LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Riots in Georgia, Manafort Tapped and Much, Much More.
Archive for 2017
September 19, 2017
THE NEW CIVILITY: California Governor Compares Trump Supporters to Cave Dwellers.
“They’re both kind of very similar. You should check out the derivation of ‘Trump-ite’ and ‘troglodyte,’ because they both refer to people who dwell in deep, dark caves,” Brown said in remarks reported by Politico.
The California governor, speaking at an event during Climate Week NYC, said the election of Trump has made it easier to promote climate-related policies. Trump is a “real adversary that is not believable, is not credible,” according to Brown.
“President Trump is the null hypothesis, which he’s proven. Everything he’s doing is … stupid and dangerous and silly. I mean, come on, really, calling the North Korean dictator ‘Rocket Man?’ … He is accelerating the reversal through his own absurdity,” Brown said.
Brown can’t even get his pet rail line built, which is technology dating back to the early 19th Century.
SHOT: Information Warfare: Russia’s “Active Measures.”
According to researchers who conducted a post-mortem of social media activity during the election using internet analytics tools, Russian Information Warfare content on social media attempts to subvert Western democracies in five ways: undermine public confidence in democratic government, exacerbate internal political divisions, erode trust in government, push the Russian agenda in foreign populations, and create confusion and distrust by blurring fact and fiction.
CHASER: Clinton won’t rule out challenging legitimacy of 2016 election.
“I don’t know if there’s any legal constitutional way to do that. I think you can raise questions,” Clinton told NPR’s Terry Gross during an extended interview on “Fresh Air,” before pivoting to criticism of President Donald Trump’s rhetoric regarding Russian efforts to interfere in the 2016 race.
Gross quickly returned to her initial question, asking if Clinton would “completely rule out questioning the legitimacy of this election if we learn that the Russian interference in the election is even deeper than we know now?”
“No. I would not,” Clinton said.
The followup question should have been, “Why are you doing the Kremlin’s work?”
THE NARRATIVE OFTEN FAILS ONCE THE NORMALS WEIGH IN: Most Americans Agree With DeVos on Sexual Misconduct on Campuses.
BRUCE BAWER: The Sinister Way Germany’s Recollection of the Holocaust Impacts Its Approach to Muslim Immigration.
Every observer of Germany knows that its officially prescribed attitude of perpetual atonement over the Holocaust coexists with an anti-Semitism that’s been on the rise for decades. These two phenomena are unquestionably linked – which is to say that the hostility of many Germans toward Jews is rooted in their awareness of their grandfathers’ or great-grandfathers’ wartime actions, their awareness that they’re expected to spend their lives professing guilt for these actions, and the fact that, in a country full of reminders of those actions, it’s impossible to escape this awareness.
How, after all, can a country that did what Germany did in the 1940s be psychologically healthy only three generations later? Henryk M. Broder, the German Jewish writer, put it this way in 1986: “The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.” It’s become a cliché that Germans love dead Jews – they just don’t care for living ones.
Six years ago I reviewed Tuvia Tenenbom’s eye-opening book I Sleep in Hitler’s Room: An American Jew Visits Germany. Tenenbom, I wrote, was “constantly exposed to rote expressions of sympathy for the victims of Auschwitz – and rote expressions of rage over Israel’s supposedly deplorable treatment of the Palestinians.”
Obviously, Germans enjoy equating Israel with Nazi Germany because it helps relieve their historical guilt. Germans will tell you that they’re resolved never to let “that” happen again – but they’ve managed to convince themselves that the group most in danger of being subjected to “that” in today’s Europe isn’t the Jews but the Muslims. Therefore, the best way to atone for what their ancestors did to Jews is to kowtow to Islam.
The end of this new path is the same as the old one: Lots of dead Jews — and Germans, too.
PEOPLE ARE TUNING OUT ON ENTERTAINMENT SHOWS BECAUSE THEY AREN’T ENTERTAINING: The Great Tune Out.
Though adjustments may change the preliminary verdict, this year’s Emmys are set to underperform even last year’s all-time low ratings. Maybe the politics on display were irrelevant; maybe the rise of streaming services has made traditional broadcast television a dying product. Maybe. But the Emmys misfortunes are of a familiar sort. This tune out is starting to feel like a trend.
In August, at just 5.4 million viewers, MTV’s Music Video Awards turned in their lowest ratings of all time. Occurring just days after a white-supremacist terrorist attack on peaceful demonstrators in Charlottesville, Virginia, that event was explicitly political. But it was hard to avoid the impression it would have been political even absent events in Charlottesville.
Awardees delivered homilies praising NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick for refusing to stand for the American national anthem and the network played a song titled “f*** Donald Trump” into breaks. For the first time, MTV presented an award for “Best Fight Against the System.” Host Katy Perry, a prominent member of Hillary Clinton’s squad of celebrity surrogates, displayed blinding originality when she joked about appearing in “Handmaid’s Tale” regalia and added that the VMAs was “one election where the popular vote actually matters.”
For months, liberal media outlets have contorted themselves into pretzels to support the claim that the sports network ESPN is not liberal, and conservatives who perceive it to be are addlebrained conspiracy theorists. Nevertheless, ESPN’s former personalities and even its regular viewers—according to a study commissioned by the network—don’t agree. Meanwhile, the network is laying off employees in droves, advertisers are panicking, and its ratings are cratering—the second quarter of 2017 was its least-watched Q2 in four years. Last week, ESPN John Skipper was compelled to admit that the network’s politicization is not a figment of conservative imaginations. “ESPN is not a political organization,” he wrote in a letter to his employees. “ESPN is about sports.” He continued, “we are a journalistic organization and that we should not do anything that undermines that position.”
Even Hollywood is feeling the crunch. The summer of 2017 was the worst performing summer for domestic box office releases in years. “Without a film debuting widely over the Labor Day weekend, Box-office Media predicts the film industry will end the summer of 2017 with sales down by up to 15 percent,” Bloomberg reported. Contrary to some recent revisionism, the films that were released this summer were well-regarded and scored well among reviewers. It’s possible this collapse is unrelated to an epidemic of performing artists lecturing America on its lack of a “moral foundation,” the “cancer” afflicting its politics, and the deteriorating race relations. But what if it’s not?
A lot of people don’t want to support the enemy, and they’re pretty convinced that Hollywood sees them as enemies.
NEW FROM MARGARET BALL: Insurgents.
BECAUSE ANTHROPOGENIC GLOBAL WARMING IS DOGMA, NOT SCIENCE: Why can’t the lessons of NASA’s Cassini be applied by Warmists?
APPARENTLY BECOMING BIRD-BRAINED WAS A STEP UP: Scientists track the brain-skull transition from dinosaurs to birds.
LIFE IN THE LEFT BUBBLE: Ideology unbound.
MORE EMOTIONAL BUBBLE CHILDREN: Even Hobby Lobby Cotton Is Racist These Days.
LAWFARE, NOT JUST FOR THE LEFT ANYMORE: Gab.AI Sues Google Over Removal of App From Google Play Store.
SO MUCH PROJECTION THEY SHOULD OPEN MOVIE THEATERS? Racism And Guns: Why The Left Keeps Painting Gun Owners As Racist.
GUESTS OF DAVID BROOKS WORST HURT: New Yorkers refuse to eat these hard-to-pronounce dishes: study.
September 18, 2017
AT AMAZON, Fall Deals on Men’s Socks.
STEVEN HAYWARD: Demography And The End Of Diversity.
This only scratches the surface. If you view government as a primary spoils system, then the zero-sum nature of it will cause infighting among the spoils-seekers. We can already see this at work in California, where the move to reinstate affirmative action admissions in public universities was sailing along until Asian Democrats in the state legislature, under pressure from their constituents, opposed the change.
Maybe this partly explains why Trump got a higher share of the Hispanic and black vote than Romney or McCain did?
Which is a pretty good showing, for Hitler.
KAROL MARKOWICZ: Why the statue-smashers will never stop.
A HERO: Stanislav Petrov, Soviet soldier credited with saving world from nuclear war, dies at 77. “Petrov, thinking that any U.S. attack should have involved even more missiles to limit the chance of Soviet retaliation, told his Kremlin bosses the alert must have been caused by a malfunction. He persuaded Moscow not to shoot back. It was later determined that Russian satellites must have mistaken sunlight reflecting off clouds for nuclear missiles.”
And, inevitably: “Petrov’s reward? He was chastised for failing to provide proper paperwork, he said.”
ENTITLEMENT ON DISPLAY: Nancy Pelosi — at her own Dreamers rally — is overtaken by bustling, screaming protesters who want action for all 11 million undocumented immigrants — not just those covered by DACA.
By “action,” they mean “amnesty.”
COMPLACENCY: Why Didn’t Florida Power & Light Do More To Prepare For Irma?
FPL’s workers on the ground seem to be doing all they can to fix downed lines and restore power to homes, and they deserve huge credit for working around the clock in awful conditions.
But the company’s corporate and government-relations wings have serious questions to answer this week after quashing regulations that could have made the energy grid stronger at a slight expense to FPL’s billion-dollar bottom line.
Hurricane Wilma, the last ‘cane to hit South Florida, tore through the area in 2005 and killed power to 3.24 million of FPL’s then-4.3 million customers (75 percent of the grid). Many of those customers had to wait up to two weeks for power to return. Since then, the company has spent more than $2 billion supposedly girding itself against the next storm, according to a Sun Sentinel piece published before Irma hit.
But after Irma — which by most reports brought only Category 1-strength winds to South Florida — by some measures the company did even worse. Despite all of those upgrades, an even larger percentage of FPL’s customer base — 4.4 of 4.9 million customers, almost 90 percent — lost electricity this past weekend.
Plus:
Thanks to power-company rules, it’s impossible across Florida to simply buy a solar panel and power your individual home with it. You are instead legally mandated to connect your panels to your local electric grid.
More egregious, FPL mandates that if the power goes out, your solar-power system must power down along with the rest of the grid, robbing potentially needy people of power during major outages.
“Renewable generator systems connected to the grid without batteries are not a standby power source during an FPL outage,” the company’s solar-connection rules state. “The system must shut down when FPL’s grid shuts down in order to prevent dangerous back feed on FPL’s grid. This is required to protect FPL employees who may be working on the grid.”
Astoundingly, state rules also mandate that solar customers include a switch that cleanly disconnects their panels from FPL’s system while keeping the rest of a home’s power lines connected. But during a disaster like the aftermath of Hurricane Irma, FPL customers aren’t allowed to simply flip that switch and keep their panels going. (But FPL is, however, allowed to disconnect your panels from the grid without warning you. The company can even put a padlock on it.)
That’s unacceptable.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
The actors posed for photographs on the red carpet as publicists and security readied for the deluge of stars expected for the show. The red carpet for the first time is tented and air conditioned to provide for some relief from the usually warm temperatures in Los Angeles in September. The temperatures are in the 70s on Sunday and the air conditioning was a welcome respite from recent years of sweltering Emmys red carpets.
—The Washington Post, yesterday.
● I don’t need air conditioning, and neither do you.
—Headline, the Washington Post, August 18, 2016.
Fortunately for all of us, the author of that 2016 has done little to persuade her boss.