A SOLUTION TO A UNIQUELY INSTAPUNDIT PROBLEM: If you purchased Glenn’s insightful little book, The Social Media Upheaval, but haven’t yet read it because the bright orange and green cover is blinding you, I have a solution. I accidentally left my copy on my patio in the sun for two days. Presto! Change-o! The cover is now pleasantly aged and easy to look at.
Of course, if you haven’t yet purchased Glenn’s book, it’s time that you do. But wear sunglasses before you open up the package.
WHAT DESPERATION LOOKS LIKE: Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boats tried, failed to seize British oil tanker in Persian Gulf.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: New Tire Buying Guide: Everything You Need to Know.
UNDOING THE SPIN: Trump and the Sex Offender: Guess why the press makes a villain out of Jeffrey Epstein’s only successful prosecutor?
Mr. Epstein is back in a holding cell, under indictment by a U.S. attorney in New York. He will have his day in court. Presumably we will find out whether the evidence against the hedge-fund impresario for sexually abusing numerous underage girls in the early 2000s is as strong as it seems.
But one element of the story should give us pause, and that’s the seemingly concerted effort by the press to make a secondary villain out of the only prosecutor who succeeded in holding Mr. Epstein accountable till now because, 12 years later, that prosecutor is Donald Trump’s labor secretary.
A much-cited story in the Miami Herald last November is headlined “How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.” The paper thereby invokes a previously unknown form of retroactive quantum action at a distance, since Alexander Acosta’s actions as a U.S. attorney in Florida in 2007 could not have been premised on Mr. Trump being president a decade later.
The headline is also misleading. In fact, the Herald’s 5,000-word exposé tells us very little about the reasons and circumstances behind the 2008 plea deal in which Mr. Epstein agreed to plead guilty to two felonies, serve an 18-month jail sentence, pay restitution to certain victims, and accept designation for life as a registered sex offender.
Instead, the paper tells us what its own sources are willing to say now about Mr. Epstein more than a decade after the prosecution. What a newspaper can report in 2018 and what a prosecutor can prove in 2007 are two very different things. A fact the Herald also should have made plain: It was precisely Mr. Epstein’s conviction at the hands of Mr. Acosta that helped fuel the filing of civil lawsuits and emergence of newly declared victims that became the basis for the Herald’s own reporting.
Making an even bigger joke of the paper’s positioning of Mr. Acosta as Mr. Epstein’s protector is this glaring fact: It wasn’t Mr. Acosta but New York County’s district attorney—a member of the city’s ruling Democratic elite, with the illustrious name of Cyrus Vance Jr.—who in 2011 sought to undo Mr. Acosta’s work by relieving Mr. Epstein of his Level 3 sex offender status in New York state.
But then Mr. Vance is not a member of the Trump administration. . . .
It also bears asking: Would the Herald even have invested in reporting the Epstein story if it couldn’t also have flounced up an anti-Trump angle?
Yes, it’s been rough couple of decades for the newspaper business. At the kindest, the Herald should have had the confidence to rest its claim to public attention on what it had to reveal about Mr. Epstein’s behavior rather than trying so pathetically to annex its reporting to an au courant anti-Trump narrative.
Think of the press as Democratic Party operatives with bylines — and Democratic Party operative editors — and you won’t go far wrong.
HMM: Vanity Fair: Trump Knew Jeffrey Epstein Had Incriminating Photos of Bill Clinton. “What makes Vanity Fair’s report double fascinating is that the leftist magazine clearly implies that Epstein doesn’t have any dirt on Trump himself. On Twitter, leftist users have been tweeting hopefully about how this could ruin Trump’s presidency. Vanity Fair knows better. When push comes to shove, this case will involve high-ranking and extremely influential Democrats.”
LORD, BUT SHE’S STUPID: AOC: ‘Patriarchy Has No Gender.’
ROGER KIMBALL: ‘We will no longer deal with him’ was the end of Sir Kim Darroch. “In the world of Sir Kim, Donald Trump is, or should be, an impossibility. Many commentators noted that he, like the rest of the world, believed that Hillary Clinton (remember her?) was the inevitable, necessary winner of the 2016 US presidential election. The fact that that ineluctable eventuality failed to materialize was not only an intellectual stupefaction, it was a political, an existential outrage. Sir Kim was not alone in his opinions about the failures of Donald Trump and his administration. The entire confraternity of honorary Sir Humphreys — from Paul Ryan on down — thought the same. Sir Kim’s sin was not opining as he did but rather in being exposed as having done so.”
If these elites had a better track record, maybe they’d deserve the deference they demand. But they don’t, and in the Trump era they’ve been revealed as not only incompetent, but also petty and immature, even as they pretend to be the adults in the room.
Plus: “Serious people in Britain should focus their attention on discovering the person or persons who leaked the cables. Those responsible did so in part to embarrass Donald Trump, of course, but they did it also in order to interfere in the forthcoming British election.”
I REMEMBER THAT, AND HOW MY FLIGHT GOT CANCELLED DUE TO LOUSY WEATHER: Laurence Jarvik: Flashback: In Honor of the July 11, 2019 White House Social Media Summit.
BUBBLES BURST: Joe Montana Relists California Estate at 41% Discount. “Football great Joe Montana is giving up his castle—a roughly 500-acre European-style estate in California wine country—for $28.9 million, or 41% less than he first sought a decade ago.”
AOC ON COMMITTEE ASSIGNMENTS: ‘I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy.’ “Apparently the stress of having to sit in congress, as a congresswoman, and endure congressional-type activities is cutting into her real job of being on social media and shedding fake tears over empty parking lots. She said, ‘I was assigned to some of the busiest committees and four subcommittees. So my hands are full. And sometimes I wonder if they’re trying to keep me busy’.”
Bless her heart.
REQUEST FOR LINKS: I’m writing a book chapter about how “wokism” is creeping into STEM topics. I’ve got some links but I’d love more.
Oh, and honest I already know it’s happening and I don’t approve, but I want sources.
THE RISE OF “AMISH FICTION:” “It turns out that the novels aren’t written by the Amish, nor are they written for an Amish audience. Instead, they are targeted at a fairly specific demographic, over-50 Evangelical women, offering a chaste romance tale with a happy ending and in a setting guaranteed to have nothing pornographic or impure, like an uncovered ankle.”
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D.D. HARRIMAN, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Virgin Galactic to become first public spaceflight company.
UGH: The House NDAA Puts the Mighty U.S. Military at Risk.
The biggest disparity to be reconciled is the $13.4 billion dollar difference in topline spending. The Senate authorized $746.4 billion, while the House provides only $733 billion. While both represent increases from the 2019 defense budget, the higher number is needed if the Pentagon is to rebuild readiness and prepare adequately for a great-power competition, as described in the National Defense Strategy.
The bipartisan National Defense Strategy Commission, former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General Joseph Dunford, and others have advised that implementing the strategy will require annual defense spending increases of 3-5 percent above inflation. The Senate bill would meet that target, growing the defense budget by 4.2 percent. The House bill provides only 2.4 percent growth.
Amendments pending in the House could split conferees even further apart.
For example, multiple amendments appear to try to shift the Pentagon’s focus from defense of the nation to defense of the environment. One would ratchet up the renewable energy mandate for defense installations. Another would assign Space Force the task of monitoring climate change. There are more amendments along these lines.
But of course.
MORE EVIDENCE FOR MY THEORY THAT SEGREGATING PEOPLE BY AGE IS INHERENTLY DESTRUCTIVE: Ageism Disappears When Young and Old Spend Time Together.
In The New School, I talked about the destructive effect of corralling teenagers into high schools where the only peer approval they could get comes from other teenagers, as opposed to having them out among adults, as was the norm for nearly all of human existence.
CHANGE: Airbus Poised to Overtake Boeing as Biggest Plane Maker.
The U.S. aerospace giant’s best-selling MAX has been barred by safety regulators from flying passengers for almost four months, far longer than Boeing, its investors and airlines expected. Consumers have expressed misgivings about getting on the plane again, and a dearth of new sales to carriers has helped drain about $50 billion from Boeing’s market value since it peaked in March.
The company’s delivery slump has reverberated across an aerospace industry that had been enjoying an unprecedented decadelong boom. Some suppliers have been forced to trim output and idle staff, while airlines have had to cancel thousands of flights and seek compensation from the plane maker.
More than 150 undelivered MAX jets are parked at sites around the U.S., along with the 380 in airlines’ hands that were grounded by regulators in March.
Ouch.
PEROT WAS A BIG TRUMP FAN: Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show Ross Perot contributed the maximum legal amount to President Donald Trump during the 2016 Republican presidential primary and in the general election against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
UPDATE: The Epoch Times has corrected its original story to say it was Perot’s son, not Perot, who made the contributions to Trump in 2016.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Teens who abuse opioids likely to use heroin, study says.
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