Headlines

All from Internet news sites. Guess which ones from Politico?

Trump options on Russian probe: Discredit, pardon, fire

Co-founder of firm behind the Trump-Russia dossier will plead the fifth

NFL: OJ will be on Hall of Fame invitation list ..

Dershowitz: 'Unlikely' Mueller will 'want to come away with nothing'

Russian sanctions deal passes without changes Trump wanted

Report: Sessions did talk about the 2016 campaign with Russians

Wall Street Journal editorial writer found dead ...

Reuters tries to trash Trump with poll showing him gaining with his voter base

Schiff, Warner launch preemptive strike on Trump pardons

Report: Trump will use anti-terror law to sidestep enviro review of border wall

Dems to rebrand: 'The better deal'

Lindsey Graham: Vote me out if you oppose amnesty and outsourcing

Headlines

The following headlines have come from Internet news sites. Guess which ones came from politico?

Trump to meet with Merkel on evening before G20

Shadow President: Obama meets with South Korean president to discuss Trump

Obama warns about too much patriotism -- on July 4th weekend ...

Huckabee: Media hates Trump more than they love America

Trump discusses North Korea with China and Japan

Tillerson: U.S. will let Russia to decide fate of the Assad regime

North Pole record summer cold ...

Wall Street Journal to cease print edition in Europe

Downing Street not aware of Trump's 'drop in' plan

Trumps keep a way smaller White House staff than the Obamas

History Channel tweets George Washington fighting at Gettysberg ...

Graphic: 10 cartel gunmen killed in firefight near Mexican beach resort

Unvetting

Remember that veterans' benefit event that Donald Trump held when he ducked out of the Republican debate in Des Moines, Iowa  (featuring Megyn Kelly) this past January? I mentioned in a blog then that I was disappointed that the money collected therein was going into Trump's personal foundation. Now the Wall Street Journal, in a good piece of follow-up journalism, has determined that, of the $6 million collected then, only $2.4 million has since been passed on to veterans' groups ... see: Breitbart News Story.

Although this could be a typical sleazy political move, I am quite disappointed that Trump, who hopefully doesn't need this money, has been so slow in passing these funds onto the veterans he so publicly praises. I will be watching and reporting on how well Trump lives up to his commitment to veterans. I clearly hope he fulfills this sacred pledge.

TPP

Free trade is a tricky issue ... like most government policies, it is cloaked in demagoguery. The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) has become a political football in the current presidential campaign ... mostly engendering scorn from the right and from the left. Obviously, the tight secrecy under which it was constructed is part of the suspicion it invokes. But a classmate of mine, Mort Kondracke,  has written, along with the Dean of the Tuck School of Business, a thoughtful progressive piece on this proposed Eastern trade pact that is worth a read. Since accessing Wall Street Journal articles is tricky, this op-ed is reproduced in Dartblog ... see: Dartblog Repost.

My only addition to this discussion is as follows -- trade protectionism in the form of the Smoot-Hawley Tarriff act of 1930 has been blamed for causing the world's great economic depression of the 1930s. If this be the case, why have not the current equally onerous trade barriers erected by China, the world's second largest economy, also led to a similar depression?

Hard of Heart

I have written multiple times about the dilemma posed by the wave of mostly-Muslim immigrants surging into Europe ... and now the Wall Street Journal has published an op-ed by Peggy Noonan on this topic that expresses my thoughts better than I possibly could. Rather than give you a link to these sage remarks, I will reproduce them here. (I hope I am not sued for copyright infringement ... but it's worth the risk):

What a crisis Europe is in, with waves of migrants reaching its shores as the Arab world implodes. It is the biggest migration into Europe since the end of World War II and is shaping up to be its first great and sustained challenge of the 21st century. It may in fact shape that continent’s nature and history as surely as did World War I. 

It is a humanitarian crisis. As Richard Haass of the Council on Foreign Relations notes, it will not soon go away, for two reasons. First, the Mideast will not be peaceful anytime soon and may well become more turbulent. Second, “The more that Europe responds the more it will reinforce the supply of migrants. Europe is caught.” If it doesn’t respond with compassion and generosity it is wrong in humanitarian terms; if it does, more will come and the problem grows. “This is now part of the architecture,” says Mr. Haass. 

Three hundred eighty-one thousand detected migrants have arrived so far this year, up from 216,000 in all of 2014. Almost 3,000 died on the journey or are missing. The symbol of their plight is the photo of the 3-year-old Syrian boy, Aylan Kurdi, who drowned along with his mother and 5-year-old brother when their boat capsized near a Turkish beach. Just as horrifying is what was found inside a Volvo refrigerated truck stranded on the shoulder of the A4 highway 30 miles from Vienna in late August. Inside were 71 bodies, including a 1½-year-old girl, all dead of suffocation. They’d been left there by human smugglers. 

It is a catastrophe unfolding before our eyes, and efforts to deal with it have at least one echo in America, which we’ll examine further down. 

According to the U.N. refugee agency, 53% of the migrants are from Syria, 14% from Afghanistan, 7% from Eritrea, and 3% each from Pakistan, Nigeria, Iraq and Somalia. Seventy-two percent are men, only 13% women and 15% children. Not all are fleeing war. Some are fleeing poverty. Not all but the majority are Muslim. 

The leaders of Europe have shown themselves unsure about what to do. It is a continentwide crisis that began in 2011, as Tunisians fled to the Italian island of Lampedusa. The following year, sub-Saharan Africans who’d migrated to Libya made for Europe after Muammar Gadhafi’s fall. Since then the European response has largely been ad hoc and stopgap. European Union President Jean-Claude Juncker has proposed a “permanent relocation mechanism” with EU members taking greater shares of the refugees, but it is unclear how exactly it would work. 

In many EU nations there will be powerful pushback. Like the crisis itself the pushback will build. Europe is in economic drift. As this newspaper has noted, even Germany is growing at only 1.6% a year. Welfare systems will be strained. Youth unemployment is already high. In Britain the crisis could contribute to a vote to leave the EU outright. There are fears, which the elites take lightly, that floods of displaced people will “alter the cultural balance of the country for ever,” as the columnist Melanie Phillips put it in the Times of London. The Gulf states have not offered a home to their Arab and Muslim cousins. Dutch right-wing leader Geert Wilders this week called the wave of migrants an “Islamic invasion” in parliamentary debate, “an invasion that threatens our prosperity, our security, our culture and identity.” A recent poll showed 54% of Dutch voters opposed to welcoming more than the roughly 2,000 refugees previously agreed to. Hungary is building a fence. 

Reading the popular press of Europe you see the questions. Do we not have a right to control our borders? Isn’t the refugee wave a security threat? ISIS is nothing if not committed to its intentions. Why would they not be funneling jihadists onto those boats? 

Many things could be done to ease the crisis. States such as Jordan and Lebanon work hard to help refugees in neighboring countries and need help. Humanitarian relief is needed for the internally displaced. Go after the human smugglers, patrol the waters, take in those who are truly fleeing war and truly desire to become a peaceful part of their new, adoptive homes. 

But here is a problem with Europe’s decision-makers, and it connects to decision-makers in America. 

Damning “the elites” is often a mindless, phony and manipulative game. Malice and delusion combine to produce the refrains: “Those fancy people in their Georgetown cocktail parties,” “Those left-wing poseurs in their apartments in Brussels.” This is social resentment parading as insight, envy posing as authenticity. 

But in this crisis talk of “the elites” is pertinent. The gap between those who run governments and those who are governed has now grown huge and portends nothing good. 

Rules on immigration and refugees are made by safe people. These are the people who help run countries, who have nice homes in nice neighborhoods and are protected by their status. Those who live with the effects of immigration and asylum law are those who are less safe, who see a less beautiful face in it because they are daily confronted with a less beautiful reality—normal human roughness, human tensions. Decision-makers fear things like harsh words from the writers of editorials; normal human beings fear things like street crime. Decision-makers have the luxury of seeing life in the abstract. Normal people feel the implications of their decisions in the particular. 

The decision-makers feel disdain for the anxieties of normal people, and ascribe them to small-minded bigotries, often religious and racial, and ignorant antagonisms. But normal people prize order because they can’t buy their way out of disorder. 

People in gated communities of the mind, who glide by in Ubers, have bought their way out and are safe. Not to mention those in government-maintained mansions who glide by in SUVs followed by security details. Rulers can afford to see national-security threats as an abstraction—yes, yes, we must better integrate our new populations. But the unprotected, the vulnerable, have a right and a reason to worry. 

Here is the challenge for people in politics: The better you do, the higher you go, the more detached you become from real life. You use words like “perception” a lot. But perception is not as important as reality. 

The great thing in politics, the needed thing, is for those who are raised high in terms of responsibility and authority to be yet still, in their heads and hearts, of the people, experiencing life as a common person on an average street. The challenge is to carry the average street inside you. Only then, when the street is wrong, can you persuade it to see what is right. 

The biggest thing leaders don’t do now is listen. They no longer hear the voices of common people. Or they imitate what they think it is and it sounds backward and embarrassing. In this age we will see political leaders, and institutions, rock, shatter and fall due to that deafness.

We in the United States also have our fair share of gated-community politicians and media types who like to prance upon the stage trying to out-compassion their rivals. Showing the slightest bit of realistic concern regarding this immigrant invasion is labeled as being hard of heart and to be castigated. Count me among these pariahs

I Told You So

I know I’ve been a bit of a harpy about this global-warming malarkey, but finally the scientific community and the media have begun to slink away into the shadows … to avoid the full-monty embarrassment of how wrong their predictions were. Matt Ridley in the Wall Street Journal has opened the kimono to reveal just how naked these global-warming charlatans were … and some still are. In particular he says: 

On Sept. 23 the United Nations will host a party for world leaders in New York to pledge urgent action against climate change. Yet leaders from China, India and Germany have already announced that they won’t attend the summit and others are likely to follow, leaving President Obama looking a bit lonely. Could it be that they no longer regard it as an urgent threat that some time later in this century the air may get a bit warmer?

 This article goes on to concede: 

The climate-research establishment has finally admitted openly what skeptic scientists have been saying for nearly a decade: Global warming has stopped since shortly before this century began.

 If you can bring yourself to eat a little crow with ketchup, read his entire article (he still offers a few face saving caveats for you believers) … see: Online WSJ Article.

Yes I also know that, in order to keep the grant money flowing, these ding-a-ling “scientists” have morphed their warming warnings into that of a “climate change” mantra and point to any natural disaster as evidence that mankind is pissing in its own soup. But, as I have pointed out in the past, acts of God have occurred throughout eternity … and are quite likely not the consequence of the internal combustion engine … see: Climate Disruptions and Climate Change Horsesh*t. (Sorry for being so strident but the sheer magnitude and economic consequence of this ruse has me angry ...)

If anyone would like a tee shirt with the “eye heart CO2” graphic at the end of the above-referenced scatological hyperlink, let me know. I am thinking about having some of them silk-screened. (You could wear it to the Democrat convention.)

The Birds

Looking for Tippi Hedren

Steve Hayward of the Powerline blog has pointed out the newest government green boondoggle, the $2.2 billion Ivanpah solar power project in the eastern Mojave desert … see: Bright Lghts, Dim Idea.  Hayward quotes extensively from a recent Wall Street Journal article how this sun-magnification project’s produces electricity that is at least twice as expensive as conventional means but, even in its test phase, it has fried dozens of birds.  And now that it has become operational, it is likely to cook, in an unkindly manner, hundreds if not thousands more.

Steve has included in his referenced blog a very poor-quality picture of these three giant sauté pans.  But fortunately for Fletcher’s readers, I recently came across much better images of same on reddit and so they are reproduced below:

Click on to Enlarge

And here is a close up of one of them:

Click on to Enlarge

Scaremongers

There is an interesting bit of mathematical hocus-pocus currently making the investment rounds … comparing the U.S. stock market’s pattern today with that in 1928-29 ... the run-up to the stock-market panic and the great depression.  Here is the article in question (WSJ Marketwatch Story) and the chart that is used there to prove this (false) premise.  I have taken the liberty of reproducing its chart here in case you don’t want to follow the link: 

 

(Click to Enlarge)

The fallacy of this scary parallel is that it compares these two market moves on an absolute terms not on a percentage-change basis.  That is ... the chart-line for 1928-29 goes from around 200 on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) to its peak of around 380 … a 90% move. The chart line for the current DJIA goes from around 12400 to peak around 16400 … a 32% move. In other words, to be truly comparable, the current market would have to reach 23560 on the DJIA (a 90% increase from 12400) to have a comparable percentage move as right before Black Tuesday in October, 1929. Thus we are over 7,100 points below where we would be if this DJIA frothy comparison were indeed valid.

I am quite surprised that the Wall Street Journal and Mark Herbert, et alia would make such a silly mathematical faux pas.  To present a valid graphic comparison between these two periods, Mr. Herbert should have plotted these two lines on a logarithmic scale which would have made the percentage movements equivalent.  I can't help but wonder why such scaremongering is afoot. Perhaps some of the hedge-fund money managers repeating this breathless warning had missed out on the market move last year and would like to have another shot at things?

Caveat emptor ... just because Herbert's DJIA analysis is flawed does not mean that the stock market is not due for a correction ... it is, after all, very often driven by emotion and not logic (just like our political system.)

Typical

One day after he announced his decision to change the rules for individuals buying health insurance under Obamacare, our fearless leader is now meeting with executives from the health insurance industry to work out how this might be implemented ... see: Wall Street Journal Article.  This is, unfortunately, Obama's typical management style ...

Rolls of Fat

China is now leading the world in the purchase of Rolls Royces ... surpassing the United States for the first time (see Wall Street Journal Story).  Perhaps the Occupiers should pitch their tents in Tiananmen Square since this clearly is where the 1%-ers now reside?

(Tip o' the hat to Terry.)

Rush Job

Stephen Moore has written an excellent and  revealing article in the Wall Street Journal showing that public sector workers in the United States now outnumber all of our manufacturing jobs by two to one. See: The Wall Street Journal.  In fact, there are more government workers in this country than the total of industrial, mining, construction, farming, forestry, utility, and fishery jobs.  To Moore, we have become a country of "takers, not makers."

I have commented in the past on why I listen to Rush Limbaugh in that he has at least one bon mot per day on his show.  Today, commenting on this Stephen Moore article, Rush said, "When are we going to start outsourcing our government jobs to China?"

Palin Paradox

Sarah Palin was ridiculed when she was on the John McCain ticket as his V.P. candidate for failing a Katie Couric question about what newspapers she regularly read.  Perhaps a better word was "castigated." The opinion makers painted her as a boob ... if you'll excuse the expression ... for fumbling this one question.  Obviously she was a rube, a hick of the first order, and didn't deserve to be one heartbeat away from being President.

That was then and now, two years later, she is again being taken to the woodshed by these same media darlings for being a primary cause of the Tuscon (alleged) shooting spree by Jared Loughner that killed six and wounded more than a dozen including Representative Gabrielle Giffords.  This was because Palin had "targeted" Representative Giffords seat in the recent elections as being one that the Tea Party should focus on winning.

Now additional poison darts are being directed at Ms. Palin for using the term "blood libel" Tuesday on her Facebook page, decrying the treatment she was receiving. Apparently, this term has an historic connotation in that it was once (falsely) used to condemn Jews for using the blood of Christian children in their rituals (see blood libel).  Also, more apparently the Wall Street Journal had used this same term on Monday to describe this same media kerfuffle (see WSJ use) over the Tuscon-shootings aftermath.  Now here is the paradox -- if Sarah Palin is so stupid and buffoonish, how does she know the historic "blood libel" reference when this author, whose been around the block more than a few times, knew not of it?  And, if she picked this reference out of Monday's Wall Street Journal, at least we know she learned something from the Couric interview.

One last thought ... why isn't the Wall Street Journal also being excoriated for this term's usage by these same prancing princes of the privileged pedantic press?  Perhaps because it buys ink by the barrel?