But they shouldn’t stop there, of course. Refusing to tour is a good first step toward saving our planet, but it’s not nearly enough. The band should quit making music entirely. I’m not exactly sure how much carbon is produced by recording and releasing music in 2019, but I doubt you can plant trees quickly enough to offset it. Even if you just count the carbon dioxide that’s released whenever Chris Martin opens his gob to sing, that’s tipping the balance. Gaia can’t take much more of it, and neither can lovers of good music.
Save the planet, Coldplay. Go away!
Hopefully this will start a trend — Hollywood and the news industry could really learn from these guys.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Elizabeth Warren Is Wrong About Everything. “As this socialist battle royale has played out, the standard take from pundits on both sides is that Warren is more deep from a policy standpoint than Sanders is. Admittedly, it is quite easy to present oneself as being less crazy and possessing more intellectual heft than Bernie Sanders. However, a quick pass over what Warren offers on any given day as she campaigns proves that she may be even loonier.”
IF THEY DO THAT, NATIONALIZE THEIR HOLDINGS. China could ‘turn off power’ in the Philippines, senate hears. “China’s State Grid Corp has a 40% stake in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) – which runs the country’s lone power transmission line. It transmits electricity all the way from Luzon – the northern end of the country – down to Mindanao in the south.”
China has big stakes in a lot of countries, but it lacks the military and the diplomatic muscle to keep them from being nationalized, especially if the United States backs the nationalizers. Hey, people did it to us for decades; let them learn what it’s like to be a global power.
House impeachment proceedings have helped — not hurt — President Trump’s approval in the eyes of voters, and in the latest survey, his rating has turned positive thanks to a massive revolt against impeachment by independents.
The just-released Emerson Poll found that 48% approve of Trump, and 47% do not.
What’s more, support for impeachment is now negative, a finding that backs up other recent polling.
The Democrats can’t catch a break, and they don’t deserve to.
PRIVACY: Telegram Founder Says Users Should ‘Delete WhatsApp.’ “WhatsApp doesn’t only fail to protect its users’ messages, it is consistently being used as a Trojan horse to spy on their users’ non-WhatsApp content, including photos kept on their phones. Founder of rival app Telegram, Pavel Durov, says people should just delete it.”
Yes, Durov is trying to get people to move from WhatsApp to his own Telegram, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong about WhatsApp.
HYPOTHESIS: What’s coming out about Ukraine — basically U.S. aid money going in, and then part of the money in the form of kickbacks funneled back to U.S. political figures via financial firms and family members — is not unusual, but rather something closer to the norm.
And comparisons to Bill Clinton don’t fly. There was a clear crime pointed to; some people (basically, the Senate) didn’t think it rose to the level of impeachable, but everyone knew what it was about. This is all smoke and mirrors and hearsay and presumptions. More on Will Hurd here.
The agricultural industry has been hit especially hard. Farm bankruptcies are up 24% this year, and a report by the American Farm Bureau Federation finds that almost 40% of farmers’ income this year will come either from insurance payouts or government bailouts.
Nobody ever said trade wars are fun and easy — er, Trump did, which wasn’t his smartest statement ever — but the short-term pain for farmers ought to yield longterm benefits to our economy generally. And also improve our global position relative to China’s.
More:
The other big weapon in the Chinese arsenal is investment. The Chinese government is traditionally a major buyer of U.S. government debt, and it holds the second-biggest stash of Treasuries (after Japan). Over the years, many have fretted that a spat between the U.S. and China would lead the latter to sell off that mountain of debt, creating a world of hurt for the U.S. financial system and economy.
But this danger is vastly exaggerated for two reasons. First, as recent experience demonstrates, the U.S. simply doesn’t need Chinese government cash. In 2015 and 2016 China experienced one of the biggest capital flights in history, with about $1 trillion pouring out of the country. This resulted in a huge drawdown of China’s foreign-exchange reserves, most of which are U.S. bonds.
If the U.S. were heavily dependent on Chinese government financing, interest rates on U.S. debt — and by extension, throughout the U.S. economy — should have risen. Instead, they fell.
Washington’s addiction to debt is a problem, but for now anyway, there are plenty of lenders outside of Beijing. And economically decoupling from China should be — and seems to be — reassuring investors and lenders that Washington is getting at least one thing right.
On reflection, Washington hates this decoupling, as it reduces opportunities for corruption and graft. This is all Trump’s work, and so far it’s working pretty well.
Trump’s policies have been more anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian than those of the Obama administration. Trump armed the Ukrainians; Obama did not. Trump imposed new sanctions against Russia, used force against Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefed up NATO defenses, pulled the U.S. out of an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia, and pumped more oil and gas to lower world prices — much to the chagrin of oil-exporting Russia.
In contrast, Obama was the architect of “reset” with Russia that reached its nadir in a hot mic exchange in which Obama offered a quid pro quo, vowing more flexibility on issues such as U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia giving Obama “space” to concentrate on his reelection.
Trump’s critics have also radically changed their spin on “coups.” To them, “coup” is no longer a dirty word trafficked in by right-wing conspiracists. Instead, it has been normalized as a possibly legitimate means of aborting the Trump presidency.
I eagerly await their response to talk of a “coup” against the next Democrat in the White House. But they don’t care about the damage they do. It’s rule or ruin. Because they’re horrible people, who in a healthy republic would be ostracized and marginalized and mocked by everyone.
Weather blogger Brendan Loy, who sounded the alarm regarding the devastation that accompanied Hurricane Katrina in 2005 days ahead of government and most media, faults New York’s Mayor Bloomberg for waiting too long to order evacuations and for underplaying the extent of the danger. He wrote the following: “Waiting until almost noon on the day before the storm, mere hours before the subways closed, to order an evacuation of the most vulnerable low-lying areas in New York City (‘Zone A’), was a huge mistake, not just in retrospect, but at the time, as I wrote then.” By contrast, “Gov. Christie was pretty emphatic in taking Sandy seriously and urging others to do so. He criticized the mayor of Atlantic City for being less so.”
For most of the last three years, Donald Trump’s critics have scoffed at supposed “conspiracy theories” that claimed a “deep state” of bureaucrats were aborting the Trump presidency. We have been told the word “coup” is hyperbole that reveals the paranoid minds of Trump supporters.
Yet oddly, many people brag that they are proud members of a deep state and occasionally boast about the idea of a coup.
Recently, former acting CIA chief John McLaughlin proclaimed in a public forum, “Thank God for the deep state.” Former CIA director John Brennan agreed and praised the “deep state people” for their opposition to Trump.
Far from denying the danger of an unelected careerist bureaucracy that seeks to overturn presidential policies, New York Times columnists have praised its efforts to nullify the Trump agenda.
Nearly all coups maintain at least a pretense of legality, and claim misconduct by the leader being removed.
Plus:
Taylor and Kent cited their anguish with Trump’s foreign policy toward Ukraine — namely that it did not go through official channels and was too unsympathetic to Ukraine and too friendly to Russia. If so, one might have thought the anguished bureaucrats would have similarly gone public during the Obama administration.
After all, Vice President Joe Biden took over the Obama administration’s Ukrainian policy at a time when his son Hunter was knee-deep in Ukrainian affairs. As a consultant for a Ukrainian natural gas company, Hunter Biden made a reported $80,000 a month without expertise in either the energy business in particular or Ukraine in general.
Also, Trump’s policies have been more anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian than those of the Obama administration. Trump armed the Ukrainians; Obama did not. Trump imposed new sanctions against Russia, used force against Russian mercenaries in Syria, beefed up NATO defenses, pulled the U.S. out an asymmetrical missile treaty with Russia, and pumped more oil and gas to lower world prices — much to the chagrin of oil-exporting Russia.
In contrast, Obama was the architect of “reset” with Russia that reached its nadir in a hot mic exchange in which Obama offered a quid pro quo, vowing more flexibility on issues such as U.S.-sponsored missile defense in Eastern Europe in exchange for Russia giving Obama “space” to concentrate on his re-election.
That’s different because shut up. Finally: “Trump’s critics have also radically changed their spin on ‘coups.’ To them, ‘coup’ is no longer a dirty word trafficked in by right-wing conspiracists. Instead, it has been normalized as a possibly legitimate means of aborting the Trump presidency.”
For people who claim that Trump is trampling norms and the Constitution, they’re doing an awful not of trampling of norms and the Constitution. But, then, they’re hypocrites who’ll do anything — and wreck anything — in the pursuit of power.
ART FOR ART’S SAKE (WHAT A CONCEPT!): Finding Hope at the Concert Hall. Heather Mac Donald on an increasing rare experience: a beautiful performance of classical music without a note of identity politics. Meanwhile, as she writes, the left continues its long march through institutions.
A few markers of our present moment: every arts institution in the United States is under pressure to discard meritocratic standards in collections, programming, and personnel, in favor of race and gender preferences. When the Museum of Modern Art opened its renovated headquarters in New York City this October, a Wall Street Journal art critic noted that the new MoMA had been able to “correct, and even make reparations for, its heretofore almost exclusive parade of white male superstars.” Gender and race bean-counting is now the key to evaluating a collection’s worth. “Previously, only about 1/20th of the art in the museum’s permanent collection was by women,” wrote the Journal’s Peter Plagens. “That fraction now exceeds a quarter and is moving toward a third.”
. . . Writing in the New York Times, Darren Walker urged museums to “resist reinforcing biases, hierarchies and inequalities”; instead, they should “redefine excellence and relevance.” That redefinition entails hiring curators and other staff based on race. The goal is “installations and institutions” that represent “people whom the system excludes and exploits.” The museum establishment hardly needed Walker’s prodding; it has already enthusiastically embraced “diversity” as its artistic lodestar. In 2020, the Baltimore Museum of Art, for example, will acquire works only by females and will stage only “female-centric” exhibits.
. . . Narcissistic opera directors have been inflicting their political ideology on defenseless operas for several decades now, but the revisionism is only going to get worse, especially with the rise of #MeToo. From here on, it will be almost impossible to mount Don Giovanni, Rusalka, Turandot, Madama Butterfly, Carmen, and much of the rest of the opera repertoire without similar directorial “help” to purge these works of their toxic masculinity, cultural appropriation, and incorrect attitudes toward the “Other.”
The good news for now: Attendance is not compulsory at MoMA, the Baltimore Museum of Art, or any opera that has been “helped.”
DEVMENTUM! Deval Patrick Cancels Campaign Event At Atlanta College After Only 2 People Show Up. “Patrick was scheduled to speak at Morehouse College in Atlanta, a historically black men’s college located not far from the site of Wednesday night’s Democratic presidential debate. The event was organized by students from the New Deal Democrats.”
GRANTED: 107-year-old woman’s only birthday wish was to hold a baby. Movingly, a (female) Facebook friend comments: “I can see this. I never wanted children. Then I agreed to have one. Then I wanted more and now I have three. When I am 100, I won’t want to hold a book I’ve written, however useful it might be, but I could see holding a baby.”
SO VERY SUSPICIOUSLY, there was a mass-flagging of negative comments about the new, crappy, Star Wars movie in this thread, leaving only 3 positive ones. I went back and approved the flagged comments. I wonder if I should consider suing Disney for wasting my time?
Although “progressive occultism” isn’t an entirely new development — Sally Quinn, then-married to Washington Post maximum editor Ben Bradlee, was playing with “Ouija boards, astrological charts, palm reading, talismans,” and casting spells she believed to be lethal since the late 1960s.
ANDREW MORRISS REVIEWS “THE LAUNDROMAT.” It’s unrealistic, he says, but I like this:
The film’s conclusion (spoiler alert, but it is really no surprise) is that Nevis, Panama, and Delaware (and presumably other similar places) are sinkholes of corruption and fraud. Streep ends the film by walking out of the Mossack Fonseca office and removing the costume that enabled her to play the role of one of the firm’s employees while reciting part of the (still unknown) Panama Papers leaker’s “manifesto”, morphing into Ellen. She then takes off a wig and transforms herself into Meryl Streep, to deliver a final lecture on the immorality of tax avoidance, shell companies, etc. Along the way, she admits the film director and producer themselves have Delaware companies, which they don’t appear to be giving up.
Instapundit blogger Glenn Reynolds makes a regular call to “repeal the Hollywood tax cuts.” As Reynolds notes, our moral betters in Hollywood regularly lecture the rest of us about the evils of tax avoidance while engaged in some of the most egregious tax and accounting gimmicks to avoid taxes. I’m not holding my breath waiting for Hollywood’s elite to practice what they preach or get back to making movies that actually entertain, but that would be a happy ending.
That’s not the kind of happy ending Hollywood demands.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: ‘Richard Jewell’ Paints Press as ‘Reckless, Corrupt, Immoral.’ “Yes, the events in the film took place more than 20 years ago, but once again Eastwood gets the zeitgeist better than his peers. While they stumble over repeated Fox News films and fawning media portraits, he’s showcasing what’s happening in the media today. Right now. Just this week we saw both AFP and Reuters ‘disappear’ a news story because if made President Barack Obama, not President Donald Trump, look bad.”
An outspoken anti-Trump Republican lawmaker said Thursday he hasn’t seen any evidence the president committed bribery or extortion, slamming the House Democrats’ impeachment probe.
Rep. Will Hurd, Texas Republican, who announced his retirement earlier this year and who has continuously been a critic of President Trump, said although he has disagreed with how the president and his administration have carried out foreign policy with Ukraine, he doesn’t support the inquiry process.
Mr. Hurd said he would like, as other Republicans have said, to hear from Hunter Biden, who worked for the Ukrainian energy company Burisma during his father’s service as vice president, as well as the whistleblower.
“An impeachable offense should be compelling,” he said during Thursday’s hearing. “It’s not something to be rushed or taken lightly. I have not heard evidence proving the president committed bribery or extortion.”
He is, however, indisputably guilty of defeating Hillary.
Related: Ken Starr: ‘This is Impeachment in Search of a Rationale.’ “Starr agued that Democrats are using impeachment as a ‘tool of expressing’ their ‘disapprobation of a controversial president.'” Trump’s not that controversial. 90% of Republicans, and an increasing number of independents, support him. He’s just highly disliked by excitable Dems and their media satraps.
WELL: Exclusive: FBI official under investigation after allegedly altering document in 2016 Russia probe. “The possibility of a substantive change to an investigative document is likely to fuel accusations from President Donald Trump and his allies that the FBI committed wrongdoing in its investigation of connections between Russian election meddling and the Trump campaign.” Well, that’s because it looks very much as if it did.
BAN ALL THE HISTORY! So Long, Sacagawea. “The City Council of Charlottesville, Virginia has voted to remove a statue of Meriwether Lewis, William Clark and Sacagawea, their Shoshone interpreter, from a street in the city.”
HE’S RIGHT ON THIS: Wilfred Reilly’sHate Crime Hoax: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War is worth reading. I speak to plenty of people on the left side of the political spectrum. They are adamant that hoaxes are rare … but they are not right. The fact that they persist in saying so (and/or believing so) is part of the problem.
Last year, Ed Razek, VS’s former chief marketing officer, made offensive comments to Vogue.com, saying that there was “no room” for plus-size models on their runway and that he would not cast transgender models.
And this summer, it was discovered that Leslie Wexner, CEO of L Brands, was a close friend of disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein used Wexner’s link to Victoria’s Secret to recruit young women by promising them modeling jobs with the brand.
Ultimately, with the brand’s revenue declining quarter by quarter and changing societal ideas of what’s sexy, Victoria’s Secret has been in trouble for quite some time.
During a press gaggle on Thursday, Biden, 77, was asked to comment on the court filing. Fox News reporter Peter Doocy asked, “I’m wondering if you have a comment on this report and court filing from Arkansas that your son Hunter made you a grandfather again.”
Biden was outraged. He dismissed the question, responding, “No. That’s a private matter. You’re a good man. You’re a good man. Classy.”
Hunter Biden, 49, agreed to take a DNA test to reaffirm his denials that he fathered a child with 28-year-old Lunden Roberts. Robert’s child made Biden a father of four. His other children, Naomi, 24, Finnegan, 19, and Maisy, 18, were from his first marriage with Kathleen Buhle.
UPDATE: “You know what the saddest part of this video is?”, asks Benny Johnson of Turning Point USA. “The reaction of the other reporters. Not a single journo has the slightest curiosity about Hunter Biden — one of the most consequential people in politics today. The same cowards who covered up Epstein.”
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and both their reaction and Biden’s makes perfect sense.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Bob Menendez: You’re Damn Right I’m Going to Take Your (Toy) AR-15 Away. “I suppose the senators want us to rest safe, knowing that they won’t sit still for one minute longer while ‘F15.06 subcommittee for ASTM F589-17, Standard Consumer Safety Specification for Non-Powder Guns’ remains hopelessly out of date. Perhaps under the revised version of ASTM F589-17, children’s toy guns will come in no color other than hot pink, have a nine-inch-diameter fake flower permanently plugged into the barrel, and feature a billboard-style sign sticking up from where the sights would be, with ‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!’ embossed in glow-in-the-dark block letters. Because, weeeeee, fun.”
Read the whole thing, if you don’t mind me saying so myself.
OF SYCOPHANTS AND CHILDREN: One of the many reasons to love Issues & Insights is its no-nonsense refusal to go with the flow of mainstream media adulation of Greta Thunberg and similar teen scolds telling the rest of us how evil we are for not heeding AOC’s prophesy of ecological doom in 12 years. Here’s a sample from today’s offerings:
“The world can’t help but know about Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish scold who seems to have dropped out of school to travel the world and impudently lecture her elders about how they have let her down. Though this girl knows nothing about climate other than it exists around her, and less about the world, adults nod in agreement as she rants, hand her multiple honors and awards, and have sworn they have been inspired as well as properly chastised by her.”
They left off my indispensable item: Retractable charging cables. The spring never lasts as long as I’d like, but they’re just so handy that I always keep a couple of backups.
Given the endless parade of “Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself” memes swamping social media, you can’t see a headline like this without wondering precisely what sort of “cooperation” Officer Noel might be prepared to offer. Some of the comments in response to the linked article have already made reference to various powerful people once again “getting nervous” and speculations about Noel’s safety are sure to follow.
I’m rather dubious of that line of thinking, however, and for two reasons that seem equally valid. First of all, the two officers charged in the incident could only play this one of two ways. The first is to keep your mouth shut and have your attorney put on the best defense possible, hoping to win over the jury. The other is to be as cooperative as possible in the hope of getting a favorable plea bargain and avoid the trial entirely. It could very well be that Noel’s lawyer is going for the latter, not seeing much hope of a not guilty verdict.
THIS WAS QUITE ENTERTAINING: Joe Rogan Interviews Matt Taibbi. “Taibbi may be a lefty, but he’s willing to call bullshit when he sees it, including on the Epstein murder ‘suicide’ and the lack of any center in today’s hate-click driven media.”
last night. Really well done, and left me waiting impatiently for the next book.
