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May 2019

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

What if Green Energy Isn’t the Future? There’s a reason Warren Buffett decided to bet $10 billion on the future of oil and natural gas By Mark P. Mills

By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-green-energy-isnt-the-future-11558294830

What’s Warren Buffett doing with a $10 billion bet on the future of oil and gas, helping old-school Occidental Petroleum buy Anadarko, a U.S. shale leader? For pundits promoting the all-green future, this looks like betting on horse farms circa 1919.

Meanwhile, broad market sentiment is decidedly bearish on hydrocarbons. The oil and gas share of the S&P 500 is at a 40-year low, and the first quarter of 2019 saw the Nasdaq Clean Edge Green Energy Index and “clean tech” exchange-traded funds outperform the S&P.

A week doesn’t pass without a mayor, governor or policy maker joining the headlong rush to pledge or demand a green energy future. Some 100 U.S. cities have made such promises. Hydrocarbons may be the source of 80% of America’s and the world’s energy, but to say they are currently out of favor is a dramatic understatement.

Yet it’s both reasonable and, for contrarian investors, potentially lucrative to ask: What happens if renewables fail to deliver?

The prevailing wisdom has wind and solar, paired with batteries, adding 250% more energy to the world over the next two decades than American shale has added over the past 15 years. Is that realistic? The shale revolution has been the single biggest addition to the world energy supply in the past century. And even bullish green scenarios still see global demand for oil and gas rising, if more slowly.

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EDUCATION Comments turned off

Harvard is failing its students by allowing them to live in a fantasy world By Kyle Smith

By on May 19th, 2019

https://nypost.com/2019/05/18/harvard-is-failing-its-students-by-allowing-them-to-live-in-a-fantasy-world/

There is a reason you don’t let inmates run your asylum, allow your toddler to eat candy for dinner or tell the Labrador retriever sitting behind the wheel of your car, “OK, Duke, I guess you drive.” Those who are, mentally speaking, a few slices short of a loaf don’t get to make grown-up-people decisions. This brings me to Harvard undergraduates.

In the softest and most spoiled generation of humanity ever to exist (they feel threatened by Halloween costumes and the existence of Ben Shapiro; their forebears endured World War II and Vietnam and even riding bikes without helmets), the softest and most spoiled corner must be the Harvard student body, those little princelings and princesslings who have more expectations about how the world should accommodate their whims than Louis XIV. Last week, a handful of these toddler-brained undergrads got a distinguished Harvard dean fired for doing his job.

That dean, Ronald Sullivan, holds an outside job. He is something called a “lawyer.” Lawyers, as everyone but screaming Harvard kids knows, are a vital element of the justice system. In Professor Sullivan’s case, he is a defense lawyer, meaning he defends people who will sometimes turn out to be guilty. Sullivan’s past clients include the family of Michael Brown, on whose behalf he brought suit against Ferguson, Mo.; and Aaron Hernandez, the former New England Patriots tight end who committed suicide in 2017 while serving a life sentence for murder.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

A ‘Do One Thing’ Congress Dooms Democrats in 2020 by Thomas McArdle

By on May 19th, 2019

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/05/16/a-do-one-thing

Reacting to their angrily-energized and ever-leftward-moving base, congressional Democrats, with their House of Representatives majority, seek President Donald Trump’s head. But they may find themselves the victim of their own guillotine.

The 112th and 113th Congresses, convening from 2011 to 2014, saw the fewest number of laws enacted in the modern era. And it’s no mystery why: one party controlled the Executive and the House of Representatives, while the other controlled the Senate. Unlike during the Nixon and Ford era when conservatism was dormant, there lay precious little public policy common ground between Big-Government Democrats and economic growth-loving Republicans.

Compare the GOP majorities of both houses of the 115th Congress, joining with Trump to cut tax rates on personal and corporate income, reduce the regulatory burden on business, open access to new domestic energy resources in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and repeal Obamacare’s individual mandate. The boost in economic growth and expansion in employment since make it hard to withhold credit.

Compare also the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority in the Senate in the 111th Congress, which with Democrats also in control of the House and the presidency enacted Obamacare, a massive fiscal stimulus, and the Dodd-Frank banking regulatory regime.

The obvious conclusion is that with such disparity in aims between a Republican Party under conservative free-market dominance and Democrats who are evermore socialist-friendly, little happens under divided rule.

This fact was never more apparent than on September 8, 2011, a low point for the Barack Obama presidency, when it was so clear that his massive fiscal stimulus was failing to turn the economy around, he arranged a special address to a Joint Session of Congress to push yet another stimulus.

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

GAYS WHO DEFY BAN ON EUROVISION AND ISRAEL

By on May 19th, 2019

http://daphneanson.blogspot.com/2019/05/fickle-fannys-down-under.html

The Iranians hang gays from cranes, and the hard men of Hamas have a habit of throwing gays off the roofs of buildings, but when the Eurovision Song Contest is held in Tel Aviv, a singularly misplaced hatred for Israel prods gay activists into turning their backs on the event.

Not all gays, of course.  Even the pompous “occasional Jew” (as somebody deliciously termed him) and gay icon Stephen Fry, who invokes his halachic Jewish status on occasions when to do so suits him (such as signing as-a-Jew statements inveighing against Israel) joined such staunch pro-Israel figures as Tracy Ann Oberman and Gene Simmons in signing a statement issued by the so-called Creative Community for Peace condemning calls for a boycott of this year’s Israel-based event:

“We, the undersigned, believe that music is our shared language, one that transcends boundaries and brings people together under a common bond.We believe that unifying events, such as singing competitions, are crucial to help bridge our cultural divides and bring people of all backgrounds together through their shared love of music.The annual Eurovision Song Contest embodies this unifying power. Every year, millions of people across Europe, and around the world, join together in a massive display of cultural exchange and celebration of music.Unfortunately, this year, the spirit of togetherness is under attack by those calling to boycott Eurovision 2019 because it is being held in Israel, subverting the spirit of the contest and turning it from a tool of unity into a weapon of division.We believe the cultural boycott movement is an affront to both Palestinians and Israelis who are working to advance peace through compromise, exchange, and mutual recognition.While we all may have differing opinions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the best path to peace, we all agree that a cultural boycott is not the answer.”

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EDUCATION, ISRAEL Comments turned off

Jonathan S. Tobin Can academia make room for honest scholarship on Israel?

By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/opinions/can-academia-make-room-for-hone

The smearing of scholars for publishing a journal that examined misleading attacks on the Jewish state exposes the intellectual dishonesty of academic Israel-bashers.

The old joke about academia is that the arguments in the faculty lounges are so nasty because the stakes involved are so small. That’s often true about most things that go on in the narrow world of intellectual specialists, who guard their university department fiefdoms with jealous ferocity. They conduct their scholarly wars with publications that are written in academic jargon that is virtually indecipherable to the general reader. Their feuds are epic in their bitterness, but happily of little concern to the rest of society, which can easily ignore the doings of this tribe of underpaid and generally disgruntled people who have earned the right to have the letters Ph.D. after their names.

But there are some academic arguments about which the rest of us would do well to pay attention. One such is the brawl that has started among the members of the Association for Israel Studies, in which a number of members are outraged that some AIS scholars have published a journal devoted to the topic of how language is used to delegitimize Zionism and the State of Israel. The special issue of the Summer 2019 edition of Israel Studies was titled “Word Crimes: Reclaiming the Language of the Israel-Palestinian Conflict.”

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WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Bomb hits tourist bus near Egypt’s Giza Pyramids, at least 17 wounded

By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.israelhayom.com/2019/05/19/bomb-hits-tourist-bus-near-egypts-giza-pyramids-at-least-16-wounded/

Blast detonates near new museum being built nearby Egypt’s famed pyramids, most of the wounded are foreign nationals, sources report.

A roadside bomb hit a tourist bus on Sunday near the Giza Pyramids, wounding at least 17 people including tourists, Egyptian officials said.

The officials said the bus was travelling on a road close to the under-construction Grand Egyptian Museum, which is located adjacent to the Giza Pyramids but is not yet open to tourists.

The bus was carrying at least 25 people, mostly from South Africa, officials added.

The attack comes as Egypt’s vital tourism industry is showing signs of recovery after years in the doldrums because of the political turmoil and violence that followed a 2011 uprising that toppled former leader Hosni Mubarak.

The officials said security forces cordoned off the site of the explosion and the wounded were taken to a nearby hospital.

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ISRAEL, MEDIA Comments turned off

Al Jazeera Pulls Video Claiming Holocaust Was ‘Different From How the Jews Tell It’

By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.haaretz.com/middle-east-news/al-jazeera-pulls-video-claiming-holocaust-was-different-from-how-the-jews-tell-it-1.7255111

Video posted to AJ+ Arabic’s social media pages says Jews skewed Holocaust facts and statistics to get reparations from Germany, and that the establishment of Israel was derived from Nazi ideology.

Al-Jazeera’s AJ+ Arabic channel pulled a video it posted to its social media channels Friday night that claimed Jews exploit the Holocaust and that Israel is the genocide’s “greatest beneficiary.”The seven minute-long, Arabic-language video asserted that though the Holocaust did occur, “it’s different from how the Jews tell it,” Israeli media reported.

AJ+ Arabic, the youth-focused, online current-events channel of Qatar’s official Al Jazeera Media Network, posted the video on its social media platforms with the caption “The gas chambers killed millions of Jews…So the story says. How true is the #Holocaust and how did the Zionists benefit from it?”Before its removal from the platforms on Saturday, the post reportedly gained 1.1 million views on Facebook and Twitter. After it was deleted, Al Jazeera said the piece violated the network’s editorial standards.

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MEDIA, NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Notes on the Great Realignment By Roger Kimball

By on May 19th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/18/notes-on-the-great-realignment/

One of these days, I would like to cadge an invitation to a strategy meeting of #TheResistance. Not the pussy-behatted feminoid Hollywood chapter of #TheResistance. Nothing could be more boring, or more depressing, than that.But I would like to get a glimpse into the engine room of the more-moral-than-thou rancid-Right confraternity.

How are their troops dispatched? Whence do they receive their marching orders? Is it via the internet, or from some even more deliquescent medium of communication, that Pete Wehner and Parson David French and the rest of that fraternity receive the codebook of this week’s virtue signaling? I sometimes imagine Bill Kristol reposed among the debris of his machinations, like Marlon Brando in “Apocalypse Now,” muttering terrible imprecations to his mesmerized if batty acolytes.

I’ll probably never know, but it’s clear that they do employ some effective means of getting the message out. I was reminded of this over the last couple of days when I noticed that Anne Applebaum, Max Boot, and Gabriel Schoenfeld all showed up with essentially the same homework assignment.

Applebaum, writing for the Orange-Man-Bad Post, weighed in with a column taking the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to task for “overt racism and covert anti-Semitism,” for mounting “an all-out assault on his country’s legal and judicial institutions, on independent media, on academia and on culture,” and for supporting Christianity against “the Muslim hordes (who don’t exist).”

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IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

The Merit of Merit-Based Immigration By Kevin D. Williamson

By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/merit-based-immigration-plan-serves-us-interests/

The general idea is a good one: The U.S. has interests of its own, and immigration should serve them first and foremost.

Having chain-migrated his way into the White House and a little bit of political power, Donald Trump’s son-in-law is shopping around an immigration plan. And if you can get past the hilarious juxtaposition of the words “merit-based” and “Jared Kushner,” it’s a pretty good one.

As things stand, the majority of immigrants to the United States (the majority of legal immigrants, anyway) qualify for entry on the basis of having a family member legally present in the United States. This is the mechanism behind what is known as “chain migration,” in which one member of a family provides entry to another, who provides entry to another, who provides entry to another, and so on.

In contrast, a small share of immigrants — about 12 percent — enter the country on the basis of a job offer or the possession of certain skills or education that make them desirable to employers. (Others enter as investors, coming in as potential employers rather than potential employees.) These are everything from doctors to software developers.

Kushner’s agenda is to reverse those proportions, reducing the number of entrants through family-based immigration and loosening up restrictions on highly skilled workers. The plan would also eliminate the “lottery,” the visa system under which 50,000 applicants are selected randomly (almost randomly, anyway) in the name of diversity, albeit a kind of diversity that excludes Canadians, Englishmen, Indians, Brazilians, Nigerians, and many others. It is difficult to think of a worse criterion for the admission of new Americans than randomness.

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POLITICS Comments turned off

Pete Buttigieg takes aim at … Thomas JeffersonBy Monica Showalter

By on May 19th, 2019

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/05/pete_buttigieg_takes_aim_at_thomas_jefferson.html

With few Confederate statues left to topple, Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg thinks it’s now time to take out Thomas Jefferson.

Look at the jackassery he displays in this interview with Hugh Hewitt, reported by the Daily Caller:

Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg says Americans should not be honoring Thomas Jefferson by naming events and places after the founding father.

The mayor of South Bend, Indiana, was on “The Hugh Hewitt Show” Friday and said he believes removing — not celebrating — Jefferson is “the right thing to do.”

The subject came up when Buttigieg was asked about the name of the annual Indiana Democratic dinner that used to commemorate the statues of Jefferson and Andrew Jackson within the party, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

“Well, let’s go to policy now—a very blunt question because you talk about going to every Jefferson-Jackson Dinner in Indiana when you were running statewide. Should Jefferson-Jackson dinners be renamed everywhere because both were holders of slaves?” Hewitt asked.

“Yeah, we’re doing that in Indiana. I think it’s the right thing to do,” Buttigieg said. “Over time, you develop and evolve on the things you choose to honor … Jefferson is more problematic. There’s a lot of course to admire in his thinking and his philosophy, but then again if you plunge into his writings, especially the notes on the state of Virginia, you know that he knew slavery was wrong.”

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