NONSENSE. IF IT WERE, YOU’D BE EXPLAINING IT AWAY. Ivy League prof: Trump immigration comments a ‘terroristic act.’
Archive for 2019
June 20, 2019
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Iran Shoots Down American Drone, Ready for War. “Gen. Hossein Salami, commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps announced: ‘Shooting down the American spy drone had a clear, decisive, firm and accurate message,’ he said, translated from Farsi. ‘The message is that the guardians of the borders of Islamic Iran will decisively respond to the violation of any stranger to this land. The only solution for the enemies is to respect the territorial integrity and national interests of Iran’.”
If the drone was flying over Iranian airspace, that’s just the risk we take for keeping an eye on things. If it really was flying in international airspace, that’s (yet another) act of war against us by Tehran.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Just remember, before fracking we had to be able to keep the Straits of Hormuz open. Now all we have to be able to do is keep them closed. And if Iran decides to close down oil shipments from the Gulf, it’s basically an oil embargo on China.
ANOTHER UPDATE: In response to the above, a reader emails:
As of a few weeks ago, Texas is exporting natural gas…to Saudi Arabia.
And on top of that, the United States is now recognized for having the most recoverable oil in the world, 100 billion barrels more than Russia and 20 billion more than Saudi Arabia.
And add to that, China is buying more and more natural gas, and Texas is producing more and more of it, and more efficiently than ever. Iran’s actions may drive China straight into our arms to buy up more good, clean American natural gas and oil.
Well, good. And thanks, frackers!
SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: Conlawprof, Dachau, and Auschwitz: The New “Learning.” “People are crossing America’s southern frontier—they are coming from Mexico, south of Mexico, and (it is reported) from other continents. They are doing so knowing full well that there is a good chance the US authorities will detain them in border facilities of the sort that are now being compared to Dachau. They are coming in large numbers—some (perhaps many) in good health with money and education. There is an element (for some of them) that can be fairly described as voluntary action seeking a better life in the US. I have never heard that such conduct was a proper characterization of those who inhabited Dachau or Auschwitz.”
Today’s academia is fundamentally unserious.
BREAK UP BIG TECH: Alphabet Tries to Silence Conservative Investors As they Question Why Google’s Parent Company Silences Conservative Voices. “In 1961, at age 12, I was one of two-dozen black children who integrated an all-white junior high school in Richmond. White parents jeered me outside the school, and inside, their kids stuck me with pins, shoved me in the halls and pushed me down the stairs. So when the group of Google employees resorted to calling names and making false accusations because they didn’t want a conservative voice advising the company, the hostility was reminiscent of what I felt back then — that same intolerance for someone who was different from them.”
HBO WRITER AND COMEDIAN CALLS BLACK COLUMNIST A ‘COON’ FOR OPPOSING REPARATIONS:
Classy stuff, and very much par for the course at sister networks HBO and CNN.
PRAGER U: Who Cares About the National Debt?
The interest payment on our debt is currently $300 billion dollars per year, heading towards a projected $1 trillion dollars within a decade. At that point, a fifth of all federal taxes will go towards the interest on the debt, not education, infrastructure, and defense – you know, the stuff government is supposed to do. And that’s with historically low interest rates. Imagine if those rates normalized. Well, maybe you don’t want to imagine it because that picture is very dark.
In a better world, voters would be marching on Washington, demanding that our politicians dig us out of this hole before we’re buried in it.
In the real world… almost no one cares.
I’ve railed against big spending/big borrowing for more than 30 years, for all the good it hasn’t done.
There’s an instructive video podcast at the link, for anyone who might care at least that much.
THE BEST AND THE BRIGHTEST: FBI, warned early and often that Manafort file might be fake, used it anyway. Though here it’s probably more a case of corruption than incompetence.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela Is Now Awash in U.S. Dollars.
We used to catch only rare glimpses of them in public. A waiter willing to risk jail time might be persuaded to accept them for the right price. Amateur tourists would flash them at the airport. Shady street hawkers made offers for them under their breath.
Now, U.S. greenbacks are everywhere. They’re stacked high in cashiers’ drawers at supermarkets and bodegas and even make their way into panhandlers’ cups. The wealthy tip parking valets with singles and pull out wads of twenties to pay for buckets of beer. Currency traders casually set up on busy street corners in slums and shout, “Compro dolares, compro dolares”—“I buy dollars.”
With the bolivar all but worthless, devalued into irrelevance by the autocrat Nicolas Maduro, the cash printed by the gringos he rails against has become king. It is beyond ironic that Washingtons and Benjamins—and not the domestic notes named for the South American independence hero—are keeping the consumer economy afloat.
Until recently, using foreign money was a crime the government enthusiastically threatened to prosecute. After the ruling socialists established currency controls back in 2003, they began patrolling for transactions that ran afoul of their Kafkaesque rules about money. Plain-clothed inspectors ran stings and raided businesses.
Weird how anti-American regimes so often wind up needing US dollars to to keep their regimes afloat.
WHY IT’S NECESSARY TO BRING JEWISH COMMUNISM INTO FULL VIEW:
It is admittedly risky to raise the subject of Jewish involvement with Communism. Anti-Semitism trolls for excuses to blame Jews for anything and everything. After the fall of the Soviet empire, some citizens of countries that had been for decades under Soviet control found it convenient to explain their lingering anti-Jewish animus as payback for the Jewish Bolsheviks who had oppressed them.
On the American scene, Harvey Klehr in his response to Evanier’s essay very helpfully puts the numbers in perspective, showing what a small percentage of American Jews actually belonged to the CPUSA or supported Bolshevism. Still, there’s reason to worry that just raising the subject could provide fuel for dedicated anti-Semites. And yet, however legitimate the concern, it is dwarfed by the greater dangers of sustained self-deception.
Here, in three parts, is why I say that.
I.
American Jews who joined the Communist party and spied for the Soviets betrayed the Jews before they betrayed America.
To become a member of the party was to undergo a kind of conversion—a voluntary conversion, and one not literally requiring baptism, but, particularly for a Jew, an act far more radical than any mere change in political affiliation. The Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 established the dictatorship of the proletariat, and the Communist International (Comintern) undertook “to struggle by all available means, including armed force, for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.” Yet whereas other nationalities were allowed to “transition” to self-dissolution, Jews, already scattered among the nations, were denounced as reactionary for wanting to retain their Jewishness.
Marxism-Leninism, ideologically incompatible with Judaism, specifically required the Jewish people to dissolve into the international proletariat. As part of its need to eradicate both the Jewish religion and Jewish nationhood, the Soviet Union forbade the teaching of Hebrew, a language essential to both. The “Jewish sections” of the party, the yevsektsii, enforced this program of Sovietization. As the historian Yuri Slezkine writes in his The House of Government, while Polish, Latvian, and Georgian high-ranking members of the party “seemed to assume that proletarian internationalism was compatible with their native tongues, songs, and foods,” high-ranking Jewish members did not speak Yiddish at home or try to pass anything Jewish on to their children. Many proved their new loyalty by pursuing their fellow Jews with special vigor.
When it came to Zionism, the Communist party under Stalin hailed the 1929 Arab pogroms against Jews in Palestine as the start of an Arab Communist revolution and created the watchwords of 20th-century anti-Zionism: a leftist version of anti-Semitism that condemned Jewish national aspirations as a crime against the international order.
Read the whole thing.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: America’s First Third-World State.
If someone predicted half a century ago that a Los Angeles police station or indeed L.A. City Hall would be in danger of periodic, flea-borne infectious typhus outbreaks, he would have been considered unhinged. After all, the city that gave us the modern freeway system is not supposed to resemble Justinian’s sixth-century Constantinople. Yet typhus, along with outbreaks of infectious hepatitis A, are in the news on California streets. The sidewalks of the state’s major cities are homes to piles of used needles, feces, and refuse. Hygienists warn that permissive municipal governments are setting the stage — through spiking populations of history’s banes of fleas, lice, and rats — for possible dark-age outbreaks of plague or worse.
High tech does its part not to clean the streets but to create defecation apps that electronically warn tourists and hoi polloi how to avoid walking blindly into piles of sidewalk excrement. In Californian logic, public defecation butts up against progressive tolerance, so it is exempt from the law. Yet for a suburbanite to build a patio without a permit, for example, costs one dearly in fines. Indeed, a new patio without a permit can be deemed more dangerous to the public health than piles of excrement in the public workplace.
One out of three Californians who enters a hospital for any cause is now found to be suffering from either diabetes or pre-diabetes, an epidemic that hits the Hispanic community especially hard but for a variety of reasons has not led to effective public-health efforts and sufficient publicity. State-run dialysis clinics now dot the towns and communities of the Central Valley — a tragic symptom of dietary culture, massive illegal immigration, and poor public-health education.
Flashback: Ten Plagues of California Are Turning The Golden State into a Third-World Hell Hole.
JOURNALISM: MSNBC host Kasie Hunt falsely claims Joe Biden’s segregationist colleagues were Republicans.
Flashback: The Party of Civil Rights.
This magazine has long specialized in debunking pernicious political myths, and Jonah Goldberg has now provided an illuminating catalogue of tyrannical clichés, but worse than the myth and the cliché is the outright lie, the utter fabrication with malice aforethought, and my nominee for the worst of them is the popular but indefensible belief that the two major U.S. political parties somehow “switched places” vis-à-vis protecting the rights of black Americans, a development believed to be roughly concurrent with the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the rise of Richard Nixon. That Republicans have let Democrats get away with this mountebankery is a symptom of their political fecklessness, and in letting them get away with it the GOP has allowed itself to be cut off rhetorically from a pantheon of Republican political heroes, from Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass to Susan B. Anthony, who represent an expression of conservative ideals as true and relevant today as it was in the 19th century. Perhaps even worse, the Democrats have been allowed to rhetorically bury their Bull Connors, their longstanding affiliation with the Ku Klux Klan, and their pitiless opposition to practically every major piece of civil-rights legislation for a century.
GOOD: Dem Staffer Who Doxxed GOP Senators During Kavanaugh Hearings Headed to Prison.
Prosecutors said Cosko had “self-righteous entitlement” and a “belief that he could violate the sanctity of the United States Senate at will and threaten individual Senators as he pleased.”
He wanted to use stolen data “to punish people who disagreed with his politics” by publishing the personal information of Republican Sens. Lindsey Graham, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rand Paul, and Mitch McConnell, the memo says, which noted that Cosko laughed about his actions.
Prosecutors said his case must be a deterrent to what they said are rising politically-motivated attacks.
We need to end the left’s culture of impunity.
But wait, there’s more: “The sentencing came on the same day a second former Hassan aide, Samantha Deforest-Davis, was charged with two misdemeanors stemming from the same scheme: aiding a computer fraud and evidence tampering.”
DECOUPLING: Apple investigating move of up to 30% of production out of China. “A team of between 30 and 40 people at Apple is surveying the company’s major suppliers about the cost implications of moving production out of China. Nikkei reports that several major suppliers have confirmed that Apple has asked them to look into moving and restructuring production.”
MONSTROUS. The flying saddle: Would you give it a try?
WHAT IF TRUMP ACTUALLY CAN DEPORT A MILLION OR MORE ILLEGALS? The president’s immigration critics instantly condemned as impossible his vow to deport “millions” of illegal aliens starting next week. But a close look at the data suggests Trump can put a huge dent in their ranks.
COMFORTABLY DUMB: Ocasio-Cortez: ‘I’m Absolutely Comfortable’ Using Concentration Camp Term to Describe Border.
June 19, 2019
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ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Even MSNBC’s Chuck Todd Slams Ocasio-Cortez For Her ‘Concentration Camp’ Remarks. Ocasio-Cortez Responds By Lying.
Ocasio-Cortez was angered by Todd calling her out and responded to him on Twitter, writing: “Well, @chucktodd – the fact that you slipped in ‘Nazi’ when I never said that is pretty unfortunate. Almost as unfortunate as the fact that you spent this whole time w/o discussing DHS freezers, “dog pounds,” missing children, & human rights abuses that uphold use of this term.”
This is a lie.
Ocasio-Cortez, in her Instagram live video, specifically mentioned “Never Again,” which is a direct reference to the Holocaust, which was carried out by Nazis.
As Stephen Miller tweets, “Jesus, Chuck Todd actually committed journalism. Can we get a welfare check on him?”
OPEN THREAD: Get us over the hump.