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WINNING: Enjoy that road trip! July 4th gas hasn’t been this cheap in years. Have you hugged a fracker today?
REAL FIREWORKS: Soldiers conduct a mine clearing exercise at Ft. Greely, Alaska. The troops used a Mine Clearing Line Charge (MICLIC). Heck of an explosion.
CHARLIE MARTIN: Charlie Gard vs. the Know-Betters.
A GOOD CAMPAIGN ITEM FOR THE FOURTH: Ed Gillespie Wants Legal Fireworks in Virginia. I think that Henry Reed would approve.
Flashback: Rudy Giuliani and Henry Reed. Not long ago, the Insta-Daughter told em that the Henry Reed series, which I pressed on her during her childhood, was one of the best things she read as a kid. That was one of my prouder moments as a father.
THE HISTORY OF FAKE NEWS: A brief history of weaponized information by an assistant professor of military history at West Point.
Not everyone needs to be professionally trained as an intelligence officer or historian to wade through sources, but Hugh Trevor-Roper was both. To apply his craft to approaching a primary source, he listed three questions that should be asked about every document: Is it genuine? Was the author in a position to know what he was writing about? And, why does this document exist? Answers to these questions are the handmaidens of trusting information and halting the malign influence of fake news.
Contemporary universities do a lousy job of improving the critical thinking skills of students — such a lousy job that you might conclude many professors don’t want their students to know how to think.
How to begin to learn how to discern fake news? By rediscovering the broad civic applicability of the historical method. It starts with modifying the national epistemological approach to acquiring knowledge, and, applied across the population of the United States, the impact could be profound.
Quite when America started deviating from critical thinking is unclear, but a test of American college students, the College Learning Assessment Plus (CLA+) shows that, in over half of the universities studied, there is no increase in critical thinking skills over a four-year degree. The reasons for this are far from clear, but the pursuit of knowledge has become more argumentative, opinion-based and adversarial than illuminating. Research papers are reminiscent of watching the prosecutor layout a criminal case on Law and Order.
The whole thing’s worth reading.
TROLL LEVEL: NEAR-TRUMPIAN. Elizabeth Warren’s real Indian opponent sends her a DNA kit for her birthday. She’s not amused.
NORTH KOREA LAUNCHES ANOTHER MISSILE: The launch is a message to the U.S. Though the UPI dateline is July 3, it was already the 4th of July in east Asia.
North Korea launched a ballistic missile early Tuesday, local time, into the waters along the eastern coast of the peninsula.
Seoul’s joint chiefs of staff stated the missile launched from Panghyon, North Pyongan Province at around 9:40 a.m., could not be identified.
Xihua, China’s state news agency, reports that Pyongyang claims it was an ICBM.
AT AMAZON, Milo Yiannopoulos’s new book, Dangerous.
READ THE WHOLE THING: Calvin Coolidge on Independence Day.
It was not because it was proposed to establish a new nation, but because it was proposed to establish a nation on new principles, that July 4, 1776, has come to be regarded as one of the greatest days in history. Great ideas do not burst upon the world unannounced. They are reached by a gradual development over a length of time usually proportionate to their importance. This is especially true of the principles laid down in the Declaration of Independence. Three very definite propositions were set out in its preamble regarding the nature of mankind and therefore of government. These were the doctrine that all men are created equal, that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and that therefore the source of the just powers of government must be derived from the consent of the governed.
If no one is to be accounted as born into a superior station, if there is to be no ruling class, and if all possess rights which can neither be bartered away nor taken from them by any earthly power, it follows as a matter of course that the practical authority of the Government has to rest on the consent of the governed. While these principles were not altogether new in political action, and were very far from new in political speculation, they had never been assembled before and declared in such a combination. . . .
Placing every man on a plane where he acknowledged no superiors, where no one possessed any right to rule over him, he must inevitably choose his own rulers through a system of self-government. This was their theory of democracy. In those days such doctrines would scarcely have been permitted to flourish and spread in any other country. This was the purpose which the fathers cherished. In order that they might have freedom to express these thoughts and opportunity to put them into action, whole congregations with their pastors had migrated to the Colonies. These great truths were in the air that our people breathed. Whatever else we may say of it, the Declaration of Independence was profoundly American.
Like I said, read it.
I SEE A LOT OF HOLIER-THAN-THOU TALK ON TWITTER ABOUT HOW WILLIAM F. BUCKLEY WOULD BE TURNING OVER IN HIS GRAVE OVER TRUMP’S INCIVILITY, but here’s how Buckley responded when called a “Crypto-Nazi.”
SO IT’S COME TO THIS: Newborn baby may be the first to be registered ‘gender unknown’ because its mum insists only the tot can decide what sex it wants to be.
These are Heinlein’s Crazy Years — we just live in them.
VIRTUE SIGNALING: The Nuclear Ban Cometh… Unfortunately.
In New York, negotiations towards a nuclear weapons ban treaty—involving approximately 130 countries plus sundry civil society groups—are drawing rapidly to a close. A second draft (PDF) of the text is already under discussion. In the end, supporters of a ban will have their day. So it now seems a foregone conclusion that the UN will soon open for signature a treaty banning nuclear weapons, which would enter into force 90 days after 50 signatories have ratified it (Article 16.1).
Does that mean nuclear disarmament is close? No. In fact, the ban treaty probably won’t remove a single nuclear weapon from the face of the earth. No nuclear weapon state is attending the negotiations. And, of all those countries known to enjoy an extended nuclear deterrence guarantee, only the Netherlands is attending. Disarmament aficionados aren’t dismayed though: they get to criticise the nuclear weapon states and their allies for not attending, and to write the treaty text that best codifies their own understanding of ‘international norms’. Problems that might be genuine difficulties in any real nuclear disarmament exercise—like verifying dismantlement, punishing breakout, or designing new stable force balances at key strategic fulcra—are either postponed to a later date or avoided altogether.
In fact, the treaty’s better seen as a normative commitment than as a practical aid to a nuclear-free world. That shows up straight away in the preamble—a treaty of 21 articles is preceded by 24 paragraphs in which the signatories describe the many ways in which they are holier than thou.
It’s easy to give up what you never had, and it’s satisfying to scold others for failing to follow your non-example.
ANOTHER ARGUMENT FOR REVISITING BAKER V. CARR AND REYNOLDS V. SIMS: California’s Far North Deplores ‘Tyranny’ of the Urban Majority.
From Hollywood to Silicon Valley, California projects an image as an economically thriving, politically liberal, sun-kissed El Dorado. It is a multiethnic experiment with a rising population, where the percentage of whites has fallen to 38 percent.
California’s Great Red North is the opposite, a vast, rural, mountainous tract of pine forests with a political ethos that bears more resemblance to Texas than to Los Angeles. Two-thirds of the north is white, the population is shrinking and the region struggles economically, with median household incomes at $45,000, less than half that of San Francisco.
Jim Cook, former supervisor of Siskiyou County, which includes cattle ranches and the majestic slopes of Mount Shasta, calls it “the forgotten part of California.”
In the same state that is developing self-driving cars, there’s the rugged landscape of Trinity County, where a large share of residents heat their homes with wood, plaques commemorate stagecoach routes and the county seat, Weaverville, is an old gold-mining town with a lone blinking stop-and-go traffic light.
The residents of this region argue that their political voice is drowned out in a system that has only one state senator for every million residents.
This sentiment resonates in other traditionally conservative parts of California, including large swaths of the Central Valley, which runs down the state, and it mirrors red and blue tensions felt in areas across the country. But perhaps nowhere else in California is the alienation felt more keenly than in the far north, an arresting panorama of fields filled with wildflowers and depopulated one-street towns that have never recovered from the gold rush.
“People up here for a very long time have felt a sense that we don’t matter,” said James Gallagher, a state assemblyman for the Third District, which is a shorter drive from the forests of Mount Hood in Oregon than from the beaches of San Diego. “We run this state like it’s one size fits all. You can’t do that.”
Well, you can. But you shouldn’t. Plus, an Independence Day angle:
Residents here have long backed a different proposal for a separate state, one that would be carved out of Northern California and the southern reaches of Oregon. Flags of the so-called State of Jefferson, which was first proposed in the 19th century, fly on farms and ranches around the region.
I think that Congress has the power to reform state legislatures directly, under its Guarantee power. In fact, you wouldn’t even have to change the case law. While the courts stepped in to remedy one kind of unfairness with Baker and Reynolds, Congress can step in on its own where necessary to guarantee a “republican form of government.” And unresponsive rule by far-away urbanites with different lifestyles is precisely what our Framers rebelled against, and thus can’t qualify as the kind of state government the Framers intended.
TRUMP’S SUCCESS: Central Americans, ‘Scared of What’s Happening’ in U.S., Stay Put. Media hysteria may be more effective than a wall. . . .
DO I HAVE TO? BECAUSE HONESTLY, I’VE KIND OF BEEN ENJOYING THEM. OR AT LEAST THE OVER-THE-TOP REACTION THEY PROVOKE. Kurt Schlichter: Here’s How To Deal With Trump’s Tweets: Stop Caring About Them.
If the hyperventilating faux outrage over Donald Trump’s tweets about that pair of home-wrecking nobodies on MSNBC was actually presented in good faith, it would be merely be stupid. But it is not presented in good faith. It is a transparent attempt to drag Trump off-point and tie him up in a never-ending discussion about his completely irrelevant personal failings, even though liberals slobber over all sorts of people with personal failings who just happen to support their fascist dreams. It’s not working, because Trump cares nothing about what these fussy nannies shriek while clutching their pearls, nor do his voters really care. But it is still annoying.
No, his tweets are not annoying. I don’t care about his tweets, so they don’t annoy me. I didn’t vote for Donald Trump to be a role model or a moral paragon. I voted for him to not be Hillary Clinton, and to incrementally move towards actual conservatism. Like everyone else who voted for him, I knew he wasn’t a doctrinaire conservative. But he believed in some conservative things, and that was better than someone who believed in no conservative things, and who wanted to stamp her sensible shoe into our faces forever.
Was he my first choice? No. Was he my second? No. But was there any other choice when it came down to him or Felonia von Pantsuit?
No. Which is something a lot of the cogs in the machine that is Conservative, Inc., still don’t choose to acknowledge.
Read the whole thing.
July 3, 2017
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Also, Men’s Socks.
DEEP STATE UPDATE: FBI employees wear ‘Comey is my homey’ T-shirts to Family Day. Well, 12 of Comey’s friends did.
FROM AN ERA BEFORE THE DENORMALIZATION OF MALE DESIRE: 49 Old Photos of Men Staring at Women in the Past.
ADVICE TO WOMEN: Yes, ladies, it’s a wife’s job to make her husband happy. Interesting to see this in a place like YourTango. “What’s happened as a result has been brilliant. I started tuning much more actively into my husband — prioritizing him, touching him regularly (holding his hand, sitting very close to him, hugging him, rubbing his shoulders, etc), more actively praising and appreciating him, and — crucially — not letting my ego get the best of me and not letting my need to be right lead to Armageddon. As a result, I have managed to bring out the best in my husband. Our relationship has become light years better, and I feel much happier and more empowered.”
ABYSSINIA, RAHM: Mayor Emanuel didn’t seek comparison to Mussolini in NYT op-ed, the Chicago Tribune notes:
Either someone at The New York Times doesn’t like Mayor Rahm Emanuel very much, or the Gray Lady needs to brush up on her history.*
How else to account for the unfortunate evocation of murderous Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in the headline NYT editors put on Emanuel’s op-ed column about his work to improve the CTA in Monday’s Times?
“Rahm Emanuel: In Chicago, the Trains Actually Run on Time,” blared the Times’ online headline for a column in which Emanuel favorably contrasted his policy of putting maintenance and reliability ahead of expansion of the city’s rail system.
Was it over when Chicago bombed Ethiopia?!
* Since they’re almost entirely Democrats with bylines at the Times, let’s go with the latter — layers and layers of fact-checkers and editors — who have no knowledge of history. Shades of Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau putting the unfortunate Neville again “Peace in our time” phrase into his boss’s second inauguration address to create a classic Kinsley gaffe.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: As Trump administration promises end to Title IX witch hunts, witch-hunters cry foul.
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YOU CAN’T SPELL “PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN” WITHOUT “PC:” Bride Auction Scene in Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean Ride Gets a Ridiculous PC Makeover. “This will no doubt be seen as an important step forward in repairing relations between pirates and nonfictional people. . . . Members of the Pirate Inclusion League of Landlubbers and Gender Equality (PILLAGE), a group I just made up, comment that changing the redheaded bride into a swashbuckling female pirate is an excellent idea since, even though it’s totally unrealistic, it’s less demeaning to women, which is always more important than truth.”
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Trump’s High-Stakes Tweeting.
Trump’s occasional uncouthness is a symptom, not a catalyst, of the times. Bill Clinton redefined presidential behavior when he had sexual relations with a 22-year-old, unpaid intern (so much for power imbalances as sexual harassment) in the presidential bathroom off the Oval Office, lied about his recklessness to his family and the country, smeared Monica Lewinsky, and then wheeled out to the Rose Garden feminist cabinet officers like Madeline Albright and Donna Shalala to deny and defend his unsavory predatory behavior. After that sordid episode, the apologetic Left lost all credibility as an arbiter of presidential norms.
Indeed, Clinton had brought us into new debased territory. In contrast, George W. Bush for eight years restored honor, integrity, and decorum to the White House. But he was rewarded for exemplary behavior by being branded a Nazi warmonger, as docudrama films and novels appeared imagining his assassination, and even the likes of John Glenn stooped to the Nazi slurs on his character. (“It’s the old Hitler business.”)
Out of office, Bush professionally kept quiet and busy as an accomplished artist, as Obama moved the country leftward. For that, Bush was ridiculed by the Left as reduced to a bewildered, paint-by-numbers dabbler.
The emeritus Obama, by contrast, frolics on billionaires’ yachts docked off tropical islands with the mega-rich whom he attacks in Wall Street chats for $10,000 a minute—and takes a day off from his wind surfing to weigh in on Trump’s unfitness. For all that, he remains a progressive icon. . . .
Factored into the Trump’s tweeting controversies are other variables mostly left unsaid by the media:
Trump has melted down partisan journalists and left the American progressive media in shambles. It was Obama, not Trump, who established the practice of going after journalists by name, both materially and rhetorically, from surveilling Fox’s James Rosen to using puerile hype to attack Sean Hannity (“You know, I’ll put—I’ll put Mr. Burgess up against Sean Hannity. He’ll tear him up.” [emphasis added]). Obama was angry that a few reporters did not join the cult of Obama worship; Trump is peeved almost no one in the press is disinterested. Trump saw Obama’s precedent, and proverbially trumped it.
CNN is now no longer a news organization, but has been reduced to caricature by Trump hatred. . . .
First, half the country despises the mainstream media and sees it as arrogant, corrupt, hypocritical, and in need of comeuppance. Trump is not running against a centrist populist Democrat like John Kennedy or Harry Truman, but a crude Resistance of foul mouths like Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez and U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), unhinged celebrities like Maher and Colbert, street theater, thuggery on campuses, and not very bright media talking heads imploding as they try to top their rivals’ hatred for Trump and what he represents.
Read the whole thing. But here’s one more bit: “Finally, no one has calibrated quite the nation’s deep antipathy toward the coastal media-university-political-cultural nexus, most specifically its utter hypocrisy. Half the country sees not so much Democrats or progressives, but rather a bankrupt class whose venom for others is used to excuse their own exemptions from the ramifications of their own ideology.”
MEANWHILE, BACK IN CENTRAL AMERICA:
The United Nations’ International Court of Justice on Monday began hearings over a maritime and land boundary dispute between Costa Rica and Nicaragua.
Costa Rica presented its case to the court in The Hague on Monday, while Nicaragua is set to present its case on Thursday.
There are two cases — Costa Rica vs. Nicaragua: Maritime Delimitation in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean, as well as Costa Rica vs. Nicaragua: Land Boundary in the Northern Part of Isla Portillos.
Circa 1983, this might have sparked a super-power confrontation, with Sandinista Nicaragua bullying army-less Costa Rica. OK, the 82nd Airborne and U.S. Marines in the region are Costa Rica’s military protection corps, but we’re not supposed to say that out loud because, you know…because not having a military makes lefties feel self-righteous…
MORE:
The countries have been at odds for year over territorial disputes, particularly over a construction project near the remote mouth of the San Juan River that marks their shared border in the Caribbean.
In 2015, the court ruled Nicaragua violated Costa Rica’s territory by establishing a military camp in the area.
Stay tuned.
SOMEWHAT COMPARABLE, IF YOU’VE A NARROW DEFINITION OF COMPARABLE: A much more serious territorial clash between Greece and Turkey.
The captain of a Turkish cargo ship said it received warning shots from the Greek coast guard Monday in the Aegean Sea off the coast of Rhodes island.
The M/V ACT was about 3 miles off the coast of Rhodes and carrying steel from the southern port of İskenderun to İzmit in the northwest, Turkey-based Deniz Haber Ajansı reported.
The captain, Haluk Sami Kalkavan, said they use this route regularly and it’s in international waters.
The Greek coast guard warned the ship to divert its course to Rhodes. Kalkavan responded he would not follow the directive and informed Turkish officials.
MORE:
The Greek Coast Guard said the ship was in Greek waters and had reports that it was carrying narcotics.
Stay tuned.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, EVERGREEN STATE COLLEGE EDITION:
A faculty member who sat on the Equity Council explicitly called him a racist in two different faculty meetings. When Professor Weinstein asked for an opportunity to defend himself, he was told that a faculty meeting was not the appropriate venue for such a defense. When he asked what the appropriate venue was, he was told that no such venue existed because he was a racist. Neither the president nor the interim provost interceded to make it clear that leveling such charges against a fellow faculty member was unacceptable within the college community. When Professor Weinstein spoke privately with both of those administrators about these incidents, they both acknowledged the inappropriateness of the behavior but each said that it was the responsibility of the other to do something about it. Neither administrator took any public action in response.
Some people are arguing that folks on the right are cherry-picking stories to make higher education look bad. But there’s an awfully big basket of cherries here.
JAMES JAY CARAFANO: Top 5 Movies to Celebrate This 4th of July.
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ANN ALTHOUSE VS. THE WASHINGTON POST: “Overwrought, jingoistic, self-righteousness, war-glorifying… really? Why does it make some people feel that’s what it says when that’s absolutely not in the words? Where does that extra-textualism come from?”
From the lefties’ need to feel that way, of course. Just like they need to feel that Donald Trump hates gays, when he’s objectively the most pro-gay president we’ve ever elected.
CHARLIE MARTIN: Trump Trolls the Pearl-Clutchers.
RETAIL BLUES: Amazon’s store of the future is delayed. Now what?
THIS SEEMS LIKE A NON-STARTER: Valerie Jarrett Says Trump Admin Should Spend More on Marketing Obamacare Benefits.
YOU DON’T MESS WITH THE POWERLINE GUYS: Lawyer Deploys Faulty Subpoena Demanding Evidence Preservation, Fails To Impress Lawyer Receiving It.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation. “Things were getting better at a breakneck pace for 25 years after World War II. Then it all just … slowed way down.”
IT LOOKED LIKE THEY WERE GOING TO DO THIS, THEN IT LOOKED LIKE THEY WEREN’T, BUT THEY DID. A CAMPAIGN PROMISE KEPT: President Trump Issues Executive Order on Reviving the National Space Council.
NINA TOTENBERG ON JUSTICE KENNEDY: “While he long ago hired his law clerks for the coming term, he has not done so for the following term (beginning Oct. 2018), and has let applicants for those positions know he is considering retirement.”
BUT I WAS TOLD THAT DEATH PANELS WERE MERELY A PRODUCT OF SARAH PALIN’S FERVID IMAGINATION: Yanking Life Support From UK Baby Demonstrates Dangers Of Socialized Medicine.
Related: Trump offers US help to UK baby on life support.
UPDATE: As one Twitter user adds, “Call me cynical, but I get the feeling the Gard story isn’t getting much attention because it’s a bit inconvenient during health care debate.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Thinking of Eating Your Placenta? Think Again.
HMM: China Is About to Bury Elon Musk in Batteries.
Chinese companies have plans for additional factories with the capacity to pump out more than 120 gigawatt-hours a year by 2021, according to a report published this week by Bloomberg Intelligence. That’s enough to supply batteries for around 1.5 million Tesla Model S vehicles or 13.7 million Toyota Prius Plug-in Hybrids per year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.
By comparison, when completed in 2018, Tesla Inc.’s Gigafactory will crank out up to 35 gigawatt-hours of battery cells annually.
Cheap energy storage is great, but it still requires cheap energy production.
HAVING GROWN UP AROUND A LOT OF VERY EMINENT PHILOSOPHERS, I DON’T THINK ANY IMPROVEMENT EXTENDS BEYOND THE NARROW CONFINES OF PHILOSOPHY: Study Philosophy to Improve Thinking—A Case of False Advertising?
FASCINATING: Hawaiian-Canadians and ‘Buffalo’ Canadians: The hidden history of confederation.
Canada is not a simple story of French, British and Indigenous nations. At the point when British Columbia became a colony in 1851, for example, the Pacific coast contained sizable populations of Indigenous nations, a thin scattering of British and U.S. trappers and miners and a well-established community of Hawaiian Canadians.
Indigenous Hawaiians, who crewed transpacific ships, had been settling the Vancouver and Victoria areas since the 1780s, jumping ship to take jobs in the burgeoning fur and later mining and timber industries; in the 19th century, they were recruited and imported by the Hudson’s Bay Company.
In the 1830s, Hawaiian Canadians were the single most populous ethnic group employed by the company on the West Coast. By 1851, half the working-age population in Fort Victoria was native Hawaiian. By 1867, according to Tom Koppel’s history of their community, the Hawaiians had become farmers, landowners and fishermen, and were known, sometimes derisively, as “Kanaka” (the Pacific Island word for “man”). There was a substantial “Kanaka Row” shack town in Victoria, and sizable districts in Vancouver and on Salt Spring Island. They had their own schools and preachers, and while they taught their children English, some subscribed to Hawaiian-language newspapers.
I had no idea.
OH, I THINK WE’RE NOWHERE NEAR PEAK YGLESIAS: ‘Hitting the crack pipe?’ Matt Yglesias achieves peak dumbassery with this take on minimum wage.
I TAKE THIS AS A SIGN THAT HE HAS NO FURTHER POLITICAL AMBITIONS: Christie’s family gets beach all to themselves after NJ shutdown.
CHANGE: A Smaller Government, At Least At 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
On Friday, the Trump administration released its annual report on White House office personnel, disclosing the name, salary and position title of all 377 White House employees. OpenTheBooks.com, a private organization that tracks government spending, calculates that the Trump White House is costing taxpayers $5 million less, and employing 110 fewer staffers than the the Obama White House in 2015.
Perhaps the biggest reduction comes in the size of the first lady’s staff: “There are five staffers dedicated to Melania Trump vs. 24 staffers who served Michelle Obama (FY2009).” God bless Melania.
Indeed.
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BETTERIDGE’S LAW OF HEADLINES STRIKES AGAIN! Is Libertarianism a “Stealth Plan” To Destroy America?
IT RHYMES WITH MODEL T: Tesla’s mass-market Model 3 begins production Friday.
The first car will roll off the assembly line two weeks ahead of schedule. Tesla has scheduled a “handover party” for the first 30 customers for July 28.
The company plans to produce 20,000 cars in December, company founder Elon Musk said Monday in a series of Twitter comments.
The Model 3, an electric-powered car selling for about $35,000, is a crucial test for the company and its plans to make affordable electric vehicles available to a wide range of customers. Musk said he hopes Tesla will manufacturer 500,000 cars per year by 2018. The company has made about 85,000 vehicles thus far, selling them at prices of $90,000 and beyond.
Musk has promised to ramp up annual Model 3 production to half a million units in 2018, which would be a modern manufacturing miracle if he can pull it off.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation. “Things were getting better at a breakneck pace for 25 years after World War II. Then it all just … slowed way down.”
DONALD TRUMP: Opioid pusher.
KEITH OLBERMANN: Trump Should Be Impeached After Tweeting CNN Takedown Video.
Flashback to the middle of 2008, when Olbermann was busy looking for “Somebody who can take [Hillary] into a room and only he comes out,” and the fall of that year, when he was worried that Sarah Palin “might stick around to be the slowest-moving target imaginable for comedians and commentators. It would be like shooting moose from a chopper.”
Also, a reminder of MSNBC’s Martin Bashir’s on-air monologue from 2013 when he wished that Palin would be defecated and urinated on.
As Glenn noted yesterday, new status anxiety fuels Trump derangement, just as it did Palin derangement syndrome.
FOR DECADES WE HEARD THAT ENERGY INDEPENDENCE WAS OUR GOAL, AND NOW THAT WE’RE ACHIEVING IT NOBODY SEEMS TO NOTICE: North America Is Making OPEC Irrelevant.
A coalition of OPEC members and other petrostates agreed to reduce its collective production by 1.8 million barrels per day through next March, but surging North American crude production is threatening to effectively cancel out those cuts. As the FT reports, oil output in Canada’s oil sands is set to jump as projects funded well before the decline in crude prices come online over the next year and half. . . .
Canada isn’t even the sharpest North American thorn in OPEC’s side, though. The United States has seen its own oil output jump 550,000 barrels per day since last November, when these petrostate cuts were first announced. American production has dipped slightly in recent weeks as producers have scaled production back slightly due to flagging oil prices, but the outlook for shale over the rest of the year is still quite strong.
Combined, Canadian and U.S. oil production is set to grow more than a million barrels per day next year, as compared to where these North American countries were when the petrostate cuts first went into place. That nullifies more than half of that petrostate production draw down.
And it’s important to note that, going forward, OPEC will be the victim of any success it manages with these cuts. If prices do start to rise—a very big if, given current market conditions—then shale producers will quickly be able to take advantage of the rebound by ramping up their own production.
Have you hugged a fracker today?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Scientists find mathematical formula for a flawless bottom.
The science is far from settled however, and further study is required.
CNN: ‘DANGEROUS’ ‘FASCIST’ TRUMP THREATENING OUR LIVES WITH HIS TWEET.
Yes, it’s high time that CNN start to treat Trump with the same tone they would deploy against any fascist dictator. Oh wait…
BLUE STATE BLUES CHAOS: Illinois House OKs income tax hike, spending plan; Rauner vows vetoes.
With the state on the cusp of a catastrophic credit downgrade, the Illinois House on Sunday voted to end the historic budget drought by passing a long-awaited spending plan and seeking to pay for it by hiking the income tax rate to 4.95 percent.
But nothing is ever easy when it comes to patching up a political feud between two of the state’s most powerful men: Democratic Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan and Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner.
Rauner’s administration on Sunday night said he’d veto both measures as soon as they hit his desk, should the Illinois Senate concur with the House on Monday. The administration also advised that members of the General Assembly “shouldn’t go anywhere.”
You can’t tax your way to prosperity, and you can’t go on indefinitely spending money you don’t have — two simple facts which escape most legislators.
#1 ON AMAZON: Mark Levin’s Rediscovering Americanism: And the Tyranny of Progressivism.
HAS ANYONE PETITIONED THE EPA TO REGULATE BIRTH CONTROL PILLS? Fish becoming transgender from contraceptive pill chemicals being flushed down household drains.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation. “Things were getting better at a breakneck pace for 25 years after World War II. Then it all just … slowed way down.”
Plus: “Ignatius also said that the name Trump was cheered whenever it was mentioned during meetings Ignatius had with Syrian forces trying to take out Assad. One Syrian commander praised Trump for having what Ignatius described as a vulgar term that in Spanish is ‘cojones.'”
A 1960s VTOL: An XC-142A hovers. The photo dates from 1964. Here’s a pic of some descendants (bumped from yesterday, the Ospreys over Sydney).
“IN OTHER NEWS, EVERGREEN STATE HAD A CONSERVATIVE STUDENT:” Conservative Student Quits Evergreen State, Pens Note to Professor Weinstein.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Why Did a UCLA Instructor With a Popular Free-Speech Course Lose His Job?
THIS SEEMS RIPE FOR FRAUD: Nearly 20% of Rhode Island Registered Voters Live Out of State.
MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE SOUTH CHINA SEA:
An American warship on Sunday sailed close to a disputed island in the South China Sea occupied by Beijing, as part of an operation to demonstrate freedom of navigation in the waters, a US official said.
The USS Stethem, a guided-missile destroyer, sailed within 12 nautical miles of Triton Island, part of the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, the official said. The operation was first reported by Fox News on Sunday.
It was the second “freedom-of-navigation operation,” or “fonop,” conducted during the presidency of Donald Trump, following a drill in late May in which a U.S. warship sailed within 12 nautical miles of an artificial island built up by China in the South China Sea.
China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement the U.S. ship had made an unauthorised entry into China’s territorial waters.
FONOP. Freedom Of Navigation Operation. What the USN did was perfectly legal. China’s manufactured islets are illegal. But Beijing called the the FONOP a “serious political and military provocation…”
After the FONOP Chinese President Xi and President Trump spoke on the phone.
“Xi Jinping stressed that since his meeting with President Trump, important results have been achieved in China-U.S. relations,” Chinese state media outlet CCTV reported. “Meanwhile, bilateral relations have also been affected by some negative factors, for which the China side has expressed its position to the U.S. side.”
HISTORY DOESN’T REPEAT ITSELF, BUT IT OFTEN RHYMES LIKE A BAD JOHN COUGAR SONG:
● Shot: OPINION: Scarborough should run against Trump in 2020.
—Brent Budowsky, The Hill, Thursday.
● Chaser: John [Cougar] Mellencamp for senator from Indiana.
—Brent Budowsky, The Hill, February 17, 2010.
And a bonus bit of Obama-era history rhyming today:
● Shot: WashPost Assembles ‘Kids Chorus’ to Mock/Sing Trump Tweets.
—NewsBusters, yesterday.
● Chaser: CNN Uses Singing Children to Campaign for ObamaCare.
—NewsBusters, October 7, 2009.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Can we move Earth’s orbit?
SALENA ZITO: Why the generation after millennials will vote Republican.
Generation Z is also more religious than preceding generations — attending organized weekly church services at about twice the rate of millennials, Generation Xers and baby boomers.
They are interested in issues that involve themselves but that also impact the broader community — education, employment, security and the environment all concern them.
“Politically, Generation Z is liberal-moderate with social issues, like support for marriage equality and civil rights, and moderate-conservative with fiscal and security issues,” said Brauer.
“While many are not connected to the two major parties and lean independent, Gen Z’s inclinations generally fit moderate Republicans.”
The Republican Party, if it plays its cards right, could make lasting inroads with this generation, even at an early age — something the GOP has struggled with for decades.
Had he been able to vote last November, Bloomstine definitely would have picked Donald Trump for president.
“I was not old enough to vote for him, but I was very engaged and informed all throughout the election,” Bloomstine said. “I liked most his independence from the political parties and his willingness to challenge them when he felt they were not serving the American people.”
If Trump runs in four years would Bloomstine vote for him? “As long as he continues to be himself, absolutely.”
Last year was the first presidential election in which Generation Z voted, according to Brauer, “yet, there was virtually no attention paid to this demographic.”
Read the whole thing.
TWO WEEKS AGO, A DEMOCRAT SHOT A REPUBLICAN CONGRESSMAN: Democrats unleash on Trump after CNN clothesline video: ‘He has violence and blood in his mind.’
Note to Democratic operatives and media figures: Wrestling isn’t actually real. It’s more like your programming.
“LITERALLY:” Trump literally tackles mainstream media with CNN ‘clothesline’ video.
CNN’s Brian Stelter actually contacted Twitter to ascertain if Trump’s animated GIF-themed tweet violated their terms of use.
Meanwhile, from BuzzFeed, “MORE LOGO VIOLENCE: BuzzFeed staffer creates wrestling video with the DOJ logo knocking out President Trump.”
As Allahpundit quipped yesterday:
The Atlantic wants Trump banned from Twitter for supposedly violating its terms of service covering violent threats, harassment, and “hateful conduct,” which is a bit like asking the Angels to release Mike Trout. When there’s only one compelling reason to pay attention to a mediocre organization, they’re going to cling to that reason as long as they can afford to. Frankly, maybe it’s best for everyone that Twitter continues to let him slide: He doesn’t seem all that stable as it is and taking away his favorite toy is likely to compound the problem. The best-case scenario is that he starts doing video rants on Instagram instead. Worst-case: Korean War II.
Perhaps another GOP presidential candidate with a show-biz connection said it best:
THANKS, OBAMA: UN agency expects rising migrant flow.
The U.N. refugee agency says people smuggling and migrant flows in Libya are on the rise, so Europe may face increased flows of migrants and refugees in the future.
UNHCR says 84,830 migrants and refugees have reached Italy’s shores so far this year from Libya, a 19-percent increase from a year earlier. Seven in 10 are economic migrants and the rest are “people in need of protection” like refugees and asylum-seekers.
In a new report on migration trends in Libya issued Monday, UNHCR noted that largely lawless Libya has become a major thoroughfare for migrants, but patterns of movement are changing.
I’m so old I can remember when Libya was a quiet ally in the Terror War.
RON RADOSH: The GOP’s Health-Care Debacle.
A MUSLIM COMES TO RURAL MINNESOTA: “The people of Dawson seemed good and genuine until they voted for the wrong presidential candidate. Who is the bigot? Who is blinded by prejudice? I see no sign that the [Washington] Post’s reporter understands that she and Dr. Virji are drawing the wrong lesson from the story they tell, but I suspect that a great many readers will take away quite a different point from the one that they intended.”
Read the whole thing.
HMM: Oil, crushed in the first half of this year, is about to rebound, analyst says.
“You are going to see crude oil inventories globally and domestically begin to decline month after month. That will support crude oil prices, boosting the entire sector,” Thummel said.
Thummel also sees a lack of capital investment in U.S. production leading to an undersupply of crude oil, resulting in a rise in crude prices.
Oilfield services firm Baker Hughes reported on Friday that its weekly count of oil rigs operating in U.S. fields fell by two rigs, the first decline since January. Last week, U.S. crude output dropped 100,000 barrels per day to 9.3 million bpd, the steepest weekly fall since July 2016.
We’re still a long, long way off from $100 oil again.
FASTER, PLEASE: NASA’S First Asteroid Deflection Mission Enters Next Design Phase.
“A binary asteroid is the perfect natural laboratory for this test,” said Tom Statler, program scientist for DART at NASA Headquarters. “The fact that Didymos B is in orbit around Didymos A makes it easier to see the results of the impact, and ensures that the experiment doesn’t change the orbit of the pair around the sun.”
After launch, DART would fly to Didymos, and use an on-board autonomous targeting system to aim itself at Didymos B. Then the refrigerator-sized spacecraft would strike the smaller body at a speed about nine times faster than a bullet, approximately 3.7 miles per second (6 kilometers per second). Earth-based observatories would be able to see the impact and the resulting change in the orbit of Didymos B around Didymos A, allowing scientists to better determine the capabilities of kinetic impact as an asteroid mitigation strategy. The kinetic impact technique works by changing the speed of a threatening asteroid by a small fraction of its total velocity, but by doing it well before the predicted impact so that this small nudge will add up over time to a big shift of the asteroid’s path away from Earth.
“DART is a critical step in demonstrating we can protect our planet from a future asteroid impact,” said Andy Cheng of The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, the DART investigation co-lead. “Since we don’t know that much about their internal structure or composition, we need to perform this experiment on a real asteroid. With DART, we can show how to protect Earth from an asteroid strike with a kinetic impactor by knocking the hazardous object into a different flight path that would not threaten the planet.”
The clock is ticking.
WELL, THEY MOSTLY SUPPORT DEMOCRATS, SO WHY NOT? Bannon Pushes Tax Hike For Wealthy.
All is proceeding as I have foreseen.
CONGRESSMEN IN HIDING, PROTESTING FOR IMPEACHMENT, AND BODY-SLAMMING CNN: All that and more in Liz Sheld’s morning brief.
USA TODAY EDITORIALIZES: On Independence Day, U.S. elections remain vulnerable.
I made that same point in my paper ballots piece.
July 2, 2017
THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE: Killer Whales Are Conceiving, but the Pregnancies Are Failing.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: My sex doll is so much better than my real wife. “After my wife gave birth, we stopped having sex and I felt a deep sense of loneliness. But the moment I saw Mayu in the showroom, it was love at first sight.”
From the wife: “I make the dinner, I clean, I do the washing. I choose sleep over sex.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How fireworks exploded into history – and became an American symbol.
I BLAME THE VIOLENT RHETORIC OF ELIZABETH SANDERS AND BERNIE SANDERS: California Democrats to far-left single payer advocates: Stop bullying and threatening us!
But Elizabeth Sanders says anyone standing in the way of single payer healthcare is guilty of “blood money.” Bernie Sanders says they’re going to kill “thousands of people.” Fellow California Democrat Nancy Pelosi says they’re dishonoring God. Hillary Clinton and Motel Williams concur with all of the above.
What, you think you wouldn’t have to deal with the blowback from this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding health care whipping your base into a frenzy? Sorry about that, Sacramento.
Or as Seth Barron wrote in City Journal in response to GOP Rep. Steve Scalise being shot by a deranged Sanders supporter, “Every policy difference, no matter how trivial, has been cast as a matter of life and death. Proposed changes in federal Medicaid reimbursement practices will consign ‘tens of thousands of people’ to early death, according to Senator Bernie Sanders, while rolling back federal guidelines on transgender bathroom signage will cause more teenagers to kill themselves, according to ThinkProgress…Trump’s opponents in the media, academia, and politics can pretend that their calls for radical action were meant metaphorically or in a nonviolent sense. But they are the ones who opened this box of fear, panic, and rage. Let them take responsibility for the climate that now exists.”
YOU’RE TAKING YOUR CHANCES WITH 11-YEAR-OLD BOYS IN ALASKA: Bear crashes through window of 11-year-old boy’s bedroom.
AT AMAZON, shop the Sexual Wellness Store.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation. “Things were getting better at a breakneck pace for 25 years after World War II. Then it all just … slowed way down.”
SPIKED: ORWELL’S WAR ON THE ‘SMELLY LITTLE ORTHODOXIES’ OF LEFT AND RIGHT. It’s an interesting review of Robert Colls’ new book, George Orwell: English Rebel, though note this passage:
Setting out his stall, Colls, a professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, puts his finger on why Orwell despised ideology as a ‘form of abstract knowledge which, in order to support a particular tendency or regime, has to distort the world and usually does so by drawing off, or separating out, ideas from experience. Ideology, in Orwell’s eyes, could never afford to get too close to the lives of the people. The more abstract the idea and the language that that expressed it, the more ideological the work and vice versa’, he writes at the book’s beginning.
‘[Orwell] knew that if he was saying something so abstract that it could not be understood or falsified, then he was not saying anything that mattered’, Colls continues. ‘He staked his reputation on being true to the world as it was, and his great fear of intellectuals stemmed from what he saw as their propensity for abstraction and deracination – abstraction in their thinking and deracination in their lives. Orwell’s politics, therefore, were no more and no less than intense encounters turned into writings he hoped would be truthful and important. Like Gramsci, he believed that telling the truth was a revolutionary act. But without the encounters he had no politics and without the politics he felt he had nothing to say.’
What’s this now about Gramsci and truth? (Though don’t let that stop you from reading the whole thing; it’s a fascinating article.)
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:
● Shot: Stephen Hawking says Donald Trump risks ‘turning Earth into Venus’ with 250 degree temperature.
—The London Telegraph, today.
● Chaser: President Obama ‘has four years to save Earth.’
—The London Guardian, January 17, 2009.
Classical reference in headline:
FLASHBACK: New status anxiety fuels Trump derangement.
Our privileged, college-educated left — what Joel Kotkin calls the gentry liberals — feels that its preeminent position in American society is under threat. And people care a lot about status.
What’s more, the people who seem to be lashing out the most are, in fact, just those gentry liberals: academics, entertainers, pundits, low-level tech types, and so on. As journalism professor Mark Grabowski reported, another academic texted him on election night: “Oh my God! We will be the ones ostracized if he wins.”
Maybe we shouldn’t “ostracize” people based on whether their candidate wins, but in a way this professor was right: A Trump victory is a blow to the status of the people who thought Hillary Clinton was their candidate — one that they feel even more deeply because gentry liberals, having been raised on the principle that the personal is political, seem to take politics pretty personally.
Related: Trump Is Playing With The Press.
Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).
Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.
They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control.
And they still haven’t learned.
Plus: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump. “When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 ‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.”