UPDATED: War Party Inc. Welcomes WikiLeaks Trade/Treason Revelations

Barack Obama, Conservatism, Neoconservatism, Regulation, Technology, The State, Trade

The War Party Inc. is forever raging against WikiLeaks and its heroic founder Julian Assange. Lo and behold, I heard Mark Levin approvingly mention the “secretive Obamatrade documents” uncovered by Wikileaks. Hmmm.

So, the liberty to scrutinize what tyranny is up to is not so bad after all?

Via Breitbart.com:

Discovered inside the huge tranche of secretive Obamatrade documents released by Wikileaks are key details on how technically any Republican voting for Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) that would fast-track trade deals like the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) trade deal would technically also be voting to massively expand President Obama’s executive authority when it comes to immigration matters.

The mainstream media covered the Wikileaks document dump extensively, but did not mention the immigration chapter contained within it, so Breitbart News took the documents to immigration experts to get their take on it. Nobody has figured how big a deal the documents uncovered by Wikileaks are until now. (See below)

The president’s Trade in Services Act (TiSA) documents, which is one of the three different close-to-completely-negotiated deals that would be fast-tracked making up the president’s trade agreement, show Obamatrade in fact unilaterally alters current U.S. immigration law. TiSA, like TPP or the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP) deals, are international trade agreements that President Obama is trying to force through to final approval. The way he can do so is by getting Congress to give him fast-track authority through TPA.

TiSA is even more secretive than TPP. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill can review the text of TPP in a secret, secured room inside the Capitol—and in some cases can bring staffers who have high enough security clearances—but with TiSA, no such draft text is available.

Voting for TPA, of course, would essentially ensure the final passage of each TPP, T-TIP, and TiSA by Congress, since in the history of fast-track any deal that’s ever started on fast-track has been approved. …

MORE (if you can unstick this website.)

TiSA Annex on Movement of Natural Persons.

TiSA Annex on Movement of Natural Persons by breitbartnews

UPDATED (6/15): “The secretive wheeling and dealing on the massive 29-chapter draft [of the Trans-Pacific Partnership] (kept under classified lock-and-key and only a tiny portion of which have been publicly disclosed through WikiLeaks) make the backroom Obamacare negotiations look like a gigantic solar flare of openness and public deliberation. Fast-track Republicans, who rightfully made a stink when Nancy Pelosi declared that ‘we have to pass the [Obamacare] bill so that you can find out what is in it,’ now have no transparency legs to stand on. …”

Michell Malkin On “Why America Hates the GOP-Obamatrade Deal.”

And if “America” doesn’t yet hate the TPP, it certainly should.

My position: all legislation is bad unless it is legislation to repeal legislation.

The ‘Ferguson Effect’

Crime, Law, Race

Like it or not, it is undeniable that “urban safety” is hampered when law enforcement is criminalized. In practice, that means that “law-abiding residents of poor communities” suffer. How much? Heather Mac Donald has the grim statistics:

… Gun violence is up more than 60% compared with this time last year, according to Baltimore police, with 32 shootings over Memorial Day weekend. May has been the most violent month the city has seen in 15 years.

In Milwaukee, homicides were up 180% by May 17 over the same period the previous year. Through April, shootings in St. Louis were up 39%, robberies 43%, and homicides 25%. “Crime is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” said St. Louis Alderman Joe Vacarro at a May 7 City Hall hearing.

Murders in Atlanta were up 32% as of mid-May. Shootings in Chicago had increased 24% and homicides 17%. Shootings and other violent felonies in Los Angeles had spiked by 25%; in New York, murder was up nearly 13%, and gun violence 7%.

Those citywide statistics from law-enforcement officials mask even more startling neighborhood-level increases. Shooting incidents are up 500% in an East Harlem precinct compared with last year; in a South Central Los Angeles police division, shooting victims are up 100%.

By contrast, the first six months of 2014 continued a 20-year pattern of growing public safety. Violent crime in the first half of last year dropped 4.6% nationally and property crime was down 7.5%. Though comparable national figures for the first half of 2015 won’t be available for another year, the January through June 2014 crime decline is unlikely to be repeated. …

MORE.

This is what Ms. Mc Donald told Paul Gigot of the Journal Editorial Report (I love text; it’s becoming rare):

GIGOT: Heather MacDonald is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at “City Journal.” And I’m happy to say, contributing writer for the “Wall Street Journal,” in a column last week … which had a big impact. Hundreds of thousands of readers called it the new American crime wave.

Is it really that bad? What are we really seeing here in terms of a change from the big decline in crime over the last 20, 30 years?

MACDONALD: Some cities, it is very, very bad. It’s not every city. Some are holding stable with a little bit of an increase. But in enough significant cities, the percentage increase is so large as to really demand attention.

GIGOT: And what’s behind it?

MACDONALD: I think what’s behind it is the last nine months of obsessive anti-cop hysteria that this country has lived through based on a few isolated and questionable shootings of black men that should be, if they are criminal, prosecuted and paid attention to. But by no means represent the norm of policing in America or the way most black men die today, which is at the hands of criminals, not the police.

GIGOT: But is this criticism leading to changes in police practices? For example, are the police saying we’re criticized so let’s not do the kinds of things that we were doing before. Don’t go into high-crime neighborhoods, for example? Let’s not pursue Stop and Frisk, which you can stop somebody, then see if they have a gun. And sometimes that gets guns off the street, or so that’s what the people who support it claim. Is it a change of police practices that’s going on?

MACDONALD: Police are still responding to 911 calls. If they get a violent felony calling in, they are responding. But it’s an informal change of officers that — if they have an option to respond or not, to undertake a discretionary stop, to ask a few questions, the very policing that is responsible for the two decades-long crime decline. Officers are hesitant to engage. They’re worried that they’ll be indicted for a good- faith mistake. They’re worried about the ubiquitous cell phone videos that rarely capture the resistance that led an officer to use force. And so officers having been told now, for the last nine months, that proactive policing, going out enforcing broken windows offenses, quality of life offenses against public drinking, that that is somehow a racist assault on minority communities, are understandably saying, well, then maybe we won’t be as aggressive and active.

GIGOT: Now, are you hearing that from — when you go — you talk to police across the country

MACDONALD: Yes.

GIGOT: When you do that, is that what you’re hearing them say privately?

MACDONALD: Absolutely.

GIGOT: They are telling you this?

MACDONALD: Oh, yes. They are very worried. They’re worried about losing their jobs. The arrest situation in places like Baltimore is unbelievably hostile. When the police are responding to a 911 call, crowds gather, jeer at them, sometimes throwing things at them for no reason. There was an incident in Baltimore recently where a man with a gun started running, the police had been called to the scene because of a 911 call saying a man with a gun. His own gun went off, he fell to the ground, started writhing and saying the police shot him. The police, who had never discharged their guns, were pelted with Clorox bottles, bricks, water bottles. This is happening not just in Baltimore but the tensions are rising elsewhere

GIGOT: What about Bill de Blasio’s argument that, look, there are — shootings are up, OK, but it’s gang-on-gang violence, and therefore it’s not something that the broader community in New York needs to worry about.

MACDONALD: Most shootings are always gang-on-gang violence. But if they get to a level, and even at any level, there are innocents inevitably taken as well.

GIGOT: Shootings, crossfire, that sort of thing?

MACDONALD: Of course. You know what kills me? We all know the names of Michael Brown, who was falsely turned into a martyr. The Justice Department itself discredited the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” shot —

(CROSSTALK)

GIGOT: In Ferguson.

MACDONALD: Marcus Johnson is a 6-year-old boy in St. Louis, who, on March 11th, when the protesters were converging on the Ferguson Police Department, again, demanding the resignation of the entire department, Marcus Johnson was killed by a stray bullet in a St. Louis park just a few miles away. America does not know his name. Why is that? Because the “Black Lives Matter” movement only applies to blacks who are killed by the police trying to do their jobs. The difference between most police shootings and gang shootings is the police do not have criminal intent. Training must work incessantly to make sure that they use force only as last resort. But they’re not the criminals we should be worrying about.

GIGOT: Heather MacDonald, thanks for being here.

MACDONALD: Thank you, Paul.

(Journal Editorial Report.)

Feminist Onslaught On Silicon Valley

Affirmative Action, Business, Feminism, Gender, Law, Technology

Entire Human Resource departments are dedicated to dealing with women (and minorities) and their ongoing special needs and complaints in the private economy. In the high-tech industry, especially, nothing is as politically precious as a woman. There is no end to which a company will go to mentor a woman and help her succeed. But such things as “sucking it up” and soldiering on are often anathema to deluded distaff. (This generally means that “guys will do double duty.”) Heather Mac Donald, fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor at “City Journal,” chronicles the manner in which one female repaid her professional benefactors. The tale of the litigious and troublesome Ellen Pao is hardly untypical:

A San Francisco jury late last week rejected a $16 million gender-discrimination lawsuit against a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm. This triumph of common sense, though, represents merely a minor setback in the feminist crusade against America’s most vibrant economic sector. The chance that Silicon Valley can preserve its ruthlessly meritocratic culture under a continuing feminist onslaught is slim.

In 2005 plaintiff Ellen Pao got an MBA’s dream job: technical chief of staff to John Doerr, a renowned senior partner with the venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Kleiner Perkins was a pioneer in high-tech entrepreneurship, making lucrative early investments in Google and Amazon, among other giants of the Internet age. Mr. Doerr mentored Ms. Pao, treating her, as Ms. Pao put it in an email to him, as a “surrogate daughter.”

He recommended her for a prestigious fellowship at the Aspen Institute and advised Ms. Pao about her performance at Kleiner Perkins. But after she was promoted into the direct-investing track, her reviews from other senior partners worsened. She was difficult to work with, they said, and wasn’t succeeding as a junior partner. By 2011, Mr. Doerr was the only senior partner who believed that she should stay on at the firm. …

MORE.

The author, Ms. Mac Donald, does paint with too broad a brush when she mouths the mantra all conservatives are wont to mouth: “the market is the best antidote to discrimination. It rewards talent and penalizes prejudice.”

That’s a half-truth. The whole truth is that the market will reflect a bias toward productivity, explained in “Apartheid South Africa: Reality Vs. Libertarian Fantasy,” which in turn excerpts this from Into The Cannibal’s Pot:

THOSE HALF-TRUTHS AGAIN

“Free market economists (the only kind worth consulting) have long since insisted that the rational, self-interest of individuals in private enterprise is always not to discriminate. Arguably, however, the good economists, while certainly not wholesale liars as are their Keynesian counterparts, are still offering up a half-truth. Rational self-interest does indeed propel people, however prejudiced, to set aside bias and put their scarce resources to the best use. But to state simply that ‘discrimination is bad for business’ is to present an incomplete picture of reality. This solecism stems from the taint the word ‘discriminate’ has acquired. The market, by which we mean the trillions of capitalist acts between consenting adults, is discriminating as in discerning—it is biased toward productivity. Hiring people on the basis of criteria other than productivity hurts the proprietor’s pocket.” (P. 127.)

“Thus, we can be fairly certain that, absent racist affirmative-action laws, the market would reflect a bias toward productivity.

In other words, what the good economists are loath to let on is that a free market is a market in which groups and individuals are differently represented. Parity in prosperity and performance between differently able individuals and groups can be achieved only by playing socialist leveler.” (P. 128.)

The Mindless, Mirthless Millennial

Celebrity, Free Speech, Intellectualism, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Millennials likely don’t know what mirthless means. Most of them are pig-ignorant even when “educated” or “well-traveled.” As I continue to discover in my own interactions, Millennials are diversity hating, unless “diversity” is defined as skin color or some other overt, exotic, cultural, culinary or sexual display. Minds that are different Millenials cannot and will not abide. Conformity is their thing.

Similar findings are being reported by some of our smarter, and certainly iconic, comedians—satirists, really.

As was noted in “Race And The American Millennial’s Brain Rot,” “comedian Chris Rock recently confessed that he avoids doing his stand-up routine in front of millennial audiences. ‘You can’t say ‘the black kid over there.’ No, it’s ‘the guy with the red shoes.’ You can’t even be offensive on your way to being inoffensive.”

Now Jerry Seinfeld says he “avoids doing shows on college campuses. … College kids today are too politically correct.” His own daughter has been brainwashed into drone-like sanctimony. Via Entertainment Weekly:

“I hear that all the time,” Seinfeld said on The Herd with Colin Cowherd. “I don’t play colleges, but I hear a lot of people tell me, ‘Don’t go near colleges. They’re so PC.’”

Seinfeld says teens and college-aged kids don’t understand what it means to throw around certain politically-correct terms. “They just want to use these words: ‘That’s racist;’ ‘That’s sexist;’ ‘That’s prejudice,’” he said. “They don’t know what the f­—k they’re talking about.”

The funnyman went on to recount a conversation he and his wife had with their 14-year-old daughter, which he believes proved his point.

“My wife says to her, ‘Well, you know, in the next couple years, I think maybe you’re going to want to be hanging around the city more on the weekends, so you can see boys,’” Seinfeld recalled. “You know what my daughter says? She says, ‘That’s sexist.’”

MORE.