GOOD FOR GREENLAND: Study: Greenland could sell its sand, profit from melting glaciers.
Archive for 2019
February 12, 2019
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Public Education’s Dirty Secret.
The trove of documents turned over by the FBI, in response to a lawsuit by the transparency group Judicial Watch, also included discussions by former FBI lawyer Lisa Page concerning a potential quid-pro-quo between the State Department and the FBI — in which the FBI would agree to downgrade the classification level of a Clinton email in exchange for more legal attache positions that would benefit the agency abroad. There was no indication such a quid-pro-quo ever took place.
And, in the face of mounting criticism aimed at the FBI, the documents revealed that Comey quoted the 19th century poet Ralph Waldo Emerson by assuring his subordinates, “To be great is to be misunderstood.”
The FBI did not respond to Fox News’ request for comment on the released emails.
Much more at the link.
SHE’S FROM A PROTECTED CLASS: Why Ilhan Omar won’t pay for peddling bigotry. Also, she represents a group of bigots who are now a core Democrat constituency.
INCONVENIENT TRUTHS: NY Times: Tech is Splitting the Workplace in Two.
The article focuses on Phoenix, Arizona, as an example of a city in which high-tech is prominent, but the percentage of workers in low-skilled, low-wage jobs hasn’t move for forty years. The implied solution, of course, is government intervention.
You might think it would be impossible to write a lengthy article of this sort *without even mentioning* the huge influx of low-skilled labor from Mexico to Arizona in that timeframe, well over 50% of whom have been undocumented since 1990. You might think so, but you’d be wrong.
Putting aside what one thinks of immigration, legal or otherwise, it seems rather obvious that if a city is consistently importing poorly-educated workers who don’t speak English, most of whom have no legal residency status and cannot work legally, the percentage of workers in low-skilled, low-wage jobs is going to stay high.
HOW DO YOU DO, FELLOW KIDS? Kamala Harris Got So High Smoking Weed in College She Thought She Was Listening To Snoop Dogg and Tupac.
In an interview yesterday with the radio show The Breakfast Club, Harris admitted to smoking weed in college (“I did inhale,” she said, laughing, “I just broke news!”) and that she listened to Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur while getting high. Here’s the problem: Harris graduated from Howard in 1986 and law school in 1989. Snoop Dogg, then known as Snoop Doggy Dogg, didn’t get started until 1992 and Tupac’s “career did not take off until the early 1990s when he debuted in Digital Underground’s ‘Same Song’ from the soundtrack to the 1991 film Nothing but Trouble.”
So either Harris was baked enough to time travel or she hit the bong after being in school. Not cool for a candidate whose slogan is “speaking truth, demanding justice.” Most likely, she’s just trying to curate a playlist that sends the right message. In this, she’s hardly alone.
To be fair, it’s arguably not the worst case of time travel by a Democrat on the campaign circuit.
(Classical reference in headline.)
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Social media use could make it harder to make friends, study says.
ENGLISH LIBERTY: Motorist who mounted ‘laser jammer’ on BMW to block speed cameras is jailed.
A businessman who attached a “laser jammer” to his BMW to block speed cameras has been locked up for THREE MONTHS.
Michael Twizell, 58 – who installed the device which works by blocking the signals that track how fast cars are travelling – was also ordered to pay a £1,500 fine for perverting the course of justice.
Police officers started investigating him when their device recorded an error code when he drove passed a police safety camera van last February on the A658 near Harrogate, North Yorkshire.
It was established that he was using a device on the front of his BMW 3-series that illegally interfered with police camera equipment.
Plus:
Speaking after the hearing, Traffic Constable Andy Forth, from the Traffic Bureau Investigations team at North Yorkshire Police, said: “To use a device which is capable of interfering with police speed measurement is clearly as shown today a very serious matter.
Good to know where Britain’s priorities are.
DEBRA HEINE: Former Obama Border Patrol Chief Slams Dem Plan to Reduce Bed Space for Criminal Aliens. “He said the plan would lead to the creation of a ‘sanctuary country’.”
Feature, not a bug.
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: How Kathleen Kennedy and Politics Cost Disney $3.7 Billion. “In plain English – Kathleen Kennedy wiped out 95% of the Star Wars franchise value.”
VIRGINIA DEMS WILL ONLY RESIGN FOR REAL SCANDAL LIKE WEARING A … As Glenn is wont to say, HEH. These Babylon Bee people are gifted satirists, so enjoy them now while you still can. The PC police will be calling on them soon enough.
ROD DREHER ON ‘CULTURAL TOTALITARIANISM:’
Once you start seeing our own culture through the eyes of people who grew up under communism, you can easily observe that the left’s embrace of identity politics — including woke capitalism, academia, news and entertainment media — has already built the cultural and psychological structure for left-wing totalitarianism. What they lack now is political power to write these things into law. Kavanaugh, the Covington Catholic boys, Ralph Northam, and Amelie Wen Zhao — these are all manifestations of what’s to come under the cultural socialism of our new Democrats.
Meanwhile, over at Power Line, Steve Hayward charts “The Laffer Curve of the Left:”
Well, Democrats have gotten over it. They know that the punitive taxes they wish to impose on the super rich won’t generate anywhere close to the revenue needed for their Green New Medicare-for-All Free College and Puppies-for-Everyone Deal, but no problem! We can just print all the money we need!
No, seriously, that’s their plan. The left has not only forgotten about the failure of socialism (okay, yes, yes, they never knew that in the first place, but still); they have apparently forgotten about inflation from monetary indiscipline, too. It’s called “Modern Monetary Theory,” and it says that sovereign debt is good, and that the United States is especially blessed with super-borrowing capacity because the dollar reign supreme. So we should borrow like there’s no tomorrow. Of course, since we’re reliably informed that we only have 12 years lefty to solve climate change, why not?
A lot can go wrong in a decade and change in a socialist administration that prints money like it’s no tomorrow. Just ask the Weimar Republic, where in 1923, this could buy you a loaf of bread — until it couldn’t:
BRUCE BAWER: Anti-Americanism: As German as Apple Strudel. “Germans overwhelmingly dislike the United States, and it’s not about Trump.”
Going back to Spengler’s piece on German anti-patriotism from yesterday, as a teen I had a lengthy conversation with a West German gentlemen who told me that he was convinced Reagan (this was during the 1984 election) wanted nuclear war in Europe. But he didn’t seem to care much one way or the other about the outcome.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Moody’s Continues New York Law School’s Negative Financial Outlook, Citing Its 26% Operating Deficit.
CULTURE OF RACISM, YALE EDITION: Student op-ed: ‘I’m watching you, white boy.’ “Everyone knows a white boy with shiny brown hair and a saccharine smile that conceals his great ambitions.”
I challenge Yale University President Peter Salovey to speak out and condemn such bigotry.
SURE, ONCE WE HAVE THE POPULATION DENSITY OF FRANCE OR MAYBE JAPAN: Is high-speed rail in the US ever going to happen?
A lengthy article which comes down, in the end, to mindless cheerleading for the Green New Deal:
The myriad benefits of high-speed rail go far beyond the strict monetary alternative to cars and planes. For one thing, most high-speed trains are electric, and as energy generation moves away from fossil fuels, this means rail becomes significantly greener than airplanes or cars — which is why Democrats like Ocasio-Cortez included it as part of the Green New Deal. Then there are the benefits to the communities along the route, and the jobs created during construction and during use.
Maybe we could power the trains with cow farts and kill two birds with one stone.
OR AUSTRIAN: Cory Booker invents language in awkward interview: ‘Swiss! Yeah, I do not speak Swiss.’ When I was 8 I knew that the Swiss spoke three different languages. But you can count on the press not to mock him on this the way they would if he were a Republican.
THE GREEN NEW DEAL WILL MEAN TRASHING ENVIRONMENTAL LAWS: The Green New Steal…err…Deal envisages a massive and rapid transformation of society akin to mobilization for the Second World War. An under-appreciated aspect of what that means is that laws that delay projects in the name of assessing environmental impact will have to be ripped up. My colleague Myron Ebell explains:
One aspect of covering the landscape with hundreds of thousands of square miles of windmills and solar panels is that to do so would require suspending federal, state, and local environmental statutes, permitting procedures, and land use plans. Forget about the Endangered Species Act’s habitat protections and prohibitions on killing endangered birds and bats. The Clean Water Act’s wetlands protections will have to be overlooked. Environmental impact statements that now take years to prepare, years to move through the permitting process, and more years to litigate, are out the window. Wind and solar projects will have to be permitted in days.
There’s a lot more to complain about when it comes to The Great New Steal, but the duplicitous nature of the green environmental movement is on full display here.
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! De Blasio headed to New Hampshire amid 2020 speculation.
“He’ll do to America what he did to New York City” doesn’t seem like a very good campaign theme.
GLENN LOURY, JASON RILEY, MICHAEL FORTNER & OTHERS: Black scholars challenge Progressive narratives in Barriers to Black Progress Forum:
“There are stories out there. And one of the stories is that [an] unrelenting, overbearing white supremacist society won’t give black people a chance,” Brown University Professor Glenn Loury said. “And I ask them, do you believe that seven in 10 black children born to a woman without a husband, that fact, is due to an unrelenting white supremacy?”
YEAH, WELL, IT WAS BAD ENOUGH THAT AOC TOOK IT DOWN FROM HER WEBSITE, SO THE DETAILS AREN’T ITS BEST SELLING POINT: VIDEO: Students all about Ocasio-Cortez’s ‘Green New Deal’…then find out what’s in it.