The World Economic Forum’s (WEF) 2018 World Competitiveness Report ranks the United States No. 1 in global competitiveness, up from No. 3 in the past few years and its first top ranking in a decade. A high ranking matters.

As the WEF reports: “Global competitiveness is determined by the set of institutions, policies and factors that determine the level of productivity of a country … And productivity leads to growth ... and improved well-being. The U.S.’s top ranking therefore suggests a lot of growth and prosperity to come."

According to the Davos elite (who are no fans of Donald Trump), the U.S. is indeed “great again,” to borrow a Trumpian slogan. It is the country, according to the WEF, that should best prosper in Davos’ “fourth industrial revolution.”

As the world’s most innovative economy, America is well positioned to take advantage of the new competitive environment. This should be welcome news for the Trump administration and a Republican Party fighting to retain control of Congress.  Let’s look at the details.

George Armstrong Custer – American Hero

Christopher Columbus was an immigrant, but it hasn’t done him much good in the eyes of the Left. The Left in this case prefers someone like Elizabeth Warren, who can claim to be as much as 1/1024th “Native American.” Big whoop.

Columbus was a Catholic and a representative of Western Civilization, so the Left—all those white liberals—would rather that Warren’s distant ancestors had chopped off Columbus’s head and torn out his heart, because liberalism, as James Burnham reminded us long ago, is the ideology of Western suicide.

Beyond the ritualistic incantations of “racism” and “genocide,” the Left sees American expansion—geopolitical and cultural—as bad, (and points to Andrew Jackson and George Armstrong Custer as among its chief villains) and American retreat as good.

But neither Andrew Jackson nor Custer is the villain the Left makes both men out to be. They were American heroes.

What has transformed the Democrat party into an anguished progressive movement that incorporates the tactics of the street, embraces maenadism, reverts to Sixties carnival barking, and is radicalized by a new young socialist movement?

Even party chairman Tom Perez concedes that there are “no moderate Democrats left,” and lately the rantings of Cory Booker, Hillary Clinton, Eric Holder, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez confirm that diagnosis.

How did it get this way?  Let’s start with Obama, who started who started being worshipped as the Democrat Savior and has now become the Fallen God.  It goes downhill from there.

Why can’t women stop buying the Marxist narrative?

If you’ve read this and you’re going “uh, what?” because you’re a woman and not Marxist, don’t worry. What I’m doing is echoing a WaPo editorial by Victoria Bissell Brown (a retired Grinnell College history professor) last Friday (10/12) who starts her insanely stupid article by asking:

Why can’t men organize to change themselves?

Why, Vicky, (yeah, I’m fairly sure you don’t want me to call you Vicky, but since you’re functioning at about a six-year-old level, that’s the best you deserve) that’s an amazing question, that probably made the Post editors drool at your amazingness.

It’s almost as good as “why can’t you take a valium like a normal human being, and stop being crazy?” which is what your editorial made me ask.

Her article starts with a confession of spousal abuse:

China has been brandishing its might and the world is taking notice. Not with military exercises, cyber attacks, or by harassing vessels in international waters.

China has been doing these things, of course, but its latest show of force comes straight from its heart: displays of ultra-nationalism by its diplomats indulging in chauvinistic and all-too-official bullying tirades..

As China’s economy and military might have grown, Chinese leaders have begun to expect obeisance from other powers, both great and especially small.

In 2010, then-Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi hinted at this in Hanoi when he harangued the assembled representatives of ASEAN with his admonition that “China is a big country and other countries are small countries, and that’s just a fact.”  Since then the bullying and arrogance has gotten so much worse.

Brett Kavanaugh was sworn in as the newest justice on the U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday (10/06), and began hearing oral arguments on yesterday (10/09), after the Court came back from its Columbus Day holiday.

Much has been said about the unfair and downright nasty tactics used by some Democrat Senators and their allies during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation battle.

But the reason they resorted to these tactics is because the federal courts have become so important in their quest to change America into their version of a Progressive Utopia.  For many decades, liberals have been using the federal courts to implement the changes they have been unable to achieve through Congress and state legislatures.

When they cannot convince voters and legislators, they have resorted to federal judges to ignore the law and ignore the Constitution and implement their social policies by judicial fiat.  With Justice Kavanaugh bringing a 5-4 conservative majority to SCOTUS, these days promise to be over for liberals and the left.

Also Stomped On: Never Trumpers, #MeToo, the Media and more

When the Christine Ford saga finally ended with the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a lot of truth had distilled out, along with the evaporation of prior pretensions and misconceptions.  Here are the Kavanaugh Casualties.

The Left

The hearing confirmed that the traditional JFK/Hubert Humphrey Democrat party, as once envisioned by a Bill Clinton, Gary Hart, or Jim Webb, is long kaput.

In its place is being birthed a hard-left progressive movement that absorbs the ideologies and methodologies of its base and that now incorporates all sorts, from Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist hipsters to Black Lives Matters, Antifa, and Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Any means is deemed permissible to enact visions of social justice, given legislative and executive power is lost for now — and as if proverbially ordinary Americans who watched the televised circus might applaud the performers.

The applause is the sound of one hand clapping.

Inevitably as China becomes more powerful and influential in international relations, Beijing will fundamentally change the international system created by the United States and the Cold War.

The key question for international politics is what kind of world does China seek to create by 2049 — the centenary of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Will China sustain the present liberal system or forge another anchored on its ambitions, culture, and desires? Millennia of Chinese history strongly suggests the latter.

In this essay, we illuminate China’s model of global governance and touch upon its derivative economic and political features. Conceiving of what type of world China will create is significant for three reasons.

First, it is critical for the United States to understand so that the full scope of China’s strategic ambitions and direction may be understood.

Second, U.S. decision-makers should expect that the world China would like to create by 2049 will be fundamentally different. The economic order will be a curious mix of hyper-capitalism and neomercantilism. The political order will be authoritarian.

Third, understanding China’s ambition and grand strategic objectives allows the United States to develop policies and undertake measures to thwart them.

Never have I felt more ashamed of my sex than in the last two weeks watching hysterical harridans trashing tradition, decorum, and common decency.

The Kavanaugh confirmation circus has brought out the worst of womankind -- woman who forced themselves, writhing with hatred and ignorance, into our living rooms and smart devices uninvited and without consent.

I've never felt so assaulted in my life than after watching the fiendish, frenzied temper tantrums of a thousand deranged females during what is supposed to be tedious, uneventful Senate procedure to seat a Supreme Court justice.

These screeching gorgons have bigger problems than Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. Their performance during this uproarious time has called into serious question their fitness to even participate in any serious matter of state.

It embarrasses me deeply that these shrieking shrews identify as "women" and are allowed to speak for all of us without question. The only women in America whose existence is continually and relentlessly denied are conservative women.

The population of the Russian Federation is falling by 700 people a day, or more than a quarter of a million a year (Narzur.ru, September 23).

The decline stems from a combination of rising death rates, changes in the age structure of the population (resulting in fewer women in the prime child-bearing cohort but more elderly), dramatically falling immigration rates, and ever greater shortages of medicines and even medical facilities.

And of course, alcoholism off the world scale.  At the very least, international health officials say, alcohol in its various forms remains “the main cause of death” in Russia today. (Thinktanks.by, October 3).

Ever more Russian analysts are describing the current demographic situation as a disaster for the future, one that may make it increasingly difficult for that country to field a sizeable military or generate economic growth.  Here are the stats showing how Russia is literally dying.

A spate of unusual reports in Hong Kong and overseas Chinese-language media lend credence to the idea that, while Xi Jinping remains China’s undisputed paramount, his authority seems diminished.

A moratorium of sorts appears to have been called on the relentless personality cult constructed around Xi, while signs have emerged that China’s economic policymaking apparatus has been hamstrung by disagreements between Xi and his top economic policymaker over how to handle a deepening trade war with the United States.

Stories about political troubles befalling Xi could be exaggerated. Xi recently completed a 10-day trip to Africa and the Middle East; it is unlikely he would have left the country for so long if his position were in imminent danger.

Further,  the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) is unlikely to move against Xi after a massive reshuffle of its command-and-control apparatus in late 2015 and early 2016 that saw Xi install protégés in most of the PLA’s senior roles. (China Brief, October 20, 2017).

Nonetheless, while Xi’s status as top leader likely remains unchallenged, his authority—including his ability to make decisions on major political, economic and foreign-policy issues—seems impaired in recent weeks.   The primary cause of this impairment is US President Donald Trump.

[The Soviet Colonial Empire was the 20th century worldwide expansion of the 19th century Russian Colonial Empire. My friend of many years Paul Goble here shows how the murder of three Russian investigative journalists spotlights Putin’s attempt to create Russian colonies in Africa –JW.]

The Kremlin has seemingly taken another step to cover up the murders of three Russian journalists who were killed at the end of July in the Central African Republic (CAR), while investigating Moscow’s dispatch of weapons there.

Moscow has far more to hide in the CAR and is prepared to act quickly and harshly to make sure those secrets stay hidden. All along, the Russian government has vociferously denied any involvement in the widely publicized murders of the three journalists, Orkhan Dzhemal, Aleksandr Rastorguev and Kirill Radchenko.

Russia has announced it had opened its own “investigation” into the deadly incident. At the same time, however, officials and Russian analysts have gone out of their way to deny that Russians in the CAR were in any way responsible for the reporters’ deaths or that Moscow was acting covertly to undermine what stability there is in that country or anywhere else in sub-Saharan Africa (see EDM, September 4).

The truth seems to be the opposite.

Now we know for sure.  The answer is No. There is not a single decent person among the Democrats in Congress.

Because not one Democrat has had the fortitude to stand up and admit that what they are doing to Judge Brett Kavanaugh is obscene and grossly indecent.

We must therefore admit that there is not one of them with the moral sense to know that destroying a man for politics is wrong.  It's not only wrong, but depraved.  Not one Democrat member of the Senate, not one in the House.  Those on the Judiciary Committee are just the most depraved and venal of the lot.

The very worst aspect of all this is that the Democrats in Congress all surely know that Kavanaugh is innocent of Blasey Ford's ridiculous accusation.  They know, and they do not care.

Cory Booker now admits it publicly – saying “It no longer matters if Kavanaugh is innocent or guilty.”  They are beyond shame, beyond decency, beyond morals.

I am not a crier. My husband jokes about my “six-second cry” when I finally shed some tears.

But as I watched Brett Kavanaugh’s opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee last Thursday, I cried—and for more than six seconds.

I wept for him, for his crushed wife seated behind him, for his young daughters, and for his friends. I cried for our country. It was an emotional release of sympathy, frustration and rage.

I wasn’t alone. The shared tears and collective fury are galvanizing women voters, but not in the way Democrats initially calculated. The Democrats’ insistence that due process and a presumption of innocence don’t apply to men (particularly conservative white men) is a terrifying prospect for the husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers we love.

The Left still doesn’t understand that we don’t hate men like they do.

Social Justice Soy Boy Man-Child Cory Booker

[In 2005 here at TTP, I wrote Infantlizomania, the defining neurosis of liberals, the compulsion to treat adults as children.  Now we see Democrats are infantilizing themselves. –JW]

Ever wonder why, while watching the Kavanaugh hearings, you thought you were peering through a keyhole at a particularly unruly and infantile kindergarten class with the teachers off on a two-hour bathroom break?

Think no further than our college campuses today.

That’s where so-called Social Justice Warriors rule the roost, isolating themselves in "safe spaces," pushing "trigger warnings," and accusing everybody and his sister of "microaggressions" and "cultural appropriation" while making sure — oh how they make sure — no speaker gets within miles of the premises with a thought that might offend their precious snowflake sensibilities.

Their infantilism has metastasized to the Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Blumenthal, Booker, Feinstein, Klobuchar, Whitehouse, Coons, Hirano, Harris, Leahy, Durbin –  the whole lot –  are the grownup imitators and wannabes of the juvenile anti-intellectual bigots dominating our campuses, pointing fingers but abjuring concrete evidence as some vestigial figment of white privilege.

The showdown between the fabulist Chrissy Ford and the righteous Brett Kavanaugh couldn't have come at a better time.

As we approach the crucial midterms -- which will decide whether the president has two more years in which to fulfill his restoration of the Republic, or be subjected to the likes of Spartacus Booker and Stolen Valor Blumenthal -- it laid bare the stark divisions in a country that seems to be coming apart.

On the one side, Mrs. Ford, a practitioner of "psychology," of a lesser form of Viennese Voodoo that masquerades as a social "science" and seems to channel folks in need of its services into the ranks of its purveyors.

The little-girl voice, the upturned question at the end of each reply, the absolute certainty about absolutely nothing -- this is the couch-riding Left at its most repellent.

On the other: Judge Kavanaugh, a man defending his life, his career, his reputation, his family, his faith, his future, and that of the country.

President Trump’s speech at the United Nations on Tuesday (9/25) is one of the greatest political speeches ever delivered in peacetime.

Barack Obama is reputed to be an impressive orator. But he never gave a speech that, in substance, could hold a candle to President Trump’s speeches at Warsaw, at Riyadh, before the joint session of Congress last year, or indeed his “rocket man” speech at the United Nations.

And this topped them all for forcefulness, clarity, and wisdom.  What, in the end, was this speech about? It was an elaboration of Trump’s chief foreign policy idea, “principled realism.”

“Realism” connotes an accurate and unsentimental appreciation of the metabolism of power. The “principles” in question involve an affirmation of who we are as a people, which turns on our affirmation of national sovereignty.

The President’s articulation of this simple, yet deep, idea is what lifted his speech out of the realm of pedestrian blather and marked it for the history books.  For now, however, we should pay attention to these key phrases in the President’s speech:

It’s been nearly a year since Ronan Farrow torpedoed the career of Harvey Weinstein, printing in The New Yorker a series of credible accusations that the Hollywood producer had sexually abused several women.

His piece touched off a firestorm that led to purges of incredibly powerful men in a variety of industries, finally forcing them to face consequences for their sexual misconduct.

Yesterday (9.24), though, Farrow and his colleague Jane Mayer did a huge disservice to the Me Too movement by publishing an incredibly thin sexual-abuse allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.  Critics by the boatload have condemned it, “Lazy at Best, Slimy at Worst.”

That story, a prime example of how some media outlets and left-wing voices have mishandled the accusations against the judge, will likely create a climate in which fewer victims are believed, more innocent men suffer for crimes they didn’t commit, and neutral observers are more inclined to doubt claims of sexual assault.

The political circus overwhelming the Kavanaugh confirmation will almost certainly weaken the Me Too movement in the long run by undermining its promise that the truth matters and that it will enable us to obtain justice.  It may already suffered a mortal wound.

Today (9/25), President Trump is in New York, meeting world leaders attending the latest UNGA (United Nations General Assembly) gathering.  Tomorrow (9/26), he chairs the 15-member UN Security Council’s meeting on Iran.  Should be fun to watch.

The present continuance of institutions such as the EU, NATO, UN, and others suggests that the world goes on exactly as before.

In fact, these alphabet organizations are becoming shadows of their former selves, more trouble to end than to allow to grow irrelevant. The conditions that created them after the end of World War II, and subsequently sustained them even after the fall of the Berlin Wall, no longer really exist.

By 2016 Americans saw the postwar order as a sort of a naked global emperor, about whom all were ordered to lie that he was splendidly clothed.  Then came along the abrasive Donald Trump, who screamed that it was all pretense.  And he was right.

[This editorial was published in the Wall Street Journal yesterday, Sept. 20.  TTP reproduces it here as a public service.]

It is still true: What begins as tragedy can end as farce. So it is with the case of Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of assaulting her when she was 15 and he was 17 [36 years ago in 1982].

Let us posit that the one thing not at issue here is the truth. As a matter of law and fact, Ms. Ford’s accusation can be neither proved nor disproved.  This is as obvious now as it must have been when Dianne Feinstein and the other Democrats came into possession of this incident.

Surely someone pointed out that based on what was disclosed, this accusation could not be substantiated. To which the Democrats responded: So what? Its political value is that it cannot be disproved.

The progressive street is leading fossilized Democrats into a dead end of collective madness.  From Dianne Feinstein to John Kerry to Maxine Waters to Cory ‘Spartacus’ Booker, Democrats are losing their marbles.

The dinosaurs of the party desperately seek relevance by sounding crazier than the new unhinged base that disrupts Senate hearings, loudly pronounces a new socialist future, and envisions octogenarian Maxine Waters (age 80) as more the future of the party than is septuagenarian Nancy Pelosi (age 78).

The spectacle is right out of Euripides’s Bacchae, as the creaky old guard of the polis, Tiresias and Cadmus, dress up in trendy, ridiculous ritual costumes to stumble along after the racing and frenzied young maenads (the “raving ones”) in their lethal courtship of suicidal Dionysian madness.  

Here’s a summary of the madness.

The Democrat goal for America

If Senate Democrats and their media allies manage to destroy Brett Kavanaugh, they will bring America one step closer to a new, liberal style of totalitarianism.

I don’t use the “T”-word lightly. I’ve spent years pushing back against those who fling it about in free societies like ours. But totalitarianism doesn’t require cartoonish, 1984-style secret police and Big Brother. The classical definition is a society where everything — ethical norms and moral principles and truth itself — is subjugated to political ends.

By that measure, the Democrats’ campaign to block Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, based on a hazy, uncorroborated, decades-old assault allegation, is further proof the totalitarian society is their goal.

Certainly, it has many of the elements of abusive politics that Americans normally associate with foreign lands untouched by the light of liberty and reason:

Democrat idols: Stalin and his chief henchman Lavrentiy Beria

Christine Blasey Ford's lawyer has announced that Ms. Ford will not testify until the FBI completes yet another investigation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh that everyone knows will never happen.

It was already highly unlikely she was ever going to testify; this is a convenient excuse, a stalling game. But it is more than the usual cheap political stunt.  It's vicious, ugly, and more than slightly sadistic. In regards to Judge Kavanaugh, Democrats are channeling Comrade Beria's famous dictum: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."

But in the grand tradition of Stalin and Beria, it is our FBI that leads the pack, and the man whose crime they wished to "show" is President Trump.

Unfortunately for the FBI, the tables have turned and the crime stoppers are about to be unmasked as the criminals.