WEIRDLY, IT’S ONLY ELITES WHO SEEM TO APPROVE OF ELITES BEING ALLOWED TO DISCRIMINATE ON THE BASIS OF RACE: Survey finds 3 in 4 voters oppose Supreme Court allowing race in college admissions.
Archive for 2019
November 4, 2019
BUSTING THE NARRATIVE ALL OVER THE PLACE: Kanye West: ‘The Richest Thing You Can Have Is As Many Children As Possible.’
Related: Famous Rapper Kanye West Shares His Born Again Testimony. “Now, I’m letting you know what Jesus has done for me and in that, I’m no longer a slave. I’m a son now, a son of God – I’m free.”
AERIAL SPRAY ATTACKING INVASIVE VEGETATION: An Air Force Reserve C-130 Hercules flies over the Utah Test and Training Range during an aerial spray operation.
BREZHNEV IN THE DARK: “‘That was the first clue I had that the system was going to fall,’ said my Russian interlocutor. He meant that a system that caused a globally humiliating mistake like that to happen, because certain people in authority thought they knew better, and everybody below them was reasonably terrified to tell them no — a system like that was going to collapse.”
THIS IS WHY THE DEEP STATE HAD TO GET ASSANGE: Do Attorney General William Barr and U.S. Attorney John Durham know that when they talk to British intel they aren’t conversing with friends? The Last Refuge sorts out the leads, the rabbit holes and false fronts.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: VIDEO: Self-identified teacher caught on camera berating conservative students.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: ‘Top Tier’ Candidate Campaign Death Watch.
Harris folded up shop in New Hampshire last week and has now put all of her eggs in the Iowa basket. As of this writing, Real Clear Politics has Harris in sixth place there.
What’s most stunning is that Harris has spent more time than any other candidate in Iowa the past couple of months. If you look at the chart on RCP you can see that she has been cratering since September, indicating that she’s the kind of candidate who does worse once the votes get to know her better.
Almost Hillary Clinton-esque.
None of the potential nominees pass my “Could I Stand to See You on TV for the Next Four Years” test, but Harris is worse than most.
“HATE-FILLED.” “It’s Okay To Be White” flyers found on university campus.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: University of Chicago projected to be the first U.S. university to cost $100,000 a year. But fewer students are paying the full tuition. Is widespread discounting helping more people afford higher education, or just making it more complicated?
NOT OUR CIRCUS: U.S. Troop Withdrawal Creates Opening for Revitalized Syrian Regime.
The Trump administration’s decision to withdraw most U.S. troops from northeastern Syria reordered the security landscape in the country, opening the door for Mr. Assad to reclaim areas he hasn’t held in years.
The Syrian leader will still face numerous challenges. The U.S. is keeping some troops behind to guard oil fields, Turkish forces are pushing into northern Syria and Kurds governing swaths of eastern Syria want to hold on to at least some autonomy.
Kurdish forces have turned to Mr. Assad for protection against the Turkish offensive bent on driving them away from its border, allowing the Syrian military to return and begin re-establishing the central Damascus government’s control.
“Definitely he gains without having to pay or fight,” said a Western diplomat in the region. “Once you give the keys over, it means the regime will, perhaps over some time, return to complete control.”
We’ve seen the local alternative to the Assad regime, and it’s worse.
I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN BILLIONAIRES’ MONEY IN POLITICS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE BAD: Left-wing billionaires spend millions on Virginia elections.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The left seeks to “normalize” crime. At Power Line, Paul Mirengoff writes:
The Washington Post has a Sunday magazine. This week, the entire magazine, an unusually thick edition, is devoted to the topic of prison. All of the articles are written by people who are incarcerated now or were incarcerated in the past. The illustrations and photographs are also exclusively by this cohort.
The lead article is by Piper Kerman. She served 13 months in federal prison for money laundering and drug trafficking. Thirteen months seems like a lenient sentence for these offenses.
The illustration accompanying Kerman’s article is by Thomas Bartlett Whitaker. He was sentenced to death for the murder of his mother and brother, but had that sentence commuted. Whitaker is serving life in prison. That sentence too seems lenient.
The title of Kerman’s article is “We’ve Normalized Prison.” But if incarceration is frequent enough to have been “normalized,” this isn’t the work of “we.” It’s the work of criminals. If they committed less crime or abstained altogether, incarceration wouldn’t be normal.
Meanwhile, back in saner times, the Atlantic magazine put the “Broken Windows” theory of crime prevention on the map with their 1982 article by George L. Kelling and James Q. Wilson. The techniques outlined in the article were used brilliantly by Rudy Giuliani and police commissioner William Bratton to turn New York around in 1990 after the city hit rock bottom during the Dinkins era. Whatever Giuliani’s successor Michael Bloomberg’s obsessions with “green” energy, banning Big Gulps, and turning Manhattan into one giant bicycle lane, he was smart enough to leave Giuliani’s crime prevention techniques largely in place.
Today though, the Atlantic has an article headlined “The Porch Pirate of [San Francisco’s] Potrero Hill Can’t Believe It Came to This: When a longtime resident started stealing her neighbors’ Amazon packages, she entered a vortex of smart cameras, Nextdoor rants, and cellphone surveillance.” The article attempts to make a serial thief of Amazon packages the victim of her neighbors’ high-tech efforts to keep their neighborhood safe, and have their property safely delivered:
Yet around that time, Fairley relapsed on drugs, and the deliveries that were dropped daily on her neighbors’ porches caught her attention. At that point, she didn’t know about the cameras or Nextdoor. In the months that followed, the police would find a cache of the neighbors’ belongings and mail in her possession. Her sister told me that Fairley generally sold the packages “for a little bit of nothing, just to get high,” or ate any deliveries that contained food. (Police say thieves generally sell their pickings on eBay, Craigslist, or to middlemen, who may hawk them at flea markets.) Fairley insisted to me that she stole only a small number of items—“I did it maybe once or twice, three times at the most; it wasn’t like a new job I went into”—and that she sold just one of them, a set of storage bins, for about $20. (She also told me she stole mostly in order to buy necessities, not drugs.) She thought the packages would be replaced by Amazon and other senders, so her gain wouldn’t be her neighbors’ loss. “That’s what eased my conscience taking someone’s property, because I’m not a bad person, it was just a bad choice,” she told me. “I was in a desperate state.”
As Fairley started hitting the stoops, her neighbors took to Nextdoor to discuss what to do. One group thought it was naive to expect a package to sit undisturbed for hours on a city stoop. Another camp felt the residents deserved the same rights to deliveries as in any other town. A third group was the solutions crowd: They advised having the boxes delivered to workplaces, or to Amazon Hub Locker, or with Amazon Key, a smart-lock system that allows couriers to drop packages directly inside a home or car. It turns out that while delivering packages is big business, so is thwarting their theft.
* * * * * * * *
While porch cams have been used to investigate cases as serious as homicides, the surveillance and neighborhood social networking typically make a particular type of crime especially visible: those lower-level ones happening out in public, committed by the poorest. Despite the much higher cost of white-collar crime, it seems to cause less societal hand-wringing than what might be caught on a Ring camera, said W. David Ball, a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law. “Did people really feel that crime was ‘out of control’ after Theranos?” he said. “People lost hundreds of millions of dollars. You would have to break into every single car in San Francisco for the next ten years to amount to the amount stolen under Theranos.”
That perspective was little comfort to San Franciscans in late 2017, when the city was the nation’s leader in property crime. In Potrero, Fairley had been captured on camera enough times, snatching packages or walking down the street with bundles of mail, that many in the neighborhood had a face and a name to attach to their generalized anger about ongoing nuisances. Fairley was correct in thinking that, in many cases, Amazon will replace pilfered packages. Her major miscalculation was in thinking that her neighbors would, therefore, just shrug and move on.
Funny that — even in far left San Francisco.
HMM: With Aramco IPO approval, China cozies up to Saudis.
Now, as the royal family seeks to monetize its massive state-run oil company, Saudi Aramco, with an initial public offering that could value it near $2 trillion, Chinese banks are looking to play a key role in the IPO both by underwriting shares and purchasing the stock, people with direct knowledge of the matter tell FOX Business. A formal announcement on the IPO came Sunday.
“China spreads its resources around in a geopolitically strategic way,” said Charles Horner, a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute. “And the Chinese have a voracious appetite for oil, which makes a relationship with Saudi Arabia particularly important.”
An outside spokesman for the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, Public Investment Fund, declined comment. A spokesman at the Chinese Ministry of Commerce did not respond to a request for comment.
The Chinese government has been making a concerted effort to cozy up to the Saudis as the royal family seeks to modernize the nation and open itself to outside investment ahead of Saudi Aramco’s pending deal. In February of this year, bin Salman went to Beijing to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping to hammer out a trade deal with $28 billion in economic agreements. “The Silk Road initiative and China’s strategic orientation are very much in line with the kingdom’s Vision 2030,” bin Salman said in a statement about the two countries.
The more we frack, the less any of this intrigue matters.
HE LIKES IT: John Fund reviews “No Safe Spaces.”
CLOSING IN ON SIX MONTHS OF PROTESTS: Protesters, Politician Attacked in Hong Kong Demonstrations.
THANKSGIVING IS COMING: Here’s my recipe for Thanksgiving Leg of Lamb.