• The Ignorance of George P. Shultz  By Richard C. Young
• YETI Coolers: Invest in Your Life  By E.J. Smith
• “The Usefulness of Useless Information”  By Debbie Young
• Hillary Clinton’s Building Blocks of Tyranny  By Richard C. Young
• Prepping for Your Survival  By E.J. Smith
• Remembering Ric Ocasek and The Cars  By Richard C. Young
• Hillary’s Sordid Activities  By Debbie Young
• Pray For All-Out Shia-Sunni War  By Richard C. Young
• Why Does Washington Agree on Foreign Policy?  By Justin Logan

Below is an excerpt from George P. Shultz’s book, Learning from Experience, due this fall from Hoover Institution Press.

They will be more effective if they are mostly Arab boots. The challenge is to develop a force in the region that, in coordination with us, can be impactful. An unusual potential coalition is possible: Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, and Israel, plus Iraqi Kurds and others with help from traditional European allies”

I asked my Cato-centric friend Jon Basil Utley, publisher of  The American Conservative , for his analysis of the comments above regarding a joint Arab, American, traditional European ally force.

There is no such force and never will be!   Fact is Saudi and UAE don’t trust their own people with weapons –Saudis even prefer to hire South American mercenaries to fight for them in Yemen.  Saudi kings most fear their own army and instead depend upon a smaller National Guard with tribal loyalty to the king to keep their own people down.

Egypt’s army is infiltrated with Islamists and fully, fully occupied in escalating fighting with them inside Egypt.  And the Kurds, they’re not fighting for America, rather their interest is in expanding territory for a new homeland.

Common Arab soldiers would just see a mission as joining the “imperialists” (Americans in Iraq and Syria) to attack another Muslim nation— Americans are seen as doing the dirty work for Arab dictators to keep them in power.  “Traditional European allies” means France and England.  Other Europeans opposed intervention and won’t send their troops to kill Arabs—they fear it would create more terrorists.  Israel is of course the enemy of all of them—Schulz imagines that America will invite Israelis into Syria to occupy and kill Arabs?

Schulz thinking shows the willful ignorance of so many interventionists and neoconservatives.  We constantly hear this reasoning to justify America’s endless wars in the Muslim world.

Best,

Jon Utley

Purdue Presidential Lecture Series: George Shultz

We use our Yeti cooler for our summer boating trips. This article in the WSJ on how they’re being stolen reminded me of this cool video on their website.

If you’re interested in boating, read my series, How to Buy a Boat (Parts I, II, III, IV, V, and VI).

John Clarke writes in The Wall Street Journal:

Yeti coolers have cult status among outdoors enthusiasts who swap stories and videos online about their Yetis. Some fans call the Yeti the “Redneck Rolex.”

They are also big with burglars this year, who are swiping Yeti coolers from stores, cars, boats and beaches nationwide.

Mobile police have five suspects and offer a cash reward for their capture.

Two Yeti bandits in Cadiz, Ky., met their victims one August night in a Main Street eatery, where they all talked amiably about vaping contests over double cheeseburgers. The thieves tracked the men back to a lodge, said Trigg County Sheriff’s Deputy David Tomlinson, and filched Yetis from pickups and boats.

“Kentucky people are pretty trusting,” said Deputy Tomlinson, who arrested them after a tipster overheard them at a restaurant talking about selling the coolers on the street. He said they stole nine coolers valued at $2,500.

How best prepare your children and grandchildren for the unforeseen future? Teach them to think intensively and imaginatively, advised Abraham Flexner, the legendary 20^th Century American educator, who played a prominent role in reforming medical and higher education in America and Canada. According to Flexner, “really great discoveries” have “been made by men and women who were driven not by the desire to be useful but merely the desire to satisfy their curiosity.”

In Notable & Quotable, the WSJ quotes from Scott L. Newstock’s article “How to Think Like Shakespeare.” (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Calligraphy More Important Than Engineering?

When he (Shakespeare) was born, there wasn’t yet a professional theater in London. In other words, his education had prepared him for a job that didn’t even exist. You should be encouraged to learn that this has been true for every generation: Four of today’s largest companies did not exist when I was born, 43 years ago. One of them, Apple, was co-founded by someone who said that the most important topic he ever studied was not engineering but calligraphy.

As with rhetoric, imitation, and inventory, you might not think very highly of apprenticeship these days. But it was crucial for skilled labor in Renaissance Europe. It required an exacting, collaborative environment, with guidance from people who knew more than you did. When Shakespeare arrived on the London theater scene, he entered a kind of artistic studio, or workshop, or laboratory, in which he was apprenticing himself to experienced playwrights. Note that playwright is not spelled w-r-i-t-e; it’s spelled w-r-i-g-h-t: a maker—like a wheelwright, who crafts wheels, or a shipwright, who crafts ships. A playwright crafts plays.

“Who Says Rhyme Doesn’t Pay?”

After collaborating with other dramatists, Shakespeare soon graduated to crafting his own plays, yet still collaborating with the members of his company, in which he owned a share. That is, he received revenue from every ticket purchased. As Bart Van Es has shown, Shakespeare wrote with specific actors in mind, making the most of the talents of his team, with an eye toward long-term continuity. And profit! At the age of 33, he could already afford to buy the second-biggest house in prosperous Stratford. He soon acquired another home, purchased more than 100 acres of land, and retired before the age of 50. Who says rhyme doesn’t pay?

William Shakespeare: Legendary Wordsmith – Fast Facts | History

There is no rational case for the election of Hillary Clinton. The majority of Americans believe Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy, that she has lied regarding the Benghazi debacle, the Clinton Foundation and her “off campus” server, just to scrape the tip of the iceberg. Hillary Clinton’s relationship with Huma Abedin is an increasing embarrassment for American voters, certainly as far as Abedin’s apparent close association with various questionable Muslim interests is concerned.

• Hillary Clinton’s posted economic program has clear Marxist leanings that will result in much greater central government spending and a bigger tax bill for America’s small business owners. You know, those who create most of the new jobs in America.

• A Hillary Clinton presidency would bring with it a neocon based hawkish foreign policy that is certain to drag America further and further into the radical Muslim based Middle East quagmire. A quagmire America should instead be extraditing itself from.

• Finally, and most concerning of all for American families, a Hillary Clinton presidency will unquestionably lead to one or more anti-2^nd Amendment Supreme Court nominations. The result will be the end of the 2^nd Amendment as we have known it since the founding of America.

Below is former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer’s even more depressing take on a potential Clinton presidency:

With all of the republic’s most dangerous enemies gathered under the leadership of the Clintons, the race has become a kind of life-and-death match. A Trump win would see him and Governor Pence initiate America’s long road back to prosperity, nationalism, commonsense, social cohesiveness, and a war-avoiding foreign policy. A Clinton win, on the other hand, would force the issue of how dissenting Americans will choose to dispose, with some finality, of what surely will be Hillary’s continuing implementation of tyranny. The building blocks for more tyranny would be Clinton’s naming of Supreme Court justices to codify more legal preference for her party’s various slave colonies; her starting and losing of more unnecessary and bankrupting interventionist wars; her maintenance of  a coddled, bribed, and controlled media; her imposition of punitive taxes on working Americans and their employers to support foreigners, migrants, illegal aliens, the Democrats’ slave colonies, as well as to eliminate middle-class jobs via trade deals and the fabricated climate-change crisis; and her party’s final destruction of the Constitution, the idea of equality before the law, the middle class, the primacy of the English language, American history, and the Christianity that always has been and still is a key part of the republic’s social fabric.

Hillary Clinton lying for 13 minutes straight

I found this article to be right on the money about the mindset of self-reliance. It’s liberating when you start thinking about how you can help yourself rather than wait for someone else to take care of you. Here it is from the Washington Post:

Here’s Blue Tip from Move Like This.

In April 2015, the Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy agency, took control of the uranium mining firm Uranium One (including major uranium mines in the U.S.)—with approval of the Hillary Clinton State Department.  The Manhattan Contrarian, Francis Menton writes that according to the New York Times, “the deal had been ‘orchestrated’ by Canadian mining financier and Bill Clinton buddy Frank Giustra. Giustra had contributed $31.3 million to the Clinton Foundation. The Chairman of Uranium One (Ian Telfer) contributed $2.35 million.  And then there was the $500,000 ‘speech’ fee to Bill personally.”

Mr. Menton lists other examples that highlight the “levels of payments, pervasiveness, and brazenness,” although none as blatant as “the Russian uranium deal, where a major transaction actually occurred to the significant benefit of Hillary’s donors.”

• From ABC News: Chicago securities trader Rajiv Fernando donated to the Clinton Foundation “between $100,000 and $250,000. “ With no relevant experience, Mr. Fernando was appointed to the government’s International Security Advisory Board.

• From the Daily Caller: The Crown Prince of Bahrain donated $32 million to the Clinton Foundation and promptly got the meeting he wished for with Hillary.

• From the Washing Examiner: Judith Rodin of the Rockefeller Foundation donated $25 million to the Clinton Foundation. Doug Band of the Clinton Foundation contacted Huma Abedin of Hillary’s State Department, and Ms. Rodin found herself sitting where she wanted—next to Joe Biden (God knows why, though).

Hillary’s economic plan to improve the economy is one government-spending program after another, Mr. Menton points out. “Who do you think is going to get those multi-tens-of-billions-of-dollar government contracts for uneconomic ‘green energy’ and ‘infrastructure’ projects?  Do you think that contributions to the Clinton Foundation, or for that matter, to the Clinton campaign, might give anyone a leg up?”

More Clinton Foundation controversy

Former CIA bin Laden unit desk chief Michael Scheuer offers for Americans the following menu:

Trump’s rise in the polls brings a smile, but the willingness of prominent Americans to advocate the election of a felon, to behave disloyally in favor of a foreign country, and to seek to involve America in endless war is deeply disturbing.

That said, the utter fecklessness of continuing U.S.-led military interventionism — always championed by those grandees who oppose Trump — and the chaos it has created in the region may yet save the republic by facilitating an all-out Shia-vs-Sunni war. I, for one, will pray for that happy event, as well as for Black Americans deciding at long last to try and unshackle themselves from the chains clutched by Democratic overseers, men and women who have given them, and all-Americans, only slavery, secession, civil war, segregation, and poverty-producing socialism.

On taxes, or abortion, or immigration, or the Second Amendment, or environmental degradation, or any of a hundred other high-voltage issues, Republicans and Democrats in Washington seem capable of disagreeing thoroughly and broadly, or even comprehensively. At times it seems like there is no detail too small to argue about.

It’s not that way on foreign policy. Sure, there are heated partisan debates about Benghazi, or Hillary Clinton’s use of email, or whether Donald Trump is lying in saying he opposed the Iraq War. But there is little debate on the substance of foreign policy itself. Even on smaller issues like the regime change war in Libya, there is little contentious debate.

And this says nothing about the broader questions of grand strategy: What countries should the United States be willing to go to war over? What sort of problems do nuclear proliferation, terrorism, or China’s military modernization pose? Should the United States pull in its horns, cut the defense budget, and start far fewer wars, or should it tear up the Iran deal, bomb Syria, and dramatically expand military spending?

On these questions, the foreign policy departments of Brookings and AEI–or really every think tank except for Cato–find little to disagree on. Isn’t that strange? Why would it be the case?

Those are the questions Ben Friedman and I take up in a paper to be published in an issue of Strategic Studies Quarterly later this year. The short version is as follows:

After demonstrating the lack of debate about grand strategy in Washington, we argue that the consensus strategy, primacy, serves the interests of U.S. political leaders, meaning there is little demand for arguments questioning it. Aspiring foreign policy hands would be poorly served professionally if they specialized in a product that their buyers–policymakers–did not want. Accordingly, think tankers and other members of the foreign policy community adopt what we call an “operational mindset”: scholars specialize in relative minutiae, giving support and the veneer of scholarly credibility to whatever foreign policy ideas the policymaker may have, without questioning the objectives themselves.

Rather than a “marketplace of ideas” in which policymakers peruse various policy shops for ideas, the role of the ideas people is mostly to lend scholarly credibility to, and possibly help implement, policymakers’ existing preferences. And policymakers’ existing preferences almost always equate to primacy, partly resulting from the normal bias toward activism among politicians, partly from ignorance, partly from social and other pressures, and partly from the fact that their own incentives point to an expansive grand strategy. In short, there are few restraints and many inducements facing policymakers when it comes to foreign policy.

If this is correct, consider then the incentives facing the think tanker, or the pundit, or the aspiring columnist or bureaucrat. There is little preexisting constituency for restraint in Washington, but many interests it would harm. This means it’s costly even to start asking hard questions of primacy. In the public, primacy is less popular and restraint is more popular, but the crucial variable among the public is salience. Foreign policy concerns rarely determine the outcomes of elections and as a consequence, public opinion presents no powerful obstacle to primacy and no great incentive to support restraint.

It’s for this reason that the foreign policy community adopts an operational mindset, proposing different ways to take a hill without questioning whether it’s the right hill in the first place, or, more realistically, better ways to occupy Iraq/expand NATO/coddle our friends without questioning whether they are good ideas in the first place. True debates about strategy are very rare in Washington.

What restraint-minded scholars need to work toward is a day where some shock causes policymakers to go looking for other ideas on grand strategy. As they look at their bookshelves, the better the arguments for restraint are formed, hopefully the more likely it is they will be adopted.