UNLIKE MELANIA, Hillary So White.
From the comments: “Reading media has become as baroque as reading Pravda used to be: look at these photos, text and graphics, and attempt to divine, what’s to be the next Party line?”
Archive for 2017
July 24, 2017
AS FAR AS I CAN TELL, EVERYTHING IS A PLOT EITHER FOR OR AGAINST THE RUSSIAN GOVERNMENT NOWADAYS: Are Fidget Spinners A Plot Against The Russian Government?
MICHAEL LEDEEN: Who Gets Purged by Trump?
I don’t think the Trumps et al. have a solid grasp of Washington. I think that they believe the bureaucracy should salute whenever the president expresses a conviction, and immediately impose his will on the system. Maybe so (elections really do have consequences. Most always). Except Washington doesn’t work that way. The bureaucrats know they will outlast any president. He’ll be gone in four or eight years, but they will still be there. Moreover, it’s almost impossible to fire a civil servant; maybe you can move him down the hall, or even half way around the world, but he’ll still be active. Somewhere. And he may well have friends.
Not so with political appointees, who can be purged. You have no doubt seen the laments from the Trump loyalists about the Obama “holdovers” who continue to work and often participate in some very sensitive meetings. Many of them are now out, but there has been a surprising purge of Trump loyalists, especially in national security, including Mike Flynn, Adam Lovinger, and Robin Townley.
Read the whole thing.
JUST TEN MORE MINUTES, I SWEAR: Democrats snoozing through their wake-up call.
Gloria Johns:
Where do we start with all the Democrats have gotten wrong?
First, they did not anticipate the backlash from the party’s greatest achievement. The election of the first African-American president was the straw that broke the back of conservatives and middle-income white Americans who were quickly becoming the minority and not happy about it at all.
Democrats failed to notice their party’s freefall, as evidenced by the loss of about 900 legislative seats from 2008 to 2016. While it’s not untypical that a two-term presidency starts to lose a little luster during its waning years, these numbers definitely signal a shift in mood among the American people – a shift not quite away from civil rights, but definitely more focused on the right to prosper as an individual, the equivalent of the Republican’s siren song.
And not to diminish her exceptional public service over many decades, but Hillary Clinton was an entitlement candidate and an unimaginative one at that. If Trump represents a 1950s separatist, Clinton is a bit of a relic of the 1960s, when the Democrats’ whimsical party platform was, “… it is the creation of an enduring peace in which the universal values of human dignity, truth, and justice under law are finally secured for all men everywhere on earth.”
How do you turn all of that into action?
If this column is any indicator, even lefties who think they get it still haven’t gotten it.
UPDATE: Yes, even Chuck Schumer.
THIS IS ESSENTIAL FOR A LOT OF DIFFERENT VARIETIES, AND NOT JUST THE SEXBOTS: Robots Learn To Speak Body Language.
JOEL KOTKIN: Why the Greens Lost, and Trump Won.
The believers at times seem more concerned in demonstrating their faith than in passing laws, winning elections or demonstrating results. So with Republicans controlling the federal government, greens are cheering Democratic state attorney generals’ long-shot legal cases against oil companies. The New York Times’ Thomas Friedman has talked about dismissing the disorder of democracy as not suited to meeting the environmental challenges we face, and replacing it with rulers like the “reasonably enlightened group of people” who run the Chinese dictatorship.
After Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord, China was praised, bizarrely, as the great green hope. The Middle Kingdom, though, is the world’s biggest and fastest grower emitter, generating coal energy at record levels. It won’t, under Paris, need to cut its emissions till 2030. Largely ignored is the fact that America, due largely to natural gas replacing coal, has been leading the world in GHG reductions.
Among many greens, and their supports, performance seems to mean less than proper genuflecting; the Paris accords, so beloved by the green establishment, will make little impact on the actual climate, as both rational skeptics like Bjorn Lomborg and true believers like NASA’s James Hanson agree. In this context, support for Paris represents the ultimate in “virtue signaling.” Ave Maria, Gaia.
They get the virtue, we get the tab.
PEER REVIEW: Predatory Journals Hit By ‘Star Wars’ Sting.
“SOMETIMES?” Dem Congressman: Democratic Party ‘Sometimes Slips Into Intolerance.’ And note this:
Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D-Mo.) criticized his own party for “intolerance” of Democrats with points of view that differ from the majority of the party’s members.
“The problem is, and we saw a little of it in the recent House race in Georgia, where our candidate was told, ‘you didn’t pass the litmus test on certain things,’ you know, it’s absolutely crazy. We have to get to the point where we understand that Democrats will not get into the majority unless we have Blue Dogs,” Cleaver said, referring to the fiscally conservative caucus, during a discussion called, “Diverse Democrats: What It Takes To Win” hosted by the nonprofit organization Third Way.
They weren’t in the slightest fiscally conservative – they voted in lockstep for Obamacare as “Nancy Pelosi’s crash test dummies” – on the way to becoming cannon fodder in the 2010 midterms.
FIVE NUTRITION LIES THAT ARE RUINING YOUR HEALTH. Well, not my health, and probably not that of most InstaPundit readers.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● The best way to reduce your personal carbon emissions: don’t be rich.
—Headline, young adult Website* Vox.com, July 14, 2017.
● EXPLAINED: Why Vox Dot Com Is a Smart Investment for General Electric.
—The Washington Free Beacon, May 1st, 2014.
—The Atlantic, March 22, 2013.
It’s the hypocrisy, Atlantic. Not to mention the sophistry:
I’d start to take global warming seriously when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves – oh and, I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint again.
* Classical reference.
UPDATE: “Left: We’re going to ensure ‘better jobs, better wages, better future.’ Also the Left: Stop making money:” “Vox’s indictment of both Hollywood and the music industry is rather harsh here.”
Heh, indeed.™
AFTER ALL, HE IS THE BULLGOD: Let’s get this out of the way right now: Yes, Kid Rock can absolutely win if he runs for U.S. Senate in Michigan.
ASTRONOMY: The Next Step In The Search For Aliens Is A Huge Telescope And A Ton Of Math.
Astronomers hoping to find extraterrestrial life are looking largely for exoplanets (planets outside Earth’s solar system) in the so-called “Goldilocks zone” around each star: a distance range in which a planet is not too hot and not too cold, making it possible for liquid water to exist on the surface. But after studying our own world and many other planetary systems, scientists have come to believe that many factors other than distance are key to the development of life. These include the mix of gases in the atmosphere, the age of the planet and host star, whether the host star often puts out harmful radiation, and how fast the planet rotates — some planets rotate at a rate that leaves the same side always facing their star, so one hemisphere is stuck in perpetual night while the other is locked into scorching day. This makes it a complex problem that scientists can start to tackle with powerful computers, data and statistics. These tools — and new telescope technology — could make the discovery of life beyond Earth more likely.
Two teams of astronomers are proposing different methods of tackling these questions. One argues that we should try to identify trends in the data generated by surveys of thousands of planets, while the other favors focusing on a handful of individual planets to assess where they’d lie on a scale from uninhabitable to probably populated.
If there’s anybody out there, I’d rather we found them before they find us.
SINGLE PAYER, SINGLE DECIDER: Charlie Gard’s Parents Drop Legal Battle Over Experimental Treatment.
The parents of critically ill baby Charlie Gard dropped their legal bid Monday to send him to the United States for an experimental treatment after new medical tests showed that the window of opportunity to help him had closed.
Chris Gard and Connie Yates wept as they withdrew their appeal during a London High Court hearing, signaling the end of a legal saga that had stretched for months. The couple’s attorney, Grant Armstrong, said recent medical tests on 11-month-old Charlie showed the baby has irreversible muscular damage, and the new treatment wouldn’t help.
“It’s too late for Charlie,” Armstrong said. “The damage has been done.”
Medically, there may have been no hope for Charlie even at an earlier date. Politically, the process the Gards were subjected to was a crude power play of the state against the individual, and the state won.
Britons should have no doubt about their place in a single payer system.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: What happens when you leave a tetherball in the forest? (Video.)
IN THE MAIL: From Hans G. Schantz, A Rambling Wreck.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Forget Russia. I’d fire Jeff Sessions over civil forfeiture.
THE OIL WARS: OPEC/Saudi ‘Promises’ Fail To Ignite Momentum in WTI Crude Prices.
As Bloomberg reports, OPEC and partners meet in St. Petersburg where the Saudi energy minister says he expects deep cut in nation’s August exports.
OPEC/non-OPEC meeting:
•Saudi Arabia’s Al-Falih says inventory draw-down to accelerate, demand picking up; Saudis to cap exports at 6.6m b/d in August, y/y decline of 1m b/d
•Joint ministerial committee said to discuss monitoring oil exports along with production figures; Al-Falih says exports have become key metric for financial markets
•OPEC may need to discuss in November extending cuts: U.A.E.
•Nigeria to limit output to 1.8m b/d if it can reach that level: Oman
•Russia’s Novak sees ‘‘big potential’’ for oil markets in 3Q; not opposed to monitoring exports
And this is the result… a quick spike above $46… then fall back.
Have you hugged a fracker today?
HAVE YOU HUGGED A FRACKER TODAY? Cheap Crude Is Hell for Oil’s Old Guard.
We live in a new oil reality. Production is surging around the world, and supplies are coming from a number of new places (read: from outside of the oil cartel OPEC). Crucially, the price of a barrel of oil today is less than half of what it was three years ago, and $50 seems to be the new market equilibrium for crude. North America, and in particular the United States, has emerged as the biggest winner in this global transition, but this new reality has produced a large number of losers, too. Petrostates—countries whose regimes have grown fat on oil revenues—have adapted poorly to changing market conditions, and as Bloomberg reports the future looks dim for this category of producers. . . .
The collapse of crude prices hurt everyone in the business of supplying oil, but it was especially painful for petrostates, whose national budgets require a strong oil price to stay in the black. In an attempt to prod prices in the upward direction, OPEC and its ilk cobbled together a weak consensus in order to collectively reduce supplies, but that strategy has been wholly ineffective thus far. Prices remain stubbornly low, while petrostates are ceding valuable market share to upstate producers like America’s frackers. Meanwhile, OPEC members are openly bucking their commitments to cutting production. The cartel’s ability to influence the global market has never looked weaker.
I’m so old, I can remember when anyone who dissented from “Peak Oil” dogma was called a shill for Exxon, and when our own President Obama mocked Sarah Palin for thinking that we could “drill our way out of” our energy problems.
SOCIAL JUSTICE: Man ordered to pay $65K in child support for kid who isn’t his.
In 2003, a child support court in Texas ruled that Gabriel Cornejo, 45, had to pay child support to his ex-girlfriend who had recently given birth because she vowed that there was no way he wasn’t the rightful dad.
Cornejo, who is currently raising three children of his own and two nephews, claimed that he was not made aware of this and only found out about the child support payments last year when a deputy served him court papers claiming that the state of Texas lists him as having another child. He soon met the minor for the first and only time – describing her as a “wonderful girl” – but after taking a DNA test, learned she was not his after all.
Only Cornejo’s ex-girlfriend and the state still want the $65,000 in back payments.
“I never thought in my whole life I would have to defend myself of something that I am innocent of,” he said.
Under current legal thinking, he’s male, so he must be guilty of something.
Plus this: “Texas’ family code, chapter 161, states that even if one is not the biological father, they still owe support payments that accrued before the paternity test proves otherwise.”
SCIENCE, UNSETTLED: How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Forget Russia. I’d fire Jeff Sessions over civil forfeiture.
THAAD INTERCEPTION TEST: A photo of the July 11 test launch from the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska in Kodiak, Alaska. The THAAD anti-missile missile intercepted an intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) target.