BUT THE NARRATIVE! Supposedly pristine South American forest had been pre-Columbian farmland.
Hot take: European colonialism is good for the rainforest.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
July 18, 2018
OOPS: Papa John’s Founder Says It ‘Was A Mistake’ To Resign Over N-Word Comment.
“The board asked me to step down as chairman without apparently doing any investigation. I agreed, though today I believe it was a mistake to do so,” Schnatter wrote in a letter Saturday to the pizza chain’s board of directors, according to the Wall Street Journal Tuesday.
“I will not allow either my good name or the good name of the company I founded and love to be unfairly tainted,” he added.
In the letter, the pizza company founder also explained that during the training session he was asked if he was racist, to which he said, “no.”
“I then said something on the order of, Colonel Sanders used the word ‘N,’ (I actually used the word), that I would never use that word, and Papa John’s doesn’t use that word,” the former chairman explained.
Schnatter should never have allowed the Outrage Mob to collect his scalp.
LET THEM KEEP ON BELIEVING THIS: Owning People Online Really Is the Left’s Path to Victory.
HEH: Riverside gun store confronts Sacha Baron Cohen after he comes to business in disguise.
It happened at Warrior One Guns & Ammo in February 2017. That’s when owner Norris Sweidan told FOX 11 Cohen and a camera met him while claiming to be filming a documentary about a Hungarian immigrant wanting to buy a gun.
“He comes in, off the bat you can see in the video I’m looking like, this guy does not look like a Hungarian immigrant, tight ass leather pants, a beard, it just didn’t fit,” Sweidan said. “The moment his words came out of his mouth I was like this guy is full of s***.”
Sweidan told FOX 11 Cohen said he wanted to buy a gun, but said it with a very odd sounding accent he didn’t find credible.
“I’m looking at the producer and I’m just like am I being fooled right here?” Sweidan said. “And I just kept looking at the guy and I was like you’re Borat, as soon as I said that his eyes just looked at me like, and he did a turn right out the door.”
He says after Cohen left the store, he left his crew behind.
It says something that a small business owner is less gullible than a not-insignificant percentage of our political class.
But as Jeff Goldstein tweeted, the exchange “probably won’t make the final cut” of Cohen’s movie.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Russiagate is a Religion.
Some people hate Trump so intensely they’re willing to take the word of a professional liar and manipulator as scripture. In fact, Brennan is so uniquely skilled at the dark art of deception, Trevor Timm, executive direction of the Freedom of the Press foundation described him in the following manner in a must read 2014 article: “this is the type of spy who apologizes even though he’s not sorry, who lies because he doesn’t like to tell the truth.” The article also refers to him as “the most talented liar in Washington.” This is the sort of hero the phony “resistance” is rallying around. No thank you.
It wasn’t just Brennan, of course. The mental disorder colloquially known as Trump Derangement Syndrome is widely distributed throughout society at this point. Baseless accusations of treason were thrown around casually by all sorts of TDS sufferers, including sitting members of Congress. To see the extent of the disease, take a look at the show put on by Democratic Congressman from Washington state, Rep. Adam Smith.
It says a lot that the resistance itself doesn’t even believe its own nonsense. They’re just using hyperbolic and dangerous language to make people crazy and feed more TDS.
Young religions typically don’t deal well with unbelievers, heretics, or apostates.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Instagram’s Growing Bot Problem. “Instagram, which recently reached a billion users, might have as many as 95 million bots posing as real accounts on its platform, according to a new study conducted for The Information by the research firm Ghost Data.”
One solution is to avoid social media. Another is to create your own content rather than reposting some bot’s.
PRIVACY: Mastercard Wins a Patent to Link Cryptocurrency With Fiat Accounts.
With Mastercard’s latest patent, we’re getting closer to using our cryptocurrency credit cards to purchase goods. According to the filing, the method addresses the storing of both fiat and cryptocurrencies under one profile. This means, as a user, you’d have two linked accounts with your bank — one for your fiat wealth, and one for crypto.
In the document, Mastercard justifies the patent explaining how users have increasingly preferred cryptocurrencies to fiat currencies due to its anonymity. The company believes some consumers have chosen digital currencies in an effort to prevent fraud.
However, Mastercard argues cryptocurrencies ensure very little protection to the receivers of funds. While traditional fiat payments are processed in a matter of seconds, crypto transactions can sometimes take as long as ten minutes. If you’re trying to pay with cryptocurrencies at a retail store, for example, that delayed confirmation can be an issue.
Additional, the document states people are taken aback by cryptocurrencies and the blockchain because they’re so different from traditional payment methods. For that reason, combining systems already in place for fiat currencies with the digital assets could potentially promote adoption while retaining the benefits of decentralization.
Smart.
SCRAPPLEFACE: New Evidence Indicates You Were Right All Along.
I knew it.
VIDEO: Ruth Bader Ginsburg Movie Does Violence to the Constitution — Just Like RBG Herself. “Movie cuts key words from the Constitution.”
Of course it does.
WINNING: America’s Oil And Gas Boom Is Spreading Through The Country.
In the DJ Basin, Bernadette Johnson, vice president for market intelligence at DrillingInfo told an audience in Littleton, CO in June that “Since December, we have seen oil grow by nearly 10,000 barrels per day every month,” and that DrillingInfo expects the rebound to continue in the coming months based on continued strong commodity prices.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration reports that a rising rig count led to a very healthy month-over-month increase in Eagle Ford Shale crude production of 35,000 barrels per day. The looming bottleneck in Permian Basin pipeline takeaway capacity will likely lead to even more rigs coming to the Eagle Ford region in the 2nd half of the year.
According to Wood Mackenzie, oil and gas production in deepwater Gulf of Mexico is expected to reach an all-time record high this year at 1.935 million boepd, of which 80 percent is oil—beating the previous record from 2009 by nearly 10 percent and representing 13-percent growth year over year.
A survey released last Friday by the Federal Reserve branch of Kansas City indicates that oil and gas activity in Oklahoma’s SCOOP/STACK play region continues to expand. Chad Wilkerson, vice president and economist at the Oklahoma City branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, said that “Expectations are nearly as high as they have ever been. Executives are pretty optimistic about future drilling activity.” The Kansas City Fed’s June report indicated that SCOOP/STACK production had reached record levels at the first of the year for both oil and natural gas, and projected that both would rise throughout 2018.
More at the link — much more. But what all these data points have in common is that it seems like our energy boom is only just getting started.
EVERGREEN: Democrats Need To Get A Grip On Reality. “This week Politico published an opinion piece headlined: “Putin’s Attack on the U.S. Is Our Pearl Harbor,” which demeaned the sacrifice of American soldiers by likening a military attack on American soil that brought us into the bloodiest war mankind has ever experienced to email phishing.”
More from David Harsanyi:
On MSNBC, where illiterate histrionic analogies litter coverage every day, a contributor compared Donald Trump’s meeting in Helsinki with Vladimir Putin to Pearl Harbor and Kristallnacht, just to be safe.
Social media is teeming with similar hyperbole — “treason,” “traitor,” etc . — and not just from anonymous trolls. It’s difficult to accept anyone with a working brain actually believes this rhetoric, and they certainly don’t act like it. But if well-heeled pundits keep telling everyone The Fourth Reich is imminent before retiring to their townhouses in Capitol Hill every night, some people might actually start believing them. And if email phishing and hacking is truly comparable to Pearl Harbor or Kristallnacht or the Holocaust there’s really no reason why those accepting these analogies shouldn’t also support military reprisals abroad and coups at home.
All the Democrats have to do is not act crazy, and… you know the rest.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Clarifies Remarks and Much, Much More. “Resistance agitator Sen. Chuck Schumer wants hearings and Trump’s tax returns. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee next week “to explain Trump’s one-on-one meetings with the ruthless strongmen.” The appearance was pushed by Iran-friendly GOP Senator Bob Corker.”
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: A.G. Underwood And Gov. Cuomo Announce Lawsuit To Protect New York Taxpayers From Drastic Cut In State And Local Tax Deduction. “The lawsuit argues that the new SALT cap was enacted to target New York and similarly situated states, that it interferes with states’ rights to make their own fiscal decisions, and that it will disproportionately harm taxpayers in these states.”
I’m so old, I remember when paying your fair share was patriotic.
More to the point, the relevant law reads: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.” And the courts have ruled consistently that the 16th Amendment’s broad powers are, well, really broad.
But if Underwood and Cuomo want to spearhead a movement to repeal the 16th, I’d be cool with that.
IS THERE ANYTHING SOCIALISTS CAN’T SCREW UP? Crab meat from Venezuela not safe, FDA and CDC warn.
As of July 12, there have been 12 cases in multiple states of Vibrio parahaemolyticus, which is a bacteria that can cause gastrointestinal illness in humans. It’s also being linked to the imported crabmeat.
Symptoms of Vibrio parahaemolyticus include diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal cramps, nausea, fever, and stomach pain.
It is only crab meat imported from Venezuela that is being implicated, so the FDA is advising restaurants and retailers to not serve crustaceans tracing back to the country.
Another reason sanctions on Venezuela are redundant: What little the socialists can bring to market, few people should be willing to buy.
WELL, BYE: Dem Campaign Manager Leaves Race in Wake of Free Beacon Exposé. “Tedra Cobb manager out after video showing candidate won’t tell public her true position on banning certain guns.”
Mike Szustak, who has been running Cobb’s campaign since April, told the Watertown Daily Times that he was no longer working on the campaign. It is not clear if he quit or if he was fired.
The move comes in the aftermath of a Washington Free Beacon report on a video showing Cobb telling a group of teen supporters that she could not publicly state her desire for a ban on certain rifles for fear that her view is unpopular and could cost her the election.
“When I was at this thing today, it was the first table I was at, a woman said, ‘How do you feel about assault rifles?’ And I said they should be banned,” Cobb said in the video. “And I said, you know, people were getting up to go, to go get their lunch because it was a buffet, and I just said to her, I want you to know Cindy, I cannot say that.”
I can’t help but notice that the wanna-be gun-grabber candidate is still in the race.
BLUE WAVE? Ted Cruz Senate Race Opponent Beto O’Rourke calls for Trump’s impeachment over Putin summit.
This comes on the heels of New York congressional candidate and “democratic” socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s call to “occupy” U.S. airports.
All Democrats have to do is not act crazy, and they can’t even manage that.
BIG LEAGUE POLITICS: Peter Strzok Grew Up In Iran, Worked As Obama and Brennan’s Envoy To Iranian Regime.
There’s a lot to chew on here, much of it conjecture, but it’s an interesting read.
D. C. MCALLISTER: Trump’s Helsinki Comments Were a Defense of U.S. Voters, Not of Russia. “The intel community has assaulted the legitimacy of the voters’ choice.”
July 17, 2018
That’ll go over well.
I’LL DRINK TO THAT: Raise a glass to GOP tax cuts! You can literally drink up the benefits.
The festive drink you’ll be holding during your beach vacation might have been produced with the assistance of full business expensing. The provision allows businesses to deduct the full cost of new equipment from their taxes the same year they purchase the equipment. In the past, deductions occurred over a lengthy, multiyear period.
For local breweries, distilleries, and wineries, buying more equipment means growing their business. It also means expanding positive economic impacts to manufacturers who produce barrels, brewing equipment and delivery vehicles.
Jose Mallea, owner of Biscayne Bay Craft Brewery in Miami, quickly took advantage of full business expensing. Following the passage of tax cuts he purchased $100,000 in new equipment and hired two new employees.
Trickle down bubbles up.