WELL, I GUESS YOU’RE GONNA HAVE TO GO WAKE THEM UP NOW, WON’T YOU? Ukrainian Officials Having Trouble Getting the DOJ’s Attention on Ukrainian-Democrat 2016 Collusion Efforts.
I’m still hoping for a more-proactive DOJ with Bob Barr at the helm.
(Classical reference in the headline.)
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Eric Swalwell announces candidacy on Colbert.
The story is from late last week, but the detail about a “signal detector to seek hidden cameras” is new. I wonder if that was something commercially available, or if it’s state-actor level gear.
I THINK IT’S TOO LATE TO WORRY ABOUT THAT: Students protest visiting Professor Brett Kavanaugh as threat to ‘mental health.’ A small group of loudmouths who would be ignored — and mocked — in a healthy society.
LET’S GET FRACKING: Fresh violence in Libya could provide new shock to oil markets amid tightening global supply.
Actually, we already are: Exxon Plans for $15 per Barrel Permian Costs.
The scale of Exxon’s drilling means that it can spread its costs over such a big operation that the basin will become competitive with almost anywhere in the world, Staale Gjervik, president of XTO Energy, the supermajor’s shale division, said in an interview.
Development, operating and land acquisition costs will be “in and around $15 a barrel,” he said on the sidelines of the CERAWeek Conference by IHS Markit in Houston. West Texas Intermediate futures traded at almost $59 on Thursday. “The way we are approaching it is very unique compared to most, if not really everybody out there, as far as the scale,” he said.
The shale revolution has made the Permian into the world’s largest shale field, with production topping 4 million barrels a day, almost as much as Iraq, OPEC’s second-biggest member. But the rapid growth has often meant that producers burn cash flow to reinvest in the expansion, prompting investors to call on them to focus more on returns in 2019.
The problem is no longer getting that much shale oil out of the ground, but getting the pipeline infrastructure in place to deliver it to market. But we’re working on that, too.
EVEN BETTER WOULD BE ELIMINATING STATE LICENSES: Arizona Will Be First State to Recognize Out-of-State Occupational Licenses.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: UCLA event compares communist dictator Che Guevara to Jesus. To be fair, Che wasn’t really a dictator, just a dictator’s henchman.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: AG Barr to Testify Today and Much, Much More. “These people are ridiculous. They all read Barr’s letter and they all know he is going to release as much of the report that he is legally able to. He provided the findings of the report so that people wouldn’t have to wait until the DOJ reviewed it and removed information that is legally prohibited from being released. And also he released the findings so that that weasels in the DOJ couldn’t drip out spun information to trash the president while the review was being completed. True story. Do these idiots think Barr lied about Mueller’s findings while Mueller stays quiet about it while helping Barr review the report? Come on now. This is such a political spectacle.”
It’s all they have.
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DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Rod Dreher on Harvard’s Glass Menagerie.
I had mentioned to my foreign friend something I’ve heard from several of you readers of this blog who are conservative academics: that as long as old-school liberals remain in charge of faculties and academic institutions, there will be a place for right-of-center scholars. But when the Jacobin-like younger generation moves into leadership, that will be the end. He agreed, and brought up several examples from academia and academia-adjacent institutions (e.g., publishing). He told me one story about a left-liberal scholar he knows who has been turned into a non-person for questioning out loud some of aspects of au courant progressive dogma. I’m not easy to shock about things like this, but this particular story — my foreign friend named names — was for me a sign of how advanced the ideological militancy has become.
It recalled in fact an e-mail conversation I had last week with a liberal journalist friend who hates to see this closing of the left’s mind. My journalist pal said that he’s seeing on the left a moralistic refusal even to consider ideas, people, and data that contradict these leftists’ moral code. Understand: it’s not that this new breed of progressives disagrees (though they do); it’s that they believe, and believe strongly, that even to confront information that contradicts what they prefer to believe is intolerable.
Said my friend: “No wonder these people are always shocked by the latest developments in politics. They refuse to see the world as it is.”
Read the whole thing.
TRIPLING DOWN ON STUPID: Democrats Will Regret Not Walking Away When They Could. “The Democrats’ continued obsession with opening the pandora’s box of the Mueller report will only make things worse for the get-Trump crowd as the hoax chickens increasingly come home to roost.”
Mueller’s team has played dirty from the start. Contrary to the public narrative that the team was “leak-proof,” the opposite is actually true. As I recently wrote, “It has been three years of innuendo and leaks, leaks, leaks, leaks, and uncountable more examples of leaks dripping poison into the poison-addicted pens of the partisan media. The Mueller team has never had to prove anything involving Trump-Russian collusion to anyone because the special counsel needs no proof to function as a potent political weapon.”
To name two awful examples: the leak of the Cohen/Trump audio recording that appears to have been seized by the feds and the leak of the written questions to the president. Add to that list a new leak reported by the New York Times, “Some of Robert S. Mueller III’s investigators have told associates that Attorney General William P. Barr failed to adequately portray the findings of their inquiry and that they were more troubling for President Trump than Mr. Barr indicated, according to government officials and others familiar with their simmering frustrations.”
Did you get that? Anonymous sources claiming to be familiar with other anonymous sources on the Mueller team are the source for the New York Times article. Double secret hearsay. My editor would laugh in my face if I tried to publish an article with such flimsy of sourcing. But no standard is too low in the pursuit of getting Trump.
So much fake news, so little reporting.
I’VE BEEN CATALOGING SECRET SERVICE PROBLEMS FOR ABOUT AS LONG AS INSTAPUNDIT HAS BEEN AROUND, SO IT’S TIME FOR A MANAGEMENT CLEAN-OUT: Secret Service agents say ‘good riddance’ to director Alles.
Related: Failure of the Trusted Institutions.
Flashback: Why is the security around Trump so bad? Does he still have his personal security, too?
LIFE UNDER LATE SOCIALISM: Socialist Venezuela now an exploding supernova of spreading infectious disease.
REMINDER: If you’re emailing me, use the pundit address in the “contact” link above, not the old gmail account that it used to forward to. If you send to gmail, I won’t get it.
DISEASE IS ANTI-VAX, TOO: Measles cases now reach 465 in the U.S., mostly in kids. “CDC reports the second-largest number of cases in the U.S. since measles was eliminated in 2000.”
The numbers are preliminary. The 2019 tally is already the most since 2014, when 667 were reported. The most before that was 963 cases in 1994.
Cases have been confirmed in 19 states, up from 15 states the week prior. Outbreaks have hit several states, including California, Michigan and New Jersey. New York City accounted for about two-thirds of the U.S. cases reported last week.
Outbreaks have been linked to U.S. communities with pockets of unvaccinated people and travelers who get measles abroad.
Unexpectedly.
UNDER PRESSURE: Harvard Flinches And Admits A Few More Asians.
YOU WILL UNDERGO RACIAL SENSITIVITY TRAINING: When I was a child, teachers used to punish the whole class when they couldn’t identify an actual wrongdoer. It didn’t make us resolve to do better. Instead, it greatly annoyed us.
It will likely do the same to the tens of thousands of students, faculty, and staff members who are going to be forced to undergo racial sensitivity training by the University of Tennessee. They, rather than the individuals in the tasteless photo on Instagram that triggered this response, are being punished. As Hans Bader points out in Liberty Unyielding, mass training like this costs millions of dollars in lost work and study time. But it’s worth it because … no wait … I can’t think why it would be worth it.
Bader has a lot more to say, including on some of the legal aspects of the situation. Read his whole post.
The aspect that bothers me is how counterproductive such training may be. Instead of increasing racial harmony, it may diminish it. As Rohini Anand and Mary-Frances Winters noted in a 2008 article in the Academy of Management Learning & Education: “Many interpreted the key learning point [from their diversity training] as having to walk on egg shells around women and minorities—choosing words carefully so as not to offend.” I’ve talked to many people who have undergone such training in recent years and drawn a similar conclusion.
People don’t like walking on eggshells. They will avoid contact with those who make them feel that way. It’s the precise opposite of what we want.
Why do employers and schools nevertheless insist on such training? As Bader points out, they may feel they reduce the likelihood of a lawsuit against them. Another interesting question is: Why do diversity advocates insist on it? Why not instead promote activities like sports and group projects that promote integration rather than convince students that race really does matter? Why not ask schools to promote integration by doing away with separate dormitories for racial groups and other kinds of campus separatism? My fear is that the answer is while diversity training may have started out as an effort to help achieve something worthwhile it has become simply a big business.
As Eric Hoffer famously said, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”
THAT WOULD BE NICE: A Growth Surprise Could Shock Markets. “Better economic data suggests expectations of low long-term yields may be overdone.”
Slowdown risks may be fading already, as recent data pointed in a healthier direction for China and the U.S., the dominant forces in the global economy. On Friday, U.S. jobs data for March came in higher than expected. And Chinese manufacturing surveys for March picked up after a rough start to the year.
“A surprise in the second half would be a bigger issue, if it turns out significantly stronger again then the bond market will be in for a real shock,” said Ajay Rajadhyaksha, Head of Macro Research, Barclays .
A healthier U.S. growth picture could be a trigger. The first-quarter was artificially weak and difficult to estimate because of things like the government shutdown, the polar vortex and last year’s boost from tax cuts, said Ralf Preusser, rates strategist at Bank of America . “But the labor market is solid and fiscal policy remains supportive,” he said. He added: “I think there is quite a high chance of a positive GDP surprise, Q2 and Q3 should be above trend.”
Remember, economists have correctly predicted nine out of the previous four recessions, and two others they never saw coming.
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SAN FRANCISCO’S SLOW-MOTION SUICIDE:
Magnificent in the distance, San Francisco is now shockingly ugly up close. In the decade I have lived here, the city has achieved the seemingly impossible: It has combined the expensive and the bland and the appalling into a new form of decadence. To the untrained eye, it looks magical: a city of the future, a city of gasps. Then, slowly, it reveals itself to be a city of lies, one that dismisses the idea of city living.
The distant future Silicon Valley sells with the zeal of a crusader — all the lip service it pays to making the world a better place — shimmers like fool’s gold, monopolistic surveillance capitalism cloaked in the language of the common good. Billboards off the highway announce the coming of artificial intelligence as new nonprofits pop up to defend us against HAL and Skynet, but in reality “AI” is machine learning — pattern-recognition software parsing out subtle statistical connections to win board games and show you better ads.
With a devilish consistency, this city sets you up for disappointment.
Speaking of which, “In San Francisco, making a living from your billionaire neighbor’s trash,” the San Francisco Chronicle notes, in a piece whose URL is “The-Trickle-Down-Economics-of-Trash-Picking:”
There’s a child’s pink bicycle helmet that Orta dug out from the garbage bin across the street from Zuckerberg’s house. And a vacuum cleaner, a hair dryer, a coffee machine — all in working condition — and a pile of clothes that he carried home in a Whole Foods paper bag retrieved from Zuckerberg’s bin.
A military veteran who fell into homelessness and now lives in government-subsidized housing, Orta is a full-time trash picker, part of an underground economy in San Francisco of people who work the sidewalks in front of multimillion-dollar homes, rummaging for things they can sell.
Trash picking is a profession more often associated with shantytowns and favelas than a city at the doorstep of Silicon Valley. The Global Alliance of Waste Pickers, a nonprofit research and advocacy organization, counts more than 400 trash picking organizations across the globe, almost all of them in Latin America, Africa and southern Asia.
But trash scavengers exist in many U.S. cities and, like the rampant homelessness in San Francisco, are a signpost of the extremes of U.S. capitalism. A snapshot from 2019: One of the world’s richest men and a trash picker, living a few minutes’ walk from each other.
Capitalism isn’t to blame here; as Thomas Sowell has written, it’s the Bay Area’s built-in “Housing Price of Liberalism.” As Sowell writes, “Much as many liberals like to put guilt trips on other people, they seldom seek out, much less acknowledge and take responsibility for, the bad consequences of their own actions.”
KEEP VOTING UNTIL THE DESIRED RESULT IS ACHIEVED: Theresa May Considering Vote On Second Referendum As Brexit Talks Stall.
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