Read it.

Because no chain of causality is too obscure to be used to support repressive legislation by Nanny Staters.

If you want to read the grandaddy of all causality stories, read Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co.

(This sort of shit is why I never practiced law. It’s too much like throwing darts over your shoulder at a dartboard.)

Read it.

Science-deniers are alive in well — in the ‘scientific’ community.

Eric Turkheimer seems to think that the possibility of racial IQ differences is refuted by an “ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair”. That’s an odd argument. Does it work with Downs and Fragile X? I doubt if he has ever used it for any other issue. Should I use it to deny the possibility of a nuclear chain reaction, or smallpox epidemics, or asteroid strikes? If he thought that there just weren’t any such differences, he wouldn’t need special new ‘logical’ principles to prevent them from existing – would he?

Philip Kitcher advocates raising the bar for evidence supporting theories he doesn’t like. I’ve talked about this [The Veeck effect]. Why do you think he makes this argument? If populations really were effectively the same in IQ, there would be lots of easily observable evidence for it. No way to prove exact equality, but it wouldn’t be hard to show that group A and B were close. But nobody does, because nobody can. If this were true, it would show up in a genetic admixture study: so nobody will do one.

Read it.

n 2014, the Obama administration promulgated a “guidance” to America’s public schools that threatened federal investigations and litigation against schools where black students are disciplined (e.g., by suspension) more often, on a pro rata basis, than white students, on the ground that such numerical discrepancy is evidence of discrimination.

After all, Everybody Knows that black students misbehave exactly in proportion to their percentage of the student population. In fact, that gives us a way to fix discipline problems in public schools. If black students are 60% of the student population and ipso facto commit 60% of infractions, then the obvious remedy is to increase the proportion of white students. (As we’ve known since Brown v. Board of Education, adding white students to black schools immediately makes black schools better! It’s magic. Don’t go saying the opposite, though, you racist.) But where are all these magical white students to be found? I guess we’d better bus them in from Idaho or something — long bus trip to Harlem, but it’s a small price to pay for black equality.)

Many schools responded by adopting discipline quotas, which meant in practice that after a certain number of students of a particular race had been suspended, teachers and administrators were helpless to enforce any kind of discipline in classrooms.

Saw that coming.

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Makes you wonder what they’re ‘proteasting’ — the fact that Farrakhan is the most notorious anti-Semite outside of Hamas or Hezbollah?

Cruel, and Usual Punishment: Bill Maher ‘Cruelly Mocks’ Donald Trump Jr.’s Divorce Like being called ugly by a frog.

Kurt Eichenwald Has Bizarre Meltdown, Calls Trump ‘A Criminal And Former Drug Addict’  I guess he couldn’t spell ‘poopyhead’.

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Can Global Warming be far behind?

Every time you see a bunch of Chicken Littles running around yelling the world is doomed, women and minorities hardest hit, etc., etc., remember that every single one of such disaster predictions has fizzled out. Every. Single. One.

Read it.

The Crust takes care of their own.

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I especially have my eyes on Cræft: An Inquiry into the Origins and True Meaning of Traditional Crafts.

Doug Kimball thinks it may be a Bad Thing.

From the employee’s perspective, this is not a positive trend. Mobility within an outsourced position is limited. You are hired to work in a specific company at a specific job, often reporting up to an employee of the company who has no authority or inclination to help your job trajectory. Outsourced staff are transformed into hyper-specialized clerks and workers and stuck in those positions with little leverage. There is no longer advancement or mobility as you are not an employee. It is not the traditional American “up or out” system. It has been replaced with the “do or done” system.

The old American idea of advancement from the mailroom to a window office is becoming impossible. Ambitious people now must migrate to rise as opportunities within companies have been eroded substantially by outsourcing trends. That’s probably ok as the half-life of corporations these days, where mergers, acquisitions, downsizings, reorganizations, consolidations, divestitures, and old-fashioned bankruptcies are as common as the holiday sale, is measured in dog years.

Since this is St Paddy’s day, I’ll quote a proverb much beloved by my Grandma Brennan: ‘God never closes a door but he opens a window.’ This trend may be bad news for ‘traditional’ employees, but it provides multiple opportunities for entrepreneurs to start up their own outsourcing services. It is quite common in tech fields for employees to think “These guys have their heads up their asses. It’s all corporate politics. I can do it for them and save them money.” And off they go. For a company to be working in an area and not appreciate what’s going on is legendary; think of Xerox PARC. Sure, it doesn’t provide an opportunity for employees who’d rather remain employees than go into business for  themselves (Me! Me!) but they can Go Along With their colleagues who are striking out. This has the potential to bring the Startup Disruption Mindset to more areas than just tech. Let’s see how it works out.

MSNBC Republicans Suffer Mind-Numbing Trump Meltdowns Over Porn, Russia, Trade  ‘MSNBC Republicans’? There’s an oxymoron for you.

PBS’s David Brooks Rips Larry Kudlow, John Bolton as the Republican D-List of Aides  Now we know what the official RINO take on it is. Can John McCain be far behind?

Juan Williams Plays ‘But Trump!’ Three Times in Excusing CBC Dems’ Embrace of Farrakhan

Donald Trump branded a ‘disgraced demagogue’ by former CIA director John Brennan over sacking of Andrew McCabe  Too bad they can’t fire Brennan as well.

Douglas Brinkley Goes Full Drama Queen Over McCabe Firing  If the Crust are not secure in their emoluments in spite of misconduct, who then is safe? (UPDATE: ‘Deep State’ Alumni Rally Around McCabe) Of course they do.

Facebook Is Suspending Data Analytics Firm Used By Trump Campaign For Allegedly Harvesting Millions Of Facebook Users’ Data  They can’t do that to our pledges customers! Only WE can do that to our pledges customers!

Over Trump, We’re as Divided as Ever  Peggy Noonan does her NeverTrump song & dance, and demonstrates the truth of Scott Adams’ trope Two Movies on One Screen.

Statistical Model Suggests Stormy Daniels Payoff Came from Trump Campaign  Is it more accurate than the junk science they use to hysteriate Global Warming? We’ll see.

Biden Knocks Trump — He ‘Dumbs Down’ American Values  That’s so people as dumb as Biden can understand them.

Read it.

Every now and then The Atlantic does some honest real journalism. This looks to be an example of that.

Setting the stage: The author is looking to hire someone, preferably a ‘refugee’, to clean house.

The other trait distinguishing these résumés was that nearly every one contained what I, as someone whose job often involves listening skeptically to people’s stories, would call irregularities, little details that seemed odd, that begged for explanation. An Afghan with no formal education claimed to know a language not spoken in any country she had visited; an African doctor whose CV could have gotten him a job with the World Health Organization in a week was working a cash register in Bridgeport. Two refugees claimed to be from, respectively, Zambia and Tanzania, countries without war or persecution that could justify asylum. (The refugees had almost certainly claimed different nationalities in their application for asylum.) Another said she was from the Democratic Republic of the Congo—a major generator of refugees—but spoke languages that suggested origin in the now relatively safe country of Rwanda. It was as if the center had sent me a dozen jigsaw puzzles, all with either missing pieces or extra ones.

All of the refugees were qualified to clean my house. (The doctor was overqualified, and I wondered whether I should be cleaning his.) But detail after detail hoisted my eyebrows. An asylum officer had heard each story—or some variant of it—and judged the claimant credible enough to welcome him into the United States. For my part, it was hard not to conclude that most of the stories were shot through with lies.

All parts of our immigration system are broken. One of the reason why people come to the U.S. illegally is that it’s like pushing a rope through an obstacle course of soda can pull tabs to get in legally. This situation is an illustrative example. Granted that government employees aren’t the sharpest knives in the drawer, this is TSA-level incompetence.

Remember this the next time somebody want to put the government in charge of your health care.

Read it.

Well, for one thing, the ‘art of squatting’ isn’t ‘forgotten’ — the people who squat still remember it, and most of the people who allegedly ‘forgot’ it never did. Kids of Western heritage, when allowed to sit on the floor, don’t ‘squat’ but rather sit and cross their legs.

Sentences that start with the phrase “A guru once told me…” are, more often than not, eye-roll-inducing. But recently, while resting in malasana, or a deep squat, in an East London yoga class, I was struck by the second half of the instructor’s sentence: “A guru once told me that the problem with the West is they don’t squat.”

Paragraphs that focus on what a ‘guru’ said are, more often than not, eye-roll-inducing, unless one is dealing with Yuppie Hipster SWPLs who have been firmly conditioned that West Is Bad But East Is Good.

I tend to quit reading articles that start out with that particular ideological squint, so this is where I stopped. If you have more patience than I do, read the article and tell me whether there is anything of value in it (beyond the obligatory KumBaYa).

Troparion for St Patrick’s Day:

Holy Bishop Patrick, / Faithful shepherd of Christ’s royal flock, / You filled Ireland with the radiance of the Gospel: / The mighty strength of the Trinity! / Now that you stand before the Savior, / Pray that He may preserve us in faith and love!

Kontakion for St Patrick’s Day:

From slavery you escaped to freedom in Christ’s service: / He sent you to deliver Ireland from the devil’s bondage. / You planted the Word of the Gospel in pagan hearts. / In your journeys and hardships you rivaled the Apostle Paul! / Having received the reward for your labors in heaven, / Never cease to pray for the flock you have gathered on earth, / Holy bishop Patrick!

Read it.

Because we haven’t practiced it from childhood. Ask me a hard one.

If you had to squat to poop every day, you could do it, too. I’d rather have a chair and a toilet.

Read it.

No discussion of the fact that he told the truth — Gonzalez is a skinhead lesbian. She would undoubtedly have embraced that characterization under circumstances.

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free … and unelectable.

Steven Hayward takes pictures of the train wreck.

I’ve been predicting, most recently in a lecture last month at Arizona State University that I’ll post up as a podcast at some point soon, that universities would soon begin to divide into two entities—the STEM fields and related practical subjects (i.e., business and economics), and the social sciences and humanities, which would start to shrivel under the weight of the degradations the left has inflicted over the last 40 years. The number of students majoring in the humanities has declined by two-thirds since around 1980.

Read it.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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This is what ‘invade the world/invite the world’ gets you.

Hundreds of children, some as young as 11, are estimated to have been drugged, beaten and raped over a 40-year period in the town of Telford.

Lucy Allan, the Conservative MP for Telford, has called for an inquiry into child sexual exploitation, saying the latest reports were “extremely serious and shocking”. She has previously called for a “Rotherham-style inquiry” into the allegations.

Did you hear that? Shocking!

Read it. 

On March 10, “authorities say,” a 22 year-old man in South Carolina killed “his grandparents, an aunt and a cousin.” It appears that only the Associated Press has given attention to this story. By contrast, recent “mass killings” involving fewer victims received widespread national coverage. Why is that? The answer appears to be that the South Carolina attacker didn’t use a gun.

Plus the alleged perpetrator was a Person of Color. So additional reasons for it not to be reported are (a) that’s as common as dirt, Not News, and (b) that completely contradicts the narrative that Every Bad Thing Is A White Person’s Fault, so not reportable.

Read it.

My question is, what if David Hogg weren’t the bitch of the Democrat party? He’s already got the Democrat appratchik Bitter Beer Face down pat.

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Doubtful. They aren’t a Fashionable Victim Group and so have no weight.

Asians aren’t seen as a “real” minority—nobody has them in mind when they speak of minorities, and thus the hiring of many Asians does not count for those in pursuit of “diversity.” This exclusion has been formalized into the bureaucratic euphemism “underrepresented minority,” which means “minorities who are not Asian.”

For purposes of racial shaming, Asians are apparently Honorary White People. (From Yellow Peril to Yellow Privilege in a generation — there’s American exceptionalism for you.

There has always been something faintly ludicrous about the “Asian-American” identity. A survey conducted in 2012 by the Pew Research Institute of the attitudes of the six largest (Indian, Filipino, Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean) of the more than 30 distinct nationalities collected under the umbrella of the “Asian-American” identity found that fewer than 15 percent of respondents considered themselves to be “Asian-Americans.” All races are, to varying degrees, artificial constructs. The “Asian-American” identity is an artificial construct that scarcely anyone claims.

Scorecards! Getcher scorecards here! You can’t tell the victims without a scorecard!

The survey drew indignant responses from Asian-American activists and civil-rights leaders, who objected to the portrayal of their community as prosperous, striving, and confident. This will only seem comic and perplexing to those who don’t understand the system of racial patronage premised on a narrative of victimization of which the “Asian-American” political project is a part.

Read it.

If, as proglodytes proclaim, ‘there is no such thing as race’, then these numbers are hard to explain.

If, however, as race realists proclaim, races are inbred extended family groups, then the explanation is perfectly straightforward.

Jim Acosta Gets Fake News’d Into Another Dimension By Trump-Supporting Internet Troll, Baked Alaska

Chris Cuomo: Trump Is Comfortable With ‘Truth Abuse’  But not as comfortable with it as Chris Cuomo.

Steyer’s Impeach Trump Campaign Scrounges For Support On Long Road Trip  I like his shirt. He is, indeed, a dreamer.

‘Morning Joe’ Praying For Stormy Daniels To Blow Trump Out Of The White House  Even if it were true, nobody would care.

CNN Asks Senator: Will You Warn Dems Not to be ‘Obsessed’ With Trump?  Doubtful.

‘View’ Touts Porn Star Suing Trump as Feminist Hero: ‘Refuses to Be Shut Up, Refuses to Be Silent!’  Refuses to pass up an attempt to cash in on TDS and her fifteen minutes of fame.

‘America’s Conscience’: Kimmel Hopes for Trump Sex Tape, Promotes Stormy Daniels’ Legal Fund  Kimmel has apparently rented an apartment in the gutter, and plans to live there for a bit.

‘Fact Checkers’ at PolitiFact, Snopes Weirdly Defend Hillary’s Trump-Voter Rant in India

CNN Stormy Daniels Debate Goes Off The Rails  Where were these people when Clinton was President?

Read it.

I would imagine so.

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Hey, how about that great government-provided health care! Don’t you wish we had a system like that in America?

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Not something you read about every day.

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1) The attacker was on FBI radar

2) His weapon of choice was a knife

3) You should know that knives have killed many more people than rifles

4) You did not see this all over the mainstream media because the anti-gun narrative didn’t exist.

Read it.

Not as offended as we Christians are that the Left dislikes Christianity and refuses to admit it.

Read it.

“There are all sorts of benign words in our language that sound like words unfit for polite company,” writes Jon Keller at CBS Boston, offering Uranus and clap as further examples. “And they offer us an opportunity to teach snickering kids about Civil War history or outer space—and about showing respect for others while avoiding making fools of ourselves.”

State Rep. Michelle DuBois (D-Plymouth) disagrees. She has been calling for the removal of a statehouse sign that reads “General Hooker Entrance” (so inscribed because it stands opposite a statue of General Hooker), which she described as an affront to “women’s dignity.”

“Female staffers don’t use that entrance because the sign is offensive to them,” DuBois told WBZ-TV this week.

Then they are as stupid as you are. That sends a really positive message about women in the workplace.

Read it.

Chicago is turning into the behavioral sink of North America.

Well, that’s what decades of rule by Democrats will get you. Detroit is not far behind.

UPDATE: Video here.

Mountie: A Note on the Itamar Massacre to a Future Historian

Muslim Murdered in Houston, and Guess Why Media Are Ignoring This Crime?

US Green Berets Killed 11 ISIS Militants During An Undisclosed Firefight In Niger

Palm Beach Jihad: Teen Converts to Islam, Stabs Three People — Media Ignore It!

Islamist Groups Protest Counter-Extremism Programs — To No Surprise

Police Chief: A Boy’s 13th Birthday Turned Into A Bloody Nightmare Over Teen’s Muslim Faith

Volkswagen Not Allowed to Fire ISIS Mujahid

Charges in Minnesota mosque bombing

Texas Man Gets 45 Years For Plotting Vehicle Bombing Of US Base In Afghanistan

Culture-Enriching Murders in Hallonbergen

WaPo Editors: Erdogan Turning Turkey Into ‘Totalitarian Prison’  Islam is like socialism: Sooner or later it turns your country into a shithole.

Explosion goes off near Palestinian Prime Minister’s convoy on rare Gaza visit  I’m sure his first question was “Is that one of ours or one of theirs?”

Turkish Coffee Shop Designed To Feel Like A Prison [VIDEO]

Why won’t western feminists support the woman arrested for taking off her hijab in Iran? It doesn’t make you Islamophobic  Oh, but to ‘western feminists’, it certainly does.

Syria war: Jaish al-Islam to evacuate number of Eastern Ghouta fighters

Israeli troops kill Palestinian in West Bank clashes

The Neo-Ottoman Empire Stirs in the Eastern Mediterranean

CNN Panel Slams Trump Rally: He ‘Flirts with Autocrats’  That’s his job. Obama flirted with racists (not his job).

Another Rotherham? Up To 1,000 Girls Sexually Abused By South Asian Men In Latest UK ‘Grooming’ Scandal  ‘South Asian Men’ is newspeak for Muslims from Pakistan and points East.

Syria’s war of ethnic cleansing: Kurds threatened with beheading by Turkey’s allies if they don’t convert to extremism

Read it.

They’re all about Safe Spaces, see….

Read it.

Don’t say we never have any good news here.

Have Tillerson track him down and waste him in a rogue CIA operation. It’s too good an opportunity to waste.

UPDATE: Matt Damon Denies He’s Leaving The Country Because Of Donald Trump  Well, shucks.

Read it.

I am totally comfortable with him doing that. In fact, if he has any kids, do them too. We don’t need those defective genes in our gene pool.

Civility, Everyone: MSNBC’s Wallace Blasts Trump as ‘Bleep-Hole’ for Wanting to Fire McCabe

Read it.

It’s called a ‘horse’. (Naw, just kidding….)

• Major scientific breakthrough research has discovered new materials offering an alternative to battery power and proven to be between 1,000-10,000 times more powerful than the existing battery alternative – a supercapacitor
• The new technology is believed to have the potential for electric cars to travel to similar distances as petrol cars without the need to stop for lengthy re-charging breaks of between 6-8 hours, and instead re-charge fully in the time it takes to fill a regular car with petrol.
• The scientific findings made by Augmented Optics Ltd and its wholly owned subsidiary Supercapacitor Materials Ltd with the University of Surrey and University of Bristol have produced a safer, faster charging, more efficient and greener alternative to battery power and supercapacitor abilities as we currently know them.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

This was a real eye-opener for me, although I’m sure most women are familiar with it.

If momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy.

Read it.

Yeah, I know, paywall — but just the parts you can see are important.

Konrad Poplawski, a 22-year old Navy hospital corpsman, is about to be deployed as a battlefield medic with the 2nd Marine Division, which has served in deadly battlegrounds in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But first, he is making a pit stop at Cook County’s Stroger Hospital, which the Navy says is among few places here in the U.S. that provide experience treating the types of wounds he will inevitably see on the battlefield.

We have a city whose hospitals are effectively treating ‘combat’ wounds — and what do you see in The Press? Nada.

Baron Bodissey asks a good question.

I’ve taken a lot of flak over the past couple of days for referring to the current government of the UK as “totalitarian”. And with good reason — it’s not the right word to describe the repressive regime which is now in place in Britain. The task of suppressing free speech and independent opinion is not the government’s alone, but is also subcontracted to supposedly independent institutions of civil society, the media (especially social media) and the academy. It’s a full-court press across the whole of British culture, but without any obvious co-ordination by a centralized hierarchy headed by a strongman in the style of Stalin, Hitler, or Mao.

No, it’s a different system, and the word “totalitarian” does not do it justice. The word is too old-fashioned: It conjures up images of jackboots and concentration camps and firing squads, which are not necessary (so far) to accomplish the state’s purposes.

Sweden and Germany are much the same, and other Western European countries — France, Belgium, and the Netherlands — are almost as bad. All are using the same types of non-totalitarian methods to enforce an efficient, technologically advanced regimen of thought control. The current government of the UK is far more successful in its brainwashing of the populace than the Soviets or the Nazis could ever have dreamed of.

I think ‘totalitarian’ is accurate. It speaks more to the result than the cause.

Read it.

Compared with peer nations, the United States sends people to the hospital less often, it has a smaller share of specialist physicians, and it gives people about the same number of hospitalizations and doctors’ visits, according to a new study. The quality of health care looks pretty good, it finds, while its spending on social services outside of health care, like housing and education, looked fairly typical.

If you’ve been listening to many of the common narratives that seek to explain the high costs of America’s health system and the nation’s relatively low life expectancy, those results might surprise you. Analysts are fond of describing the system as wasteful, with too many patients getting too many services, driven by too many specialist doctors and too few social supports.

But a large and comprehensive review in The Journal of the American Medical Association punctures a lot of those pat explanations. The paper, conducted by a research team led by Ashish Jha, compiled detailed data from the health care systems of the United States and 10 other rich developed nations, and tried to test those hypotheses. The group included nations with single-payer health care systems, like Britain and Canada, and countries with competitive private insurance markets, like Switzerland and the Netherlands.

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Thank you, minimum wage.

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And then, by God, we will have our revenge!

Stephen Hawking said popularity of ‘demagogue’ Trump was beyond even his understanding  I guess he wasn’t so smart after all. Actually, it demonstrates that however smart you may be in Area X, it doesn’t necessarily carry over into Areas Y and Z. As my old Dungeon Master used to say, ‘Intelligence and Wisdom are two separate rolls’.

EU council president calls out Donald Trump’s ‘transatlantic bickering’ in face of Russia tension  ‘Calling out’ is just Crustian for ‘talking a lot but doing nothing’. It’s virtue-signalling for blowhards.

Mika Brzezinski Breaks Down Over Trump’s Visit to Mexican Border  Apparently she can’t handle the truth.

CNN’s Mudd: ‘I Wouldn’t Stoop to Wipe My Ass’ With House Intel Report  That’s why you’re the network of Fake News.

Robert De Niro’s Latest Attack On Trump Takes Tone-Deaf To A New Level

CNN Snobs Dismiss Economist Kudlow as Mere ‘TV Personality’ for Trump’s ‘Feedback Loop’  You could add up all the IQs of the people working for CNN and still not reach Larry Kudlow.

There is ‘significant evidence’ of Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia, top Democrat says  They just can’t seem to find it. It was here just yesterday….

Read it.

Best of all, you don’t have to smell it.

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It’s hard to be certain, but I propose a few reasons. First, the political left needs to recruit more people to support their agenda; the black population had a history of deep oppression, the left leadership knew it, and capitalized on that history. But they also needed to convince the citizen population that portraying the country’s blacks as victims who need to be helped by the left is an admirable pursuit. Today, the leadership plays on the emotions of the population, calling for sympathetic action toward blacks. It suggests that accomplished, compassionate people should feel guilty for their own success and feel they owe it to others who are not so successful to “do something.” The leadership convinces them that feeling guilt is the same as doing something, that they can show their generosity by shaking their heads sadly at the very people whom they have hobbled, instead of simply freeing them from their contrived restraints. They choose to feel bad for folks who have less than they do and treat them as if they are less.

By creating an underclass and “trying to help them,” the left can feel much better about themselves: they are the benefactors, the heroes for those who are suffering. It never occurs to the person on the left that he or she is perpetuating the illusion of the underclass, and in fact works to reinforce it.

Another reason to maintain an underclass arises from the arrogance of the left: they have the solution for those who suffer from the illusion the Left has created. Only their solutions can work; they assume that black Americans cannot find their way forward with their own determination and hard work. And the left is ready to help them. But their “help” further cripples their recipients and erodes their faith in themselves.

Read it.

Rex Tillerson always looked like a total insider appratchik, the Deep State guy in Homeland Security who gets notified that Jason Bourne has been spotted in Prague.