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Kevin Williamson writes on the serial collapse of the left’s silly dreams. This time in Venezuela.
Venezuela had a good run of it for about five minutes there, at least in public-relations terms. When petroleum prices were booming, all it took was a few gallons of heating oil from Hugo Chávez to buy the extravagant praise of House members, with Representative Chaka Fattah (D., Philadelphia) issuing statements praising Venezuela’s state-run oil company “and the Venezuelan people for their benevolence.” Lest anybody feel creeped out by running political errands for a brutal and repressive caudillo, Joseph Kennedy — son of Senator Robert Kennedy — proclaimed that refusing the strongman’s patronage would be “a crime against humanity.” Kennedy was at the time the director of Citizens Energy, which had a contract to help distribute that Venezuelan heating oil — Boss Hugo was a brute, but he understood American politics.
Celebrities came to sit at his feet, with Sean Penn calling him a “champion” of the world’s poor, Oliver Stone celebrating him as “a great hero,” Antonio Banderas citing his seizure of private businesses as a model to be emulated in the rest of the world, Michael Moore praising his use of oil for political purposes, Danny Glover celebrating him as a “champion of democracy.” His successor, Nicolás Maduro, continued in the Chávez vein, and even as basics such as food and toilet paper disappeared the American Left hailed him as a hero, with Jesse Myerson, Rolling Stone’s fashionable uptown communist, calling his economic program “basically terrific.” Some of the more old-fashioned liberals at The New Republic voiced concern about Venezuela’s sham democracy, its unlimited executive authority, political repression, the hunting down of government critics, the stacking of elections and the government’s perpetrating violence inside polling places — but Myerson insisted that Venezuela’s “electoral system’s integrity puts the U.S.’s to abject shame.” Never mind that opposition leaders there are hauled off to military prison after midnight raids.
Vice President Biden, who can always be counted on to cut straight to the heart of any political question, ran into Maduro in Brazil and, noting the potentate’s thick mane, commented: “If I had your hair, I’d be president of the United States.” Tragically for the Sage of Delaware, hair transplants don’t work that way.
That is all going down the memory hole. …
Another serial fraud of the left/media has been demolished by the Ferguson outcome. Bret Stephens has that story.
Darren Wilson has been exonerated, again, in last August’s shooting death of Michael Brown, and that ought to be as much a vindication for the onetime Ferguson, Mo., police officer as it is a teachable moment for the rest of America.
It won’t be. The story line has failed, so the statistics have been put to work.
That the claims made against Mr. Wilson were doubtful should have been clear within days of Brown’s death, and again in November after a grand jury, having heard from some 60 witnesses, declined to indict the officer—an outcome one outraged commentator denounced as having “openly and shamelessly mocked our criminal justice system and laid bare the inequality of our criminal jurisprudence.”
Yet if anyone was openly and shamelessly mocking the criminal-justice system, it was so much of the media itself, credulously accepting or sanctimoniously promoting the double fable of Ferguson: that a “gentle giant” had been capriciously slain by a trigger-happy cop; and that a racist justice system stood behind that cop.
At least half that fable was put to rest last week by an exhaustive Justice Department report. …
Business News Factor tallys the cost of the year’s serial snow storms in New England. Not as bad, they say, as last year’s mid-west polar vortex.
Ignore anyone who tells you snow is free. Every work day lost during New England’s historic winter has meant millions of dollars taken out of the regional economy.
IHS Global Insight, an economic analysis firm, estimates Massachusetts alone suffered roughly $1 billion in lost wages and profits, as storm after storm pummeled the region, delivering over eight feet of snow in roughly a month.
Retailers and restaurants were among the hardest hit, as customers held off on big purchases or chose to stay at home rather than enjoy a night on the town.
A survey released this week by Massachusetts business groups representing those and other industries reported sales dropped an average of 24 percent and payroll dropped about 7 percent among their small businesses members.
Car dealers and real estate agents complained the poorly-timed storms — many of which hit on or around weekends — were disastrous to business. And with the exception of the region’s famed ski resorts, many New England hotels, transportation companies and other businesses in the travel and tourism trade say they’ve struggled too. …
Popular Science posts on Panama Canal expansion.
Over the past 20 years or so, traffic on the world’s oceans has quadrupled. Ships now carry 95 percent of the cargo imported to American shores. To move those goods more quickly and cheaply, cargo ships have grown nearly four times bigger–and many are now too large to fit through the Panama Canal.
A $5.25 billion expansion project, scheduled for completion this year, will create two new lock complexes and a third lane of traffic. The new Panama Canal will be roomy enough for boats nearly three times the current maximum size.
Approximately 52 percent of container ships that leave Asia for the East Coast today opt to traverse the arguably less secure Suez Canal, which cuts through Egypt to connect the Mediterranean and Red Seas. The Panama Canal’s upgrade may soon bring the bulk of intercontinental traffic its way. The expansion will shake up shipping patterns and make trade more efficient by requiring less time, fuel, and money to get more products to U.S. ports–just as the original canal’s opening did in 1914. …
Washington Post says daylight “savings” time doesn’t mean savings.
Back in 1784, hanging out in Paris and heady with Enlightenment, Benjamin Franklin had an idea. Struck by the fact that Parisians were sleeping during sunlight hours and then staying up late at night by candlelight, he calculated the number of candles that were being wasted — and came up with an impressive number, 64 million pounds worth of them. Franklin therefore jokingly proposed a massive schedule change, noting that a fortune could be saved through “the economy of using sunshine instead of candles,” and even suggested at one point that perhaps cannons be fired at sunrise to get everybody out of bed.
Such was the germ of the idea that would eventually lead to daylight saving time — that if we patterned our lives to rise and set with the sun itself, we’d save energy and money. Flash forward 230 years later, and this remains the basic reason why many of us will wake up Sunday and realize that it’s darker outside than we’re used to. After “falling back” in November to standard time — setting our clocks back an hour — we’ll have sprung forward, adopting daylight savings time. Daylight savings moves an hour of light we had in the morning to the evening, which may make us a little groggy Sunday but at least promises to end the miserable practice of leaving work in the dark.
But there’s a problem with this (well-lit) practice. It is increasingly looking like Franklin’s idea about saving energy was wrong. …
CBS News had pictures of chunks of ice washed up on the shore of Wellfleet in Cape Cod. More likely, these are chunks of snow tossed into Boston harbor from the Boston Snow Party.
The historic winter of 2015 has left giant chunks of ice on the Cape Cod National Seashore.
Cape Cod photographer Dapixara captured images of a person standing next to the massive pieces of ice that washed ashore in Wellfleet over the past few days. …