers are plowing under crops, leaving them to rot or piling them on the ground, in hopes of better prices next year, according to interviews with more than two dozen farmers, academic researchers and farm lenders. It’s one of the results, they say, of a U.S. trade war with China that has sharply hurt export demand and swamped storage facilities with excess grain.

In Louisiana, up to 15 percent of the oilseed crop is being plowed under or is too damaged to market, according to data analyzed by Louisiana State University staff. Crops are going to waste in parts of Mississippi and Arkansas. Grain piles, dusted by snow, sit on the ground in North and South Dakota. And in Illinois and Indiana, some farmers are struggling to protect silo bags stuffed with crops from animals.

U.S. farmers planted 89.1 million acres of soybeans this year, the second most ever, expecting China’s rising demand to give them better returns than other bulk crops.

But Beijing slapped a 25 percent tariff on U.S. soybeans in retaliation for duties imposed by Washington on Chinese exports. That effectively shut down U.S. soybean exports to China, worth around $12 billion last year. China typically takes around 60 percent of U.S. supplies.

It’s a good thing I’m not a farmer, or…wait a minute. University enrollment is down this year. One reason? We’ve lost many of our Chinese students, who have elected to attend universities in places that do not have a repressive tyrant who demonizes China in charge.

Student visa data show that the number of international students at U.S. universities declined last year after years of substantial growth. Professionals in international education attribute the decline to a range of factors, including reductions in scholarship programs sponsored by foreign governments, issues of cost and affordability, uncertainty about visa policies and the future availability of poststudy work opportunities, concerns about physical safety and, yes, perceptions of the U.S. as a less welcoming place to foreign nationals under the Trump presidency.

The president reportedly called “almost every” Chinese student in the U.S. a spy at a recent meeting with CEOs. And various Trump administration policies on immigration have been broadly seen by many in U.S. academe as unwelcoming and counterproductive to the cause of recruiting talented students and scholars to American campuses. Among them: the travel ban barring entry to the U.S. for nationals of multiple Muslim-majority countries, new restrictions on the duration of visas for Chinese graduate students in certain high-tech fields and changes to how “unlawful presence” is calculated for international students and exchange scholars in the U.S.

In 2016, 52% of the Stevens county population voted for Donald Trump; we’re in the western red part of the state, full of big corporate farms that rely heavily on subsidies but who’ve been indoctrinated to hate government. We’re actually a little better than the surrounding counties, which were at more like 60% Republican, because our population is modulated a little bit by the university and by students.

Well, at least those farmers get to go back to the farmhouse at night and console themselves with how much they hate the gays and abortion, after doing such a good job of demolishing the economic foundation of their beloved homestead and conservative culture. Then they wonder why they can’t keep their kids on the farm and why they flee for the degenerate life of the city.

We’ll have to see if they wise up by 2020.