Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The almost terminal stupidity in contemporary American culture is the sub-topic of four items today. The first from Washington Examiner posts on reviews of the movie Dunkirk.

… At USA Today, Brian Truitt laments “the fact that there are only a couple of women and no lead actors of color.” This, Truitt explains, “may rub some the wrong way.” … 

…  The Washington Free Beacon’s Alex Griswold beat me to it, explaining why Truitt’s review is so silly. But let me add one point. What measure of honor would there be to inject “actors of color” into a historical event in which no persons of color served? It would be like making the civil rights movie, Selma, but hiring all white actors to play the parts that black demonstrators played in real life. 

In a similarly silly take, at Slate.com, Dana Stevens suggests the British Army at Dunkirk was the “last bulwark against Nazi invasion of the British mainland.” 

No, this is just wrong. Even if the British Army had been captured, there were two further bulwarks against invasion. First, the British Royal Air Force (RAF). As history records, the RAF was crucial in holding off swarms of German bombers that aimed to destroy the British will to resist and means of doing so. Unless and until the RAF was defeated, the Nazis would have not been able to protect ground forces on the landing grounds and approaches to London. (Incidentally, Hitler’s idiocy in diverting German bombers away from RAF airfields and towards British cities helped the RAF win the day.) 

Second, the Royal Navy. …

Walter Williams attempts to deal with left propaganda that tries to portray slavery as an American institution.

… Large numbers of Christians were enslaved during the Ottoman wars in Europe.

White slaves were common in Europe from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages. It was only after the year 1600 that Europeans joined with Arabs and Africans and started the Atlantic slave trade.

As David P. Forsythe wrote in his book, “The Globalist,” “The fact remained that at the beginning of the nineteenth century an estimated three-quarters of all people alive were trapped in bondage against their will either in some form of slavery or serfdom.”

While slavery constitutes one of the grossest encroachments on human liberty, it is by no means unique or restricted to the Western world or United States, as many liberal academics would have us believe. Much of their indoctrination of our young people, at all levels of education, paints our nation’s founders as racist adherents to slavery, but the story is not so simple. …

 

… The most unique aspect of slavery in the Western world was the moral outrage against it, which began to emerge in the 18th century and led to massive elimination efforts. It was Britain’s military sea power that put an end to the slave trade. And our country fought a costly war that brought an end to slavery. Unfortunately, these facts about slavery are not in the lessons taught in our schools and colleges. Instead, there is gross misrepresentation and suggestion that slavery was a uniquely American practice.

A Johns Hopkins instructor told a joke and the university decided there would be hell to pay.

For the past six years, I have taught an undergraduate course on international economics at JohnsHopkinsUniversity. Most of my students thought it was a very good course. So I was shocked when, on December 6, 2016, I was met at the door of my classroom by Johns Hopkins security personnel and barred from entering.

The next day, I received a letter from my dean suspending me from my teaching duties—just three classes before the end of the semester.

What had I done to cause such a reaction by the administration? I had told a joke when discussing off-shoring, the practice of firms shifting work abroad, often in search of lower wages. Here it is:

‘An American loses his job due to his work being off-shored. He is very depressed and calls a mental health hot line. He gets a call center in Pakistan where the call center employee asks, “What seems to be the problem?” The American responds that he has lost his job due to the work being sent overseas and states, “I am really depressed and actually suicidal.” The call center employee says, “Great. Can you drive a truck?” ‘

The lecture on off-shoring took place several weeks earlier. The stated reason for my suspension was that three students (out of 68) complained that my joke had created a “hostile learning environment” in the class. That’s a charge most college administrators now take with the utmost seriousness. …

The old saw, “They don’t make them like they used to” is right, because usually things are made better. Unless, of course, the idiots in government get involved. American Lens with a post on what went wrong with gas cans. If you’re driving through an old neighborhood and see a garage sale, a good piece of advice is stop and see if they have old gas cans. Because they don’t make them like they used to. 

… Soap doesn’t work. Toilets don’t flush. Clothes washers don’t clean. Light bulbs don’t illuminate. Refrigerators break too soon. Paint discolors. Lawnmowers have to be hacked. It’s all caused by idiotic government regulations that are wrecking our lives one consumer product at a time, all in ways we hardly notice. …

… The whole trend began in (wait for it) California. Regulations began in 2000, with the idea of preventing spillage. The notion spread and was picked up by the EPA, which is always looking for new and innovative ways to spread as much human misery as possible.

An ominous regulatory announcement from the EPA came in 2007: “Starting with containers manufactured in 2009… it is expected that the new cans will be built with a simple and inexpensive permeation barrier and new spouts that close automatically.”

The government never said “no vents.” It abolished them de facto with new standards that every state had to adopt by 2009. So for the last three years, you have not been able to buy gas cans that work properly. They are not permitted to have a separate vent. The top has to close automatically. There are other silly things now, too, but the biggest problem is that they do not do well what cans are supposed to do. …

 

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

The left likes victims. That’s why they dislike Israel so much because Israel refuses to be a victim. Domestically the left wants us to be weak and is happy to be at the mercy of the world’s oil producers. Victor Davis Hanson writes on what we owe to the fracking industry because it keeps us from being victims.  

… “Peak oil” — the theory that the world had already extracted more crude oil than was still left in the ground — was America’s supposed bleak fate. Ten years ago, rising gas prices, spiraling trade deficits, and ongoing war in the oil-rich Middle East only underscored America’s precarious dependence on foreign sources of oil. …

… In 2012, when gas prices were hitting $4 a gallon in some areas, President Obama admonished the country that we “can’t just drill our way to lower gas prices.” That was a putdown of former Alaska governor and vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s refrain “Drill, baby, drill.”

Obama barred new oil and gas permits on federal lands. Steven Chu, who would become secretary of energy in the Obama administration, had earlier mused that gas prices might ideally rise to European levels (about $10 a gallon), thereby forcing Americans to turn to expensive subsidized alternative green fuels. …

… Fracking has given America virtual energy independence, freeing it from the leverage of unstable and often hostile Middle East regimes. The result is less need to interfere in the chronic squabbling in the oil-rich but unstable Persian Gulf.

Fracking has reduced oil prices and radically weakened America’s rivals and enemies. Desperate oil exporters like Iran, Russia, and Venezuela are short about half the oil income that they enjoyed ten years ago.

The late Hugo Chávez’s oil-fed socialist utopia in Venezuela is bankrupt.

What so far constrains Russian president Vladimir Putin is as much a shortage of petrodollars as fear of NATO. …

IBD Editors celebrate our energy boom. It’s great to have a president who wants our country to be strong and self-reliant.

Last week President Trump announced plans to make the U.S. not just energy independent, but a global energy powerhouse. Too bad everyone was hyperfocused on his tweets. … 

… Administration critics, naturally, are determined to downplay this announcement by saying — as both Reuters and CNBC put it, using exactly the same words — that Trump had simply “re-branded efforts … set in motion during the previous presidential administration.”

But the truth is that the difference between Trump and President Obama on energy could hardly be more stark.

While Obama mouthed the words “all of the above” when describing his own energy policy, his administration did everything it could to thwart all sources of energy except unreliable and heavily subsidized wind and solar.

Obama canceled the Keystone XL pipeline; put vast tracts of land and offshore areas off-limits to oil and gas development; denied a permit for a liquefied natural gas export terminal in Oregon; endlessly pushed for huge tax hikes on energy companies; called oil the “energy of the past”; and tried to kill coal with his “Clean Power Plan.” Nuclear power was at a standstill. Even hydropower production dropped 7% on his watch.

It is true that oil and natural gas production took off while Obama was in the White House, but this was despite Obama’s best efforts, not because of them, since those production gains were on private lands. …

More bad news for petro states like Russia and Venezuela. American Interest posts on a major find in the Gulf of Mexico.

An international consortium of oil companies has struck oil in shallow waters off the coast of Mexico in what could be one of the five largest discoveries in the past five years, and among the top fifteen in the last two decades. The find could be good for 1.4 to 2 billion barrels of light crude. …

… This is a big win for Mexico, which two years ago decided to allow private companies to participate in energy projects. If this find turns out to be as significant as early indicators seem to have it, expect even more international companies to get interested.

It’s also yet another reminder of just how off the “peak oil” prognosticators have been. This is a substantive find of easy to process light crude in shallow waters; no fracking or next-gen technological requirements will be necessary to exploit it. Greens may not love it, but the age of oil appears to not quite yet be over.

“Useful Idiots” was the term Lenin used to describe Westerners who were willing to overlook his thuggery and their loyalty to their countries for the idea of a “greater” good. Lincoln Stephens quickly comes to mind. He visited the Soviet Union in 1919 and famously said, “I have seen the future, and it works.” Stephens was not a 22 year-old know nothing. He was 53 years old in 1919 and had been a journalist since 1898. All of this is proof the media has been screwed up for a long long time and fake news is nothing new. Then there’s the NY Times guy in Moscow, Walter Duranty, who lied about the existence of the Ukrainian Famine in the early 1930′s. The Times was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting. And to its everlasting shame, the Times still touts that award. Another of the West’s ”useful idiots” was the playwright and journalist George Bernard Shaw. He met Stalin in 1931 and said Stalin was ”a Georgian gentleman with no malice in him.” This for the man who was responsible for the deaths of tens of millions.

Daily Signal tells how the Russians are helping finance and colluding with this generation’s version of useful idiots – those who want to stop fracking. As always, the left liberals want our country to be weak.

Forget about allegations of Russian interference in U.S. presidential elections for a moment, or even “collusion” between Russian officials and Trump campaign operatives.

The real action is in the European and U.S. energy markets, according to a letter from two Texas congressmen to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin that details what they call “a covert anti-fracking campaign” with “little or no paper trail.”

The Daily Signal obtained a copy of the June 29 letter to Mnuchin from Reps. Lamar Smith and Randy Weber, both Republicans who chair energy-related House panels. (See the full letter below.)

Smith and Weber quote sources saying the Russian government has been colluding with environmental groups to circulate “disinformation” and “propaganda” aimed at undermining hydraulic fracturing. Commonly called fracking, the process makes it possible to access natural gas deposits.

The sources include a former secretary-general of NATO, …

… In their letter to the treasury secretary, Smith and Weber also say the Russians have been able to advance their strategy without “a paper trail.”

They pass along reports that Russia apparently funnels the money through a Bermuda-based “shell company” known as Klein Ltd.

Tens of millions of dollars are moved from Russia through Klein “in the form of anonymous donations” to a U.S.-based nonprofit called the Sea Change Foundation.

The money, the congressmen write, then is moved in the form of grants to U.S. environmental organizations. …

For a reminder of the bullet we dodged last November, we have this quote from a May 2016 Fortune Magazine. 

… The front-runner for the Democratic party nomination (H. Clinton) used a debate in Flint, Michigan on Sunday night to oppose fracking anywhere local communities were against it, wherever it polluted air or water, and whenever companies refused to disclose what chemicals they use in the process.

“By the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places in America where fracking will continue to take place,” she said. …

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

June 23rd Pickings covered the troubles of Jane Sanders growing out of her seven year stewardship of the now bankrupt Burlington College. Under her direction, the college improvidently, and perhaps fraudulently, borrowed ten million dollars to purchase land for a new campus. Our first look was a single article from Politico. Now, WaPo investigative reporters have much more. We will have more items, but it is worth noting the first two pieces on her travails have appeared in friendly publications.

A federal investigation of a land deal led by Jane Sanders, the wife and political adviser of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), has accelerated in recent months — with prosecutors hauling off more than a dozen boxes of records from the Vermont college she once ran and calling a state official to testify before a grand jury, according to interviews and documents. 

Half a dozen people said in interviews in recent days that they had been contacted by the FBI or federal prosecutors, and former college trustees told The Washington Post that attorneys representing Jane Sanders had interviewed them to learn what potential witnesses might tell the government.

The investigation centers on the 2010 land purchase that relocated BurlingtonCollege to a new campus on more than 32 acres along Lake Champlain. While lining up a $6.7 million loan and additional financing, Jane Sanders told college trustees and lenders that the college had commitments for millions of dollars in donations that could be used to repay the loan, according to former trustees and state officials. 

Trustees said they later discovered that many of the donors had not agreed to the amounts or the timing of the donations listed on documents Jane Sanders provided to a state bonding agency and a bank. That led to her resignation in 2011 amid complaints from some trustees that she had provided inaccurate information, former college officials said. 

The land deal, the officials said, became a financial albatross for the 160-student school, contributing to its closure last year. …

A report in Fox News says the probe into Sanders’s wife was started by opposition research in the Clinton campaign. Then again, perhaps those rascally Russians did it.

Sen. Bernie Sanders’ claims that an ongoing FBI probe of his wife is based on partisan politics don’t square with the fact that it began under President Obama and appears to closely track Democratic opposition research revealed in the hacked emails of the Hillary Clinton campaign.

The FBI and U.S. Attorney in Vermont are investigating Jane O’Meara Sanders for her role in a failed 2010, $10 million college land deal that she orchestrated during her seven-year stint as president of BurlingtonCollege in Vermont.

According to a series of 2015 emails to and from Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, leaked to and published on Wikileaks, the Clinton team wrote an extensive political opposition memo entitled “Sanders Top Hits-Thematics.” The memo details Mrs. Sanders’ role in the college’s financial failure, and parallels the ongoing FBI investigation, now before a grand jury, into the scandal.  Other email correspondence shows the Clinton team believed scandals surrounding the college and Jane Sanders provided an opportunity to knock the Vermont senator’s reputation and chances to win the Democratic primary election.

“I think our first question is how are we going to defeat Sanders. … he’s not who he says he is — gun votes, DSCC money, Jane. …

… Sen. Sanders has alleged that (the GOP’s) Toensing was motivated to file the complaint because of his ties to Trump. But Toensing told Fox News that is simply wrong. He didn’t take on the role of Vermont state chairman for the Trump campaign until the summer of 2016, well after the federal grand jury investigation of Mrs. Sanders began.

“This investigation was started under President Obama’s Justice Department,” Toensing said. “The senator’s claims are a common, but lame diversion for politicians faced with a grand jury investigation. He should focus on answering the allegations, which are solidly based on analysis of facts from documents obtained through public records requests and evidence gathered by investigative reporters.” …

Turns out failed BurlingtonCollege paid $500,000 to the for-profit woodworking school of Bernie’s daughter. Investment Watchdog has the story.

… Last year, Politico described BurlingtonCollege as catering to “nontraditional students, such as veterans and adults. It grew from its original 14 students to about 200 in recent years, finding appeal with its small student-to-faculty ratio and degrees in unusual fields including woodworking.” Yet, when Jane Sanders first arrived at BurlingtonCollege in 2004 no degree program in woodworking existed. It isn’t until 2009 that public tax records show BurlingtonCollege paying VermontWoodworkingSchool $56,474 for materials, charges and lease of bench space based on student enrollment reflecting what appears to be the beginning of the College’s woodworking program. The college was forced to report this expenditure as it related to a relationship between an interested party (Jane Sander’s daughter, Carina Driscoll) and BurlingtonCollege. Over the next four years, funds to VT Woodworking School increased considerably from this original amount to $133,134 in 2010; $138,571 in 2011; and, $182,741 in 2012 (the last year program expenses are reported in the tax filings).

Another leftist with feet of clay, Elizabeth Warren, is up for election next year. Milo Yiannopoulos Blog tells us about the real Indian who will challenge the fake one.

… “I think only a real Indian can defeat a fake Indian. I sent her a DNA test kit for her birthday, and I was very sad that she returned it. I tweeted it out, and it went viral all over the internet,” Ayyadurai said, referencing Warren’s dubious claim that she has Native American ancestry.

“The issue of a real Indian and a fake Indian — there is a truth there because there is a woman who actually checked off the box that she is Native American. This foretells a person who is basically a self-serving elitist, is willing to cut in line as she needs, is willing to promote policies, for example, illegal immigration, so others can cut in line. I came in as a legal immigrant. My dad came first. We had to wait about a year. So it’s essentially disrespect for the law and disrespect for the country.

Not many cartoons for Jane Sanders yet, BUT there’s lots for Liz Warren.

Click on WORD or PDF for full content

WORD

PDF

Targeted by the unabomber in 1993, Yale professor David Gelernter can truly be said to be engaged in the culture wars. In Friday’s WSJ he takes conservative intellectuals to task for their disdain for Trump and their unwillingness to take on his execrable predecessor.

… I’d love for him (Trump) to be a more eloquent, elegant speaker. But if I had to choose between deeds and delivery, it wouldn’t be hard. Many conservative intellectuals insist that Mr. Trump’s wrong policies are what they dislike. So what if he has restarted the large pipeline projects, scrapped many statist regulations, appointed a fine cabinet and a first-rate Supreme Court justice, asked NATO countries to pay what they owe, re-established solid relations with Israel and Saudi Arabia, signaled an inclination to use troops in Afghanistan to win and not merely cover our retreat, led us out of the Paris climate accord, plans to increase military spending (granted, not enough), is trying to get rid of ObamaCare to the extent possible, proposed to lower taxes significantly and revamp immigration policy and enforcement? What has he done lately?

Conservative thinkers should recall that they helped create President Trump. They never blasted President Obama as he deserved. Mr. Obama’s policies punished the economy and made the country and its international standing worse year by year; his patronizing arrogance drove people crazy. He was the perfect embodiment of a one-term president. The tea-party outbreak of 2009-10 made it clear where he was headed. History will record that the press saved him. Naturally the mainstream press loved him, but too many conservative commentators never felt equal to taking him on. They had every reason to point out repeatedly that Mr. Obama was the worst president since Jimmy Carter, surrounded by a left-wing cabinet and advisers, hostile to Israel, crazed regarding Iran, and even less competent to deal with the issues than Mr. Carter was—which is saying plenty. 

But they didn’t say plenty. They didn’t say much at all. The rank and file noticed and got mad. …

Conservative intellectuals think that if Trump were asked about the conservative canon, he would ask why anyone is interested in obsolete artillery; missing entirely the point of the collection of thought containing the intellectual basis for the idea of free markets. The magazine National Review has been the center of effort of the conservative “Never Trump” movement. And there has been little change in their negativity since the election. Reagan quoted de Tocqueville and Frederick Hayek so thinkers on the right warmed to him. But there is little chance that will happen with Trump. Consequently writers from National Review have been scarce in our pages for the last year. This post aims to begin to correct that. John Fund, an old friend and Pickings reader has written a good piece on London’s towering inferno.

I was in London last week and woke up to horrifying pictures of the inferno that engulfed the GrenfellTower public housing project in London. They were among the most unsettling images I’ve seen since I watched the WorldTradeCenter collapse from my office building just across the street on 9/11. …

… GrenfellTower was owned by the local council, which in turn had turned over management to the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Company, a not-for-profit that is managed by a board of directors consisting of eight elected tenants, four council members, and three independent members.

“Social housing” in Britain — what we call public housing in the U.S. — has turned into areas of deprivation and neglect. Although many tenants have bought their units under plans initiated by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, many current tenants are poor, recent immigrants without the wherewithal to buy their units.

It was the council that made the key decisions about the controversial retrofit of the building. …

Notable in his absence from the “never Trumpers” at National Review was Victor Davis Hanson. His essay on the never ending ironies of the Trump presidency is worth a read.

The Left was mostly untroubled for eight years about the often unconstitutional abuses of Barack Obama — given that they saw their shared noble aims as justifying almost any means necessary to achieve them.

There was the not uncommon Rice-Gruber-Rhodes-Holder sort of deception (on Benghazi, on the conduct of Bowe Bergdahl, on the Affordable Care Act, the Iran deal, on Fast and Furious, etc.) — a required tactic because so much of the Obama agenda was antithetical to the wishes and preferences of the American electorate and thus had to be disguised and camouflaged to become enacted. …

… So along came the next Republican president, empowered by Obama’s exemptions to do almost anything he wished, albeit without the thin exculpatory veneer of Ivy League pretension, multicultural indemnity, and studied smoothness.

In biblical “there is a season” fashion, for every sermon about not building your business, making too much money, or profiting at the wrong time, there was a Trump retort to profit as never before.

For every too-frequent gala golf outing of a metrosexual Obama decked out in spiffy attire, there is a plumper Trump swinging away, oblivious to the angry pack of reporters that Obama once so carefully courted.

For every rapper with an ankle bracelet that went off in the White House, there is now a White House photo-op with Ted Nugent. …

… Even the most die-hard Never Trump conservative has had to make some adjustments.

Despite assurances that Trump would not get the nomination, he did.

Despite assurances that he could never be elected, he was.

Despite prognostications that Trump was a liberal wolf hiding in conservative fleece, Trump’s appointments, his executive orders, his legislation pending before the Congress, his abrupt withdrawal from the Paris global-warming accords, his fierce support for vouchers, his pro-life advocacy, and his immigration normality were so far orthodoxly conservative. …

David Harsanyi asks, “What If Donald Trump Doesn’t Sink the Republican Party?”

What if Republican voters who don’t particularly like President Donald Trump are also able to compartmentalize their votes? What if they dislike Democrats more than they do the president? What if, rather than being punished for Trump’s unpopularity, local candidates are rewarded for their moderation? This would be a disaster for Democrats. And Tuesday’s runoff election in Georgia’s Sixth District shows that it might be possible.

Now, had Jon Ossoff come out ahead of Karen Handel, the coverage would have painted this as a game-changing moment: a referendum on conservatism itself, a harbinger of a coming liberal wave, and a rejection of Trump’s disastrous presidency. It would have illustrated that Democrats had figured out how to flip those suburban and affluent Republicans who aren’t crazy about the president.

Perhaps some of that will still play out during the midterms, because one race (or even four) doesn’t tell us everything we need to know. Every district is unique. Still, there are definitely ominous signs for Democrats. …

For sheer fun, you can’t beat Kevin Williamson on the Clintons – “Big Creep, Mrs. Creep, and Little Creep.”

… Chelsea Clinton, most recently lionized on the cover of Variety, is a 37-year-old multi-millionaire who has never uttered an interesting word about any subject at any time during the course of her life. Judging from the evidence of her public statements, she has never had an original thought — it isn’t clear that she has had a thought at all. In tribute to her parents, she was given a series of lucrative sinecures, producing a smattering of sophomoric videos for NBC at a salary of $600,000 a year. She later went more formally into the family business, leaving her fake job at NBC for a fake job in her parents’ fake charity. She gave interviews about how she just couldn’t get interested in money and bought a $10 million Manhattan apartment that stretches for the better part of a city block.

And, since her mother’s most recent foray into ignominious defeat, she has been inescapable: magazine covers, fawning interviews, talk of running her in New York’s 17th congressional district. The Democrats are doing their best to make Chelsea happen.

And, who knows, it might work. It would be tempting to write her off as a know-nothing rich kid who has made a living off her family connections while operating one of the world’s most truly asinine Twitter accounts, but . . . well, you know.

But, for Pete’s sake, stop it. Have a little self-respect, Democrats. Build Bill Clinton a statue or . . . whatever. Send him your daughters like a bunch of bone-in-the-nose primitives paying tribute to the tribal chieftain. But stop trying to inflict this empty-headed, grasping, sanctimonious, risible, simpering, saccharine little twerp on American public life.

It’s stupid enough out there.

Rich Lowry writes on the Dem blindspot on culture.

How much do Democrats really want to defeat Donald Trump?

It’s worth asking in the wake of the latest Democratic failure to notch an electoral victory for the resistance, this time in the Georgia special election.

There’s no doubt that Democrats want to watch TV programs that excoriate the president. They want to give money to candidates opposing him. They want to fantasize about frog-marching him straight from his impeachment proceedings to the nearest federal penitentiary. But do they want to do the one thing that would make it easier to win tough races in marginal areas, namely moderate on the cultural issues? Not so much.

In retrospect, Jon Ossoff’s loss in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District was overdetermined. Youthful to a fault, he didn’t live in the district and had no record of public service. Yet it didn’t help that he was an orthodox liberal who conceded nothing on cultural issues, even though he was running in a Republican district in the South.

In this, Ossoff merely reflected his party’s attitude. Stopping Trump is imperative, so long as it doesn’t require the party rethinking its uncompromising stance on abortion, guns or immigration.