At three minutes into this charming video, we find out that the lovely lady speaking to an approving crowd is a pre-school teacher. Quite a country you’ve got there.

Super awful bonus: subjecting 11 yr old children, who know, if they still teach such things, only addition, subtraction, multiplication and division, as well as the parts of speech, to such nonsense, should be a criminal offense. It is child abuse and the perps should be in jail.

Take your pick: this or this.

CHS:

her assessment of the U.S. is foundational to “intersectional feminism.” This theory — now official doctrine in gender studies – portrays American society as a “matrix of domination and oppression.” And the list of oppressions keeps growing. Actress Laverne Cox, a frequent campus lecturer, expanded hooks’ formulation in a 2015 tweet: “Actually its cisnormative heteronormative imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Others have added ageist, able-ist, lookist, pro-natalist, and size-ist to the matrix. At the risk of sounding like a weapon of patriarchal terrorism, I don’t see progress here. I see a descent into madness. Proliferating “ists” and “isms” are turning many of our campuses into hostile environments for sanity. Students are organizing themselves into aggrieved little tribes that police and bully one another for imagined slights and micro-invalidations. On some campuses, intersectionality has tenure. Last year, 28 faculty members at Scripps College opposed former Secretary of State Madeline Albright as a speaker because her “category of ‘woman’ evacuates feminism of its anti-racist, anti-imperialist potential.’

We used to think this was funny, but it’s really out of control. As we noted a dozen years ago, affluence, utopianism, and tenure of all sorts provide an excellent breeding ground for the nuttiness above. The only thing worse than the disease may be the cure.

ABC:

Several dozen suspected terrorist bombmakers, including some believed to have targeted American troops, may have mistakenly been allowed to move to the United States as war refugees, according to FBI agents investigating the remnants of roadside bombs recovered from Iraq and Afghanistan. The discovery of two al Qaeda-Iraq terrorists living as refugees in Bowling Green, Kentucky — who later admitted in court that they’d attacked U.S. soldiers in Iraq — prompted the bureau to assign hundreds of specialists to an around-the-clock effort. An ABC News investigation of the flawed U.S. refugee screening system showed that Alwan was mistakenly allowed into the U.S. and resettled in the leafy southern town of Bowling Green, Kentucky, a city of 60,000 which is home to Western Kentucky University and near the Army’s Fort Knox and Fort Campbell. Alwan and another Iraqi refugee, Mohanad Shareef Hammadi, 26, were resettled in Bowling Green even though both had been detained during the war. As a result of the Kentucky case, the State Department has stopped processing Iraq refugees – even for many who had heroically helped U.S. forces as interpreters and intelligence assets. One Iraqi who had aided American troops was assassinated before his refugee application could be processed, because of the immigration delays.

Oh wait, that story is from 2013. (Sounds of crickets chirping.) And what about that dead Syrian boy? Oh wait, that was 2015. But now it’s 2017: Lights, Cameras, Action!

Since taking office a week ago, Mr. Trump has issued a significant number of executive orders, the Big Bang is coming via the CRA, and company after company makes noises about increasing US employment.

Yet the media, so far, seem to be focusing much of their firepower on things like crowd sizes and illegal voting, issues that DJT dangles before them. Perhaps it’s a plan, or perhaps it’s an instinctive thing for him; either way, the result is the same: the MSM obsess about trivialities while big changes are in the works. It’s like tossing tasty nuggets in a koi pond, the way the media reacts. In any event, they ignore, for the most part, the major changes that are taking place, while focusing and insisting on nonsense like there’s no substantial voter fraud. If he can keep the koi going for the nuggets, it’s a formula for success. We’ll see.

BTW: re MSM and Mr. Seth M. M. Stodder, this is not America’s problem, and it is not America’s responsibility to fix it. What is this nonsense?

FSN:

In an internal message sent to FSIS employees on Jan. 18 and obtained by Food Safety News warned that delays in lab tests are expected through at least March 3. The FSIS is responsible for ensuring the safety of meat, poultry, eggs and catfish.

“Effective Jan. 18, 2017, due to a temporary decrease in staffing, results on pathology samples submitted to the FSIS laboratory system will be delayed,” according to the email sent to all FSIS employees. “AMR-01 and rush cases will be given priority status; however turnaround times are expected to be delayed by at least 24 hours on these samples. This is expected to be rectified by March 3, 2017, but is dependent on staffing key vacancies. The Pathology Branch apologies for the inconvenience these delays will cause.”

“Less than a week into the Trump Administration, we are already seeing the devastating effects of President Trump’s federal hiring freeze. News that the USDA does not have enough staff to properly test the nation’s food supply is extremely disconcerting and it is only a matter of time until a consumer ends up sick — or worse, dead,” U.S. Rep Rosa Delauro, D-CT told Food Safety News.

Q: How many employees does FSIS have? A: 10,000 (HT:AT)

WaPo:

Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s job running the State Department just got considerably more difficult. The entire senior level of management officials resigned Wednesday, part of an ongoing mass exodus of senior foreign service officers who don’t want to stick around for the Trump era.

Tillerson was actually inside the State Department’s headquarters in Foggy Bottom on Wednesday, taking meetings and getting the lay of the land. I reported Wednesday morning that the Trump team was narrowing its search for his No. 2, and that it was looking to replace the State Department’s long-serving undersecretary for management, Patrick Kennedy. Kennedy, who has been in that job for nine years, was actively involved in the transition and was angling to keep that job under Tillerson, three State Department officials told me.

Then suddenly on Wednesday afternoon, Kennedy and three of his top officials resigned unexpectedly, four State Department officials confirmed. Assistant Secretary of State for Administration Joyce Anne Barr, Assistant Secretary of State for Consular Affairs Michele Bond and Ambassador Gentry O. Smith, director of the Office of Foreign Missions, followed him out the door. All are career foreign service officers who have served under both Republican and Democratic administrations. Kennedy will retire from the foreign service at the end of the month, officials said. The other officials could be given assignments elsewhere in the foreign service.

In addition, Assistant Secretary of State for Diplomatic Security Gregory Starr retired Jan. 20, and the director of the Bureau of Overseas Building Operations, Lydia Muniz, departed the same day. That amounts to a near-complete housecleaning of all the senior officials that deal with managing the State Department, its overseas posts and its people.

“It’s the single biggest simultaneous departure of institutional memory that anyone can remember, and that’s incredibly difficult to replicate,” said David Wade, who served as State Department chief of staff under Secretary of State John Kerry. “Department expertise in security, management, administrative and consular positions in particular are very difficult to replicate and particularly difficult to find in the private sector.”

The State Department has 30,000 employees and spends $66 billion a year. ExxonMobil has 75,000 employees and over $250 billion in revenue. Somehow ExxonMobil would find a way to go on if a few dozen executives quit. Indeed, the more junior executives would be excited at the chance for a promotion. BTW, we hear there’s also a talented genius available to fill in.

Back in the 2008 financial crisis, the Dow was at 8,000 and even lower, down to 6,547 on March 9, 2009, and now it’s at 20,000 on January 25, 2017. Notice a pattern in those dates? The market is smarter than, say, the AP. BTW, what’s going on over at the AP? “If the president’s claim were true it would mark the most significant election fraud in U.S. history — and ironically, would raise the same questions about Trump’s legitimacy that he’s trying to avoid.” (Oh yeah, the idiot believes in fraud.) And “President Donald Trump declared Wednesday he believes torture works.” Well, it’s obviously working on the AP! HT: PL

Today’s craziness. Just wait until tomorrow. BTW, the nuttiness currently knows no limits. It’s quite enjoyable to watch the media-academy establishment of the last 20 years losing its mind. In a bit, we may have comments on their nuttiness from a psychoanalytic perspective, but for now we’re just happy to watch the show. Carnage is carnage FWIW. And Edd had the right name.

The Game must have driven her insane.

A guy from New Jersey:

The E Street Band is glad to be here in Western Australia. But we’re a long way from home and our hearts and spirits are with the hundreds of thousands of women and men that marched yesterday in every city in America and in Melbourne – who rallied against hate and division, and in support of tolerance, inclusion, reproductive rights, civil rights, racial justice, LGBTQ rights, the environment, wage equality, gender equality, healthcare and immigrant rights. We stand with you. We are the new American resistance!

He forgot to mention the concentration camps. Bonus fun: compare and contrast what a guy thinks is nasty and nice; this guy Brennan is vile. Final link of the day to this Roger Kimball piece; it’s useful in itself, but the comments in some ways are even more interesting.

Biggest crime in human history? Puh-leeze. A few weeks ago we suggested that the new administration might want to take on the foolishness of catastrophic global warming as a kind of line in the sand. The silly billies who say nonsense like “no challenge — no challenge — poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change” should be met with eye-rolling and guffaws. Now if you click on such a reference you get this. Here’s some additional detail. That was sure fast.

BTW, in case you hadn’t noticed, it’s crazy out there.

James Carville famously said in some form: it’s the economy stupid. Our view: it’s the hair, stupid or not. Whether you like or despise Donald Trump, it’s important to recognize one thing. This is a guy who the media/establishment would find it very hard to defeat with conventional firepower: oh he makes insults, he said naughty things to a TV crew, he didn’t release his tax returns, etc. etc. Overlooked in all of this is a most salient fact about the new president: he is transparent in his presentation to voters and defiance of PC. 91% of the news stories about him were negative, but somehow he prevailed.

We think a substantial portion of this invulnerability is attributable to his kooky orange-gray hair and orange face. This is a guy who wears many of his faults in an entirely visible way, with no changes or apologies. That’s an unprecedented in-your-face persona, totally rejected in the world of conventional politics, and it attracted a lot of people to really believe that when he said MAGA, he meant it. Achieve or die trying. As we’re writing this, we hear the Darth Vader theme playing on MSNBC in another room. Yawn. We haven’t a clue whether Trump’s agenda will be enacted and will succeed, though we hope so. But we say this to the media and his opponents: you underestimate at your peril a guy who wears openly the most ridiculous hairstyle in American political history.

Spengler:

The protagonists of American popular culture are outsiders with scant patience for authority. The Western heroes invented by Zane Grey and Louis L’Amour and portrayed by William S. Hart or John Wayne, and their urban cousins — the private detectives of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler — play loose with the law and play dirty with the opposition, but they have an inviolable inner code. They don’t betray their friends and they don’t exploit the weak. They don’t aspire to entry into the elites, and they don’t apologize for their vulgarity. They come in comic form, for example Huckleberry Finn, or nastily serious, like William Munny in Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven, or a bit of both in Hammett’s wise-cracking angel of vengeance, the Continental Op.

Religious or not, the entire dramatis personae of American fiction descends from the Christian in John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the original of which every product of the American literary imagination is a reworking. Americans are pilgrims. We have no settled culture, no inheritance of customs handed down over generations, no ancient vineyards or ancient recipes, no monuments from the deep past and no long memory. We invented ourselves as a nation out of the Protestant imagination, and we must journey towards a goal that we never will reach. The goal — salvation — always awaits just beyond the horizon. Our fiction lacks endings. Our national novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, ends perforce the way it began, with Huck running away from home: “But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”

It was just last month that some Virginia schools banned Huck Finn and, of all things, To Kill a Mockingbird. It is amusing and perhaps fitting to note that a town in the state of Massachusetts banned Huckleberry Finn from its library in 1885. Roger Kimball has a good companion piece.

We note the take no prisoners approach of the inaugural address today, and found some CNN commentary amusing. Referring to the economic “carnage,” the commenter thought it made no sense, since the unemployment rate was 4.7% or so, without (of course) noting that the labor force participation rate is the lowest in 40 years. Interesting times ahead. As we wrote recently, the skim is the scam, but those relying on the skim are now facing some serious opposition.

We discussed this six years ago, and still it’s so peculiar to have a soundtrack playing in the background as we go through the day. We “run” for more than an hour daily and listen to the radio, so there’s that — but almost all of our soundtrack doesn’t play, even on oldies or classical stations. There’s no Lesley Gore or Bobby Vee, and few Raindrops, for example. Often oddities and one-hit wonders appear: here and here for example. We don’t like most recent pop music, though we’ll make an exception for Don’t Stop Believin’.

From a business viewpoint, we note that the ad industry really ought to have clever jingles for all products, since the jingle sometimes lasts longer than the company. We recall WPRO singing about being Color Radio, and Rocky Point (RIP) crooning about its World Famous Shore Dinner Hall. Don’t get us started on Taunton Dog Track (here comes Rusty, look at him run, you’ll be sure that you’ll have fun, watching all the greyhounds run etc). Speaking of such old days, it’s interesting that there’s now a mini-network that rebroadcasts the game shows of yore, complete with the original Dristan and Anacin etc ads (eg, like jet-age plastic so tough, bullets bounce off).

From our earlier post on soundtracks, we note a couple of others reported having the same phenomenon. We wonder just how common it is. If it’s universal it has tremendous potential commercial value. Yet, unless we’re mistaken, it has been little studied, and the studies have been peculiar. If we’re mistaken, we’d like to know.

Finally, we know we’re too oldy for the oldies stations, but take a look at the songs and the groups from one year that sometimes bounce around in our head, eg 1966. Yes, many of them are silly, but the tunes are mostly nice and the lyrics not vulgar. These are invisible today, as is most of 20th century American culture, except on TCM. Can anything stop the cultural rot?

What does it mean that one of the signers of this charming letter is now offering 7000 words of analysis and advice? (Kissinger, who is discussed extensively in the latter link, had nicer things to say than did the letter.) BTW, of course the sentence should be reduced; it wasn’t her, it was a bad guy who committed the crimes. The 1956 Secretary of State in the Congressional Record: “You are dealing with a kingdom and with a dynasty which more than any other in the world practices very religiously certain religious doctrines and they have felt for a long time — it goes back centuries — a very particular animosity toward the Jews, because they credited the assassination of Mohammed to a Jew.” Well, that explains a lot. Finally, fun with numbers: Question, when is a hoax not a hoax? Answer, when it pays real well, duh!

More: this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal, so learn how to build an igloo. and then there’s fiercely anti-intellectual computer scientist professor at Yale. SNL, ugh.

WSJ:

Mr. Xi stressed that no power should attempt to dictate to other countries a specific path. Development, he said, is “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” borrowing a phrase from U.S. President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Some in the audience noted irony in the appeal from the leader of a country that has undermined competition. Foreign companies and governments complain that China has moved to restrict foreign companies’ access to its markets, while buying up technology and assets from firms abroad. The U.S. and Europe also accuse China of selling goods from steel to solar panels at improperly low prices. “Here, we have the global elite embracing Xi as the anti-Trump,” said Lawrence Freedman, emeritus professor of war studies at King’s College, London. Mr. Trump has pledged to defend American firms and workers against foreign competition and impose tariffs on imports from China and Mexico, among other countries. Mr. Trump also accused China of manipulating its currency to boost exports. “China has no intention to boost its trade competitiveness by devaluing the renminbi, still less will it launch a currency war,” Mr. Xi said. China’s yuan weakened almost 7% against the dollar last year, nearly double the drop in the year earlier.

Also, via CNBC: In most middle class societies, people can’t get a raise, Biden said. But if we offered free college, he said, they would be thankful. “We can afford to do that in a heartbeat,” Biden said. We can pay for every student to go to community college for $6 billion a year.”

Hmmm. “In fall 2016, some 20.5 million students are expected to attend American colleges.” If they all went to community college, tuition would thus be $150 a semester. Sounds about right for the quality of education the snowflakes are getting.

Via PL:

Ken Adelman, David Adesnik, Michael Auslin, Mike Baker, Christopher Barton, Kevin W. Billings, Robert D. Blackwill, Daniel A. Blumenthal, Max Boot, Ellen Bork, Anna Borshchevskaya, Joseph A. Bosco, Michael Chertoff, Patrick Chovanec, James Clad, Eliot A. Cohen, Gus Coldebella, Carrie Cordero, Michael Coulter, Chester A. Crocker, Patrick M. Cronin, Seth Cropsey, Tom Donnelly, Daniel Drezner, Colin Dueck, Eric Edelman, Joseph Esposito, Charles Fairbanks, Richard A. Falkenrath, Peter D. Feaver, Niall Ferguson, Jamie Fly, Richard Fontaine, Aaron Friedberg, Dan Gabriel, Greg Garcia, Jana Chapman Gates, Jeffrey Gedmin, Reuel Marc Gerecht, James K. Glassman, David Gordon, Christopher J. Griffin, Mary R. Habeck, Paul Haenle, Melinda Haring, Robert Hastings, Rebeccah Heinrichs, Francis Q. Hoang, Rachel Hoff, Jeffrey W. Hornung, William C. Inboden, Jamil N. Jaffer, Ash Jain, Marc C. Johnson, Myriah Jordan, Robert G. Joseph, Tim Kane, Kate Kidder, Robert Kagan, Rep. Jim Kolbe, David Kramer, Stephen Krasner, Matthew Kroenig, Frank Lavin, Philip I. Levy, Philip Lohaus, Mary Beth Long, Peter Mansoor, John Maurer, Matthew McCabe, Bryan McGrath, Richard G. Miles, Paul D. Miller, Charles Morrison, Michael B. Mukasey, Scott W. Muller, Lester Munson, Andrew S. Natsios, Michael Noonan, Tom Nichols, John Noonan, Roger F. Noriega, Stephen E. Ockenden, John Osborn, Robert T. Osterhaler, Mackubin T. Owens, Daniel Pipes, Everett Pyatt, Martha T. Rainville, Stephen Rodriguez, Marc A. Ross, Nicholas Rostow, Michael Rubin, Daniel F. Runde, Benjamin Runkle, Richard L. Russell, Andrew Sagor, Kori Schake, Randy Scheunemann, Gary J. Schmitt, Gabriel Schoenfeld, Russell Seitz, Kalev I. Sepp, Vance Serchuk, David R. Shedd, Gary Shiffman, Kristen Silverberg, Michael Singh, Ray Takeyh, Jeremy Teigen, William H. Tobey, Frances F. Townsend, Jan Van Tol, Daniel Vajdich, Ruth Wedgwood, Albert Wolf, Julie Wood, Dov S. Zakheim, Roger Zakheim, Sam Zega, Philip Zelikow, Robert B. Zoellick, Laurence Zuriff, and quite a few others

Oops! More at AT.

WSJ:

The main Shanghai Composite Index fell as much as 2.3% intraday, before suspected buying by state-backed funds known as the “national team” in the last half-hour of trading helped narrow the day’s loss to 0.3%.

The more lively and speculative Shenzhen market saw deeper losses, with its benchmark Shenzhen Composite Index and the Nasdaq-style ChiNext board both down 3.6%. The two indexes both slumped as much as over 6% in the last 30 to 40 minutes of trading. The Shenzhen index’ drop was its largest since it fell 4.9% on Dec. 12.

The apparent trigger was Leshi internet Information & Technology, which provides online video broadcasting services. The firm resumed trading Monday after a period of suspension. The stock initially rose at the open but started tumbling just after the lunch break. Selling soon spread wider on the ChiNext board, where the technology firm is a bellwether and a barometer of general sentiment.

This happened in a climate of nervousness following a Sunday article published by the official Xinhua News Agency that described the acceleration in initial public offering approvals in recent months as a normalization of that market, which has seen several IPO moratoriums over the past decade.

“We saw a crash-style slump during the last trading hour today as panic spread because sentiment was severely hurt by Xinhua’s rhetoric,” said Deng Wenyuan, an analyst at Soochow Securities.

China approved 227 IPOs last year, slightly more than 223 in 2015. But most of last year’s approvals came after July. The first half of 2016 saw few listings, as Chinese authorities were trying to stabilize the share market after a selloff that began in the summer of 2015.

The Chinese securities regulator has picked up the pace of IPO approvals since the start of this year, greenlighting 24 IPOs two weeks into the new year.

“Xinhua’s article sent a signal to the market that Beijing supports the acceleration of IPOs, which was a huge blow to market confidence,” said Amy Lin, senior analyst at Capital Securities, noting the deals will drain cash from previously listed shares.

We would have thought that a pickup in IPO’s was bullish, but then again, this is China. At PE’s of 51x, anything can happen.

If we’re going to reduce government spending and waste, as well as media corruption, there’s a very easy place to begin: fire the stupidest of the stupid. We have a suggestion in that regard, and it is not based on partisanship — anyone who advocated for the “dossier” or reported it on TV or in print (other than with winks and laughter) should be loudly dismissed from his job and ridiculed in public discourse. No, wait, they should also be displayed in stocks or pillories for a few weeks (possibly a good idea for the Cathedral of Global Warming nincompoops as well). We need only look at the most obvious of frauds to make this judgment.

According to a writer on the left, this group of idiots, imbeciles and morons includes many at the highest levels of the so-called intelligence community, another good reason for heads to roll. Why is it so obvious that mass firings are common sense? In the ancient days of 1987 it was 30 years after the book was published and 24 years after From Russia with Love the film that Roger Simon found himself at the Yalta Hotel, with cameras rolling. In the century since Mata Hari was executed, the story is all the same. Anyone who thinks that Trump was that stupid at the Ritz Carlton has pretty much forfeited his right to have an income. HT: Clarice