MY USA TODAY COLUMN: After Turkey, An American Coup?
Archive for 2016
July 18, 2016
TAXPROF ROUNDUP: the IRS Scandal, Day 1166.
MICHAEL LEDEEN ON NICE, BATON ROUGE, MILWAUKEE: They Win, We Lose.
As I have been saying for quite a while, the terrorists are in a hurry. They know that their free run at their enemies will not last much longer, and so they are eager to grab whatever they can as fast as they can. They expect things will get tougher when the next president takes over in January. For the moment they expect the Obama administration to make nice to Iran and Russia, Cuba and China, and the other members of the global alliance arrayed against us.
Ergo Nice. And Baton Rouge. And Milwaukee.
Read the whole thing. Michael’s new book, co-authored with Lt. General (Ret.) Michael T. Flynn is The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies.
I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN THE LEFT VOWED TO STAY OUT OF YOUR BEDROOM: San Francisco’s Threat to AirBnb a Threat to the Entire Sharing Economy.
THEY CARE, BECAUSE THEY’RE DEMOCRATS: How the Clinton Foundation Got Rich off Poor Haitians.
HURRAY FOR FRACKING: When You Gas Up for Cheap This Summer, Thank Shale.
The average American is going to pay nearly 40 cents less per gallon of gasoline this summer, according to the latest data from the Energy Information Administration (EIA), and save even more at the pump come the fall. . . .
The EIA notes that gas prices are going to be slightly higher than they projected back in April, largely because oil prices have climbed roughly $10 per barrel since those projections were made. This illustrates an important (if obvious) point: cheap gasoline has come about directly as a result of cheap oil. You might be saying that that’s self-evident, as gasoline is a refined petroleum product, and you’d be right to do so—but that causal relationship is important for understanding one of the biggest ways in which the shale revolution is helping Americans, because the oil price collapse has largely been precipitated by surging U.S. oil production. Upstart shale producers nearly doubled American oil output in a few short years, and helped create a global oil glut that drove crude prices—and eventually gas prices, too—down. So we have shale to thank for cheap gas.
Still, even with price expectations slightly up, drivers are far from being fleeced with an average price of just $2.25 per gallon these next few months. And if that’s too much to bear, you can always look forward to September, when gas prices are projected to average just $2.19 per gallon. Hail shale!
Fracking means cheap energy for working people. Naturally, all the best minds are against it.
NEWS YOU CAN USE FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES: It’s O.K., Liberal Parents, You Can Freak Out About Porn.
Fair enough — but when isn’t the Margret Dumont-esque Gray Lady freaking out about something?
UNEXPECTEDLY: Venezuela’s inflation is set to top 1,600% next year.
A shortage of medical supplies means infants and other sick patients are dying of treatable illnesses. Soldiers guard empty grocery store shelves. Inflation is so bad, the government has had to order bolivars by the planeload.
As Caracas extends its declared state of economic emergency, it’s no wonder many economists say the nation will soon have to ask the IMF for a bailout. It’s gotten so bad, the government this week handed over control of food stocks to the military, ceding even more power to the armed forces.
And:
Thursday. My day of the week to buy staples. I head over to the local supermarket just after 10 a.m. Sixty people or so are waiting outside. They’ve come from all over the city, especially the poorer neighborhoods where food is scarcest, to stand in line. No one knows anything: what time the regulated goods will be put up for sale; which items, if any, will be offered; nothing. They just wait, doggedly, under the blistering Caribbean sun.
“This is the line of hope,” one woman says to me. “We are hoping they have something to sell us.” Nice. A little bit of gallows humor. I laugh. A couple hours later, though, with the line still at a standstill, I’m out of hope. I abandon my spot and walk away.
Socialism is about caring.
CLEVELAND POLICE UNION PREZ SAYS OBAMA HAS ‘BLOOD ON HIS HANDS’ AFTER BATON ROUGE.
CHINESE PIRATES: StrategyPage looks at the China-Indonesia Fishing War.
China and Indonesia are unofficially, but very visibly, at war with each other over illegal fishing. China has been stealing fish (poaching) from offshore areas where the fishing rights belong to other countries. This poaching has been going on with increasing frequency since the 1990s.
The Hague’s UNCLOS arbitration panel found that China has been waging a “fishing war” against the Philippines. I mentioned that in last week’s Creators Syndicate column.
FORMER DEMOCRATIC PARTY PRESIDENTIAL NOMINEE SENATOR GEORGE MCGOVERN AND THE USDA DAMNED BUTTER– AND THEY WERE WRONG: They decided the science was settled enough to demonize butter.
Congress, of course, is an inherently political entity. And so when it — or any other government-appointed body — privileges one theory over another, it creates bias that trickles down to the research community. The problem is not simply that the government makes decisions on the basis of imperfect information, but that government intervention, itself, can distort the development of research. For example, the theory that dietary fat plays a large role in cardiovascular disease was controversial in the scientific community, even as the government began relying on it to develop the first federal nutritional guidelines. In fact, a lot of the existing research contradicted it. Nevertheless, the theory flourished. Why? In part, no doubt, because researchers — many of whom rely on government grants — faced risks associated with bucking the new zeitgeist created by the government.
THEY TOLD ME IF TRUMP GOT THE NOMINATION, BOOKSELLERS WOULD BE SHUT DOWN FOR DISPLEASING THE AUTHORITIES. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Police Confiscate Thousands of Books from Upper West Side Street Vendors.
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QUANTUM EFFECTS IN PHOTOSYNTHESIS AND THE SENSE OF SMELL?: Photosynthesis works very well — almost too well. The process exhibits “quantum effects.” The article discusses new theories and research. “The next step will be having some quantitative results saying that the efficiency of this biological machine is this due to quantum phenomena.”
HMM: Rebel F-16s Had Erdogan’s Jet in Sights, Reuters Source Says.
The Turkish leader was returning to Istanbul from a holiday near the coastal resort of Marmaris after a faction in the military launched the coup attempt on Friday night, sealing off a bridge across the Bosphorus, trying to capture Istanbul’s main airport and sending tanks to parliament in Ankara.
“At least two F-16s harassed Erdogan’s plane while it was in the air and en route to Istanbul. They locked their radars on his plane and on two other F-16s protecting him,” a former military officer with knowledge of the events told Reuters. “Why they didn’t fire is a mystery.”
Indeed.
TIM BLAIR: STOP POINTING THE FINGER AT VICTIMS OF TERROR.
Armed police enter the house. Instead of pursuing the thieves, however, they surround you in the kitchen, where you are still bound and gagged. For some minutes they regard you in complete silence. Their arms are crossed.
Finally, an officer speaks. Leaning close in to your face, he says: “Why can’t you just be nice to people?”
Now, all of that might seem highly unlikely. In what possible world would authorities blame victims rather than culprits? Yet after every terrorist attack on Western targets, this is precisely what happens.
Read the whole thing.
SHOT: Turkey coup could threaten country’s Nato membership, John Kerry warns.
CHASER:
BREAKING: Turkey's Prime Minister says country might review its friendship with the United States
— The Int'l Spectator (@intlspectator) July 18, 2016
Moscow smiles.
TRUMP “SHOCKS” THE VOX JOCKS:
Shot: Vox’s Ezra Klein: Trump’s Speech Introducing Pence ‘Shocking’ and ‘Scary.’
—NewsBusters, yesterday.
Of course, Ezra’s definitions of shocking and scary have changed a bit over the years. Which brings us to…
Chaser:
Not everything the Nazis touched was bad. Hitler was a vegetarian. Volkswagen is a perfectly good car company. Universal health care is a perfectly good idea. Indeed, the Nazis actually did a pretty good job increasing economic growth and improving standards of living (they were, many think, the first Keynesians, adopting the strategy even before Keynes had come up with it), pushing Germany out of a depression and back into expansion. Unfortunately, they also set out to conquer Europe and exterminate the Jews. People shouldn’t do that.
—“Nazi Ideas,” Ezra Klein, The American Prospect, September 11(!) 2006.
ASHE SCHOW: False accusations should receive harsh punishments.
If someone falsely accuses another person of a crime, like child abuse or sexual assault, then the false accuser needs to be punished harshly.
Too often, false accusers are given just slaps on the wrist — and receive nowhere near the punishment someone actually guilty of the accused crime would receive. This diminishes the harm that false accusations do to the people they are lodged against, who are often branded in the media as some of the worst criminals imaginable: “child abuser” or “rapist.”
Case in point: Taylier Tibbetts accused the father of her child of abusing the boy, and even went so far as to alter photos of her son to make him appear bruised. After she made the false accusation to police, she opened a GoFundMe account to raise money for herself and her son using the false claim.
Tibbetts insisted she had told the truth as recently as May, but on Tuesday she pleaded guilty for filing a false police report. And what punishment did she receive for falsely accusing a man of beating his own child, attempting to raise funds off of her lie and maintaining the lie to the media? Not much.
Tibbetts received a suspended sentence of 30 days in jail and a $350 fine. Meanwhile the accusation of being a child abuser will hang over the head of the boy’s father for years to come, as accusations travel farther and wider than vindication.
The accused man, who I will not name here because he is the victim, said the sentence was too light but that he wants to move on with his life.
“I’d like to have at least the 30 days in jail imposed, considering she lied about something so serious,” he said.
He added: “She lied and did false things and got away with it, and I don’t think that’s right.”
Female privilege. Note that the prosecutor was a woman, too. If a male prosecutor let a male defendant off so lightly, we’d hear about it.
BENGHAZI REPORT SHOWS BEN RHODES PUSHED FALSE VIDEO NARRATIVE AFTER ATTACK: “In a moment of national shock and horror, leaders in the White House and the State Department tried to shift the blame to a silly anti-Muslim video—and then, as we all remember too well, Obama took off for a political fundraiser in Las Vegas.”
Read the whole thing.
Flashback: “The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru.”
And to place the administration and its court stenographers’ obsession with videos and media memes into context, “The MacGuffinization of American politics.”
HERE COMES THE GAS GLUT: Oil Prices Steady but Products Glut Looms.
There are signs that an increasing glut of refined products could begin to weigh on crude prices. The oversupplied products markets, especially gasoline, means refiners will pull back on crude purchases, especially as the autumn maintenance season is only two months away, the New-York-based bank Morgan Stanley said.
“The bottom line is that the gasoline market faces a nasty reckoning, as the consequences of the market’s rush to bid up summer gasoline values last winter are now becoming clear,” the London-based Energy Aspects said in a note.
In China, one of the largest consumers of oil, growing inventories of refined fuels is also jolting some investors, who expect the country’s oil demand to taper off in the coming months as domestic production of fuels, such as gasoline and diesel, outpaces demand.
Getting sub-$2 gasoline again would be nice.
THIS ISN’T THE 21st CENTURY I WAS PROMISED: The fear of raising biracial babies could lead to new era of segregation, Naomi Schaefer Riley (the mother of three mixed-race children) writes in the New York Post.
Obligatory:
