FAKE FACT CHECK: The New Yorker “fact checker” who incorrectly claimed an ICE agent had a white supremacist tattoo has been hired by Media Matters to serve as a researcher on “far-right extremism.”
Doubt she’s learned her lesson.
Archive for 2018
July 23, 2018
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: New York Daily News Announces Mass Layoffs To Staff Via Email, Ashe Schow writes at the Daily Wire:
Tronc, which owns NYDN, sent an email to staff Monday morning announcing it would be “fundamentally restructuring the Daily News,” according to a copy of the memo obtained by the Daily Beast’s Max Tani.
“We are reducing today the size of the editorial team by approximately 50 percent and re-focusing much of our talent on breaking news — especially in areas of crime, civil justice and public responsibility,” the email said.
* * * * * * * *
The biggest cut was editor-in-chief Jim Rich, who foreshadowed the layoffs in an ominous tweet Monday morning.
Rich tweeted, “If you hate democracy and think local governments should operate unchecked and in the dark, then today is a good day for you.”
No, there is another option. It’s entirely possible to believe that journalists should be a watchdog on politicians, without resorting to material such as this:
UPDATE: It’s easy enough already to think of the Daily News as Democratic operatives with bylines, but Andrew Cuomo wants to make it official: Cuomo Offers to Bail Out Daily News with State Money. Pardon the pun, but this is the money quote: “These layoffs were made without notifying the State or asking for assistance.”
“Notifying the state.”
NOW THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY I’D BEEN HOPING FOR: Plans outlined for 2,000 supersonic jets to link hundreds of cities across the planet.
Blake Scholl, founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, says his company will be able to make supersonic air travel financially viable and affordable to the public, with one-way fares from London to New York from £2,000, about the same as a business class ticket today.
Boom Supersonic is one of a handful of firms attempting to revive the commercial prospects of planes that can travel faster than the speed of sound, something not seen since the demise of the Concorde in 2003.
The Denver-based operation has developed prototypes of a 55-seater jet that will have a cruising speed of 1,451mph, 100mph faster than the Concorde, and hopes to begin passenger flights by 2025.
“We are focused on accelerating long transoceanic trips. We we want to get the economy of the plane down so that anybody who flies can fly fast,” Scholl, who used to work at Amazon, told the Independent at the Farnborough Airshow.
Faster? Please!
ROGER SIMON: The FBI Goes Full Nixon with the FISA Report.
YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: Female Deputy in Washington State Fired for Wearing ‘Proud Boys’ Sweatshirt.
“Celebrate diversity” morphed into “Conform, Prole” so slowly that I hardly even noticed.
FIELD TRIPS TO THE GAP DIDN’T IMPRESS THE ACCREDITORS, I GUESS: University no longer offers credit for ‘Witnessing Whiteness.’
(Classical reference in the headline.)
CHANGE: Peak Oil Demand Could Be Less Than 2 Decades Away. “A new forecast says oil demand will plateau in 2036, which is several years earlier than the view of many in the industry.”
You read more and more about peak oil demand these days, and less and less about peak oil.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: ‘Speech tariffs’: Cornell cops decide security fees by predicting reaction to speaker.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump threatens Iran IN ALL CAPS, Redacted FISA Released, and Much, Much More.
BUT OF COURSE: German intelligence contradicts Merkel on Iran’s nuclear drive.
A German intelligence report from the city-state of Hamburg said Iran’s regime is continuing to seek weapons of mass destruction, delivering another intelligence agency blow to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s belief that the 2015 atomic deal with the Islamic Republic curbed Tehran’s nuclear weapons ambitions.
The Jerusalem Post reviewed the 211-page document that states “some of the crisis countries… are still making an effort to obtain products for the manufacture of atomic, biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction (proliferation) and the corresponding missile carrier technology (rocket technology).”
The Hamburg report on Thursday added that “the current main focus points of countries in the area of relevant proliferation activities are: Iran, Syrian, Pakistan and Syria.”
Given her history as Chancellor, don’t expect Merkel’s policies to change just because they’re contrary to reality.
HOW CONSERVATIVES WON THE LAW:
The main achievement of the conservative legal movement, Mr. Teles says, hasn’t been fundraising but education, study and debate. The Federalist Society’s premise is that “we’re going to be smarter than the liberals,” he adds. “We’re going to be more bookish. We’re going to be more intellectual.” Conservative law students would “go down to first principles” to show that liberal students “can’t even describe why they’re in favor of what they’re in favor of.” Many of the early Federalist Society members were former liberals; their goal was to “draw people in” as they had been drawn in, by demonstrating “how thoughtful and how intellectual that project is.”
Assisting presidents with judicial appointments is a tiny fraction of the group’s activities. “If you add up all of the hours of everyone who works in the Federalist Society, overwhelmingly, it’s running debates and speakers,” Mr. Teles says. While it has a robust fundraising operation, “most of the Federalist Society is basically done by pro bono contributions” from “people who are running chapters all over the country” for students, faculty and lawyers. The fundraising is merely “a multiplier force for all of the stuff people are doing that’s really voluntary activity.”
What motivates these millions of hours of intellectual legwork? Mr. Teles says it’s a conservative response to the “entrenchment of liberalism” in the legal ecosystem. Through the first half of the 20th century, groups like the American Bar Association were conservative in the sense that they were controlled by a risk-averse WASP elite. But amid the Cold War and the social unrest of the 1960s, the legal establishment—like the educational establishment—decided it needed to move leftward to retain its legitimacy. It began to throw its weight behind representation for the unlawyered, while backing liberal groups like the Environmental Defense Fund, the NAACP and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Foundation. At the same time, law schools were on a hiring spree, and young professors tended to lean left.
In the decades after World War II, “a new kind of legal establishment” was created, one that saw social justice as a core element of its mission. This was a double-edged sword. Even as “the establishment got liberalized,” Mr. Teles says, “liberalism got establishmentized.” Avowed liberals wound up “running things that were not supposed to be at least openly ideological”—not only the bar, but universities, the prestige press and other elite institutions.
“Liberals got power because they got control of professional venues.” As a result, they fell back on appeals to authority, or what Mr. Teles calls “hiding the ball.” Rather than arguing against conservative ideas on the merits, they claimed their opponents were “violating expert knowledge.” He cites the popular assertion by corporations and universities—and the Supreme Court, in decisions involving racial preferences in admissions—that diversity is merely a matter of “good professional practice” rather than social justice.
The Federalist Society does many excellent things, and is currently enjoying a deserved victory lap. But if other, less bookish, Republicans hadn’t won elections, there would be no victory lap.
SILK ROAD BLUES: China’s Global Building Spree Runs Into Trouble in Pakistan. “To fund a 70-nation infrastructure initiative, Beijing has been extending loans in opaque deals often contingent on using Chinese contractors.”
Financed and built by Chinese state-run companies, the soon-to-be-finished overhead railway through Lahore is among the first projects in China’s $62 billion plan for Pakistan. Beijing hoped the $2 billion air-conditioned metro, sweeping past crumbling relics of Mughal and British imperial rule, would help make Pakistan a showcase for its global infrastructure-building spree.
Instead, it has become emblematic of the troubles that are throwing China’s modern-day Silk Road initiative off course.
China’s global plan, called the “Belt and Road Initiative,” involves some 70 countries and has been likened to the U.S. Marshall Plan that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. By building a network of ports, railways, roads and pipelines, China aims to open new East-West trade routes, generate business for Chinese companies and expand its strategic influence.
While the Americans mainly used grants in Postwar Europe, China has mostly extended loans in opaque deals often contingent on using Chinese contractors. Pakistan is now one of several countries grappling with the financial and political fallout of taking on so much Chinese debt.
With a general election in Pakistan scheduled for July 25, an ascendant opposition is pledging to publish secret details about the financing of Chinese projects, including the Orange Line, and Pakistani industry is agitating for less-generous perks for Chinese companies.
Well, this is getting sticky.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Democratic Desperation on Kavanaugh Is Showing.
It’s just a dress rehearsal for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s eventual replacement.
VULTURES OF A FEATHER: Venezuela exported $779 mln in gold to Turkey in 2018.
Venezuela’s Mining Minister Victor Cano on Wednesday said the central bank was exporting gold to Turkey rather than Switzerland due to concerns about sanctions, without specifying the amount that was being sent.
The latest data on Turkey’s Statistical Institute website show that between January and May, Venezuela exported 20.15 tonnes of gold to Turkey, compared with none in 2017. Turkey did not send an equivalent amount of gold back to Venezuela, the data showed.
Evading sanctions — or putting the deposit down on a cushy safe haven for Venezuela’s socialist elite when the regime collapses?
Meanwhile, for those without gold to export: In Venezuela, public buses give way to private ‘dog carts’.
JETS WITH FRICKIN’ LASER BEAMS: F-35 Engine Upgrade Would Enable Directed Energy Weapons.
Additional power and thermal management capability will enable the use of directed energy weapons and other advanced offensive and defensive systems and, if approved, would feature in an upgrade package called Growth Option 2.0 (GO2). Pratt & Whitney, which would roll PTMS into a suite of compressor and turbine enhancements originally proposed in the first upgrade package, G01, says the complete upgrade could be available within four years of getting the official go-ahead.
Growth Option 1.0, which was floated with the JPO in 2017, offered 5% fuel reductions and as much as 10% higher thrust. Offered as a cost-neutral upgrade, it was always meant to form part of a longer-term, two-stage improvement road map for the F-35 engine under plans first unveiled by the manufacturer in 2015. However, with the move to combine GO1 and 2 into a more complete enhancement package, Pratt is tailoring the revised proposal to closer match the F-35 upgrade road map recently outlined under the C2D2 continuous improvement strategy.
It seems we’ve barely scratched the surface of what can be done with the F-35 platform. But that shouldn’t come as a surprise, since a recent-vintage F-15 or -16 is a far more capable beast than the original ’70s models.
JOEL KOTKIN: Democrats Are Helping Trump Win Re-Election. “In their anti-Trump fervor, the Democrats have embraced leftist positions that weaken their prospects in 2018 and, perhaps even more so, beyond. This leftward shift was evident in scores of elections around the country as well as here in California where the party endorsed climate activist and open-borders advocate Kevin De Leon over longtime centrist, and still heavily favored, Sen. Dianne Feinstein. The lurch to the left could become particularly problematic if the economy, always a big if, holds up. Right now almost two-thirds of voters think the economy is in good shape, according to a recent YouGov poll. To be sure, Trump’s approval ratings are not great, but not much worse than those at the same stage of their presidencies as Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, all but one of which was re-elected to second term.”
IT’S COLLUSION, I TELLS YA — COLLUSION! Pentagon Giving $200 Million to Ukraine to ‘Build Defensive Capacity.’ “In quest to ‘bolster Ukraine’s ability to defend its territorial integrity’ a ‘timeline for delivery and fielding of equipment will be determined at a later date’.”