It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

The latest wince-inducing stunts from the Very Stable Genius. (Well, one' from a couple of years ago, but it's just now coming to light.)

There's the photo of the Iranian rocket that exploded on its launch pad that is ostensibly highly classified, but leave it to the VSG to disseminate it to one an all on Twitter.

“I’m not supposed to see stuff this good. He’s not supposed to share it. I’ve honestly never seen an image this sharp,” said Melissa Hanham, deputy director of the Open Nuclear Network and director of the Datayo Project at the One Earth Future Foundation.

Hanham suspected the shot was taken from a high-altitude aerial vehicle using tracking technology, such as an RC-135S Cobra Ball or a similar aircraft.

“This will have global repercussions,” said Joshua Pollack, a nuclear proliferation expert and editor of the Nonproliferation Review.

“The utter carelessness of it all,” Pollack said. “So reckless.”

In 2017, Lonnie G. Bunch III, now Smithsonian Secretary, gave the VSG a private tour of the African-American History Museum. He recalls this little episode:

“The president paused in front of the exhibit that discussed the role of the Dutch in the slave trade,” Bunch writes. “As he pondered the label I felt that maybe he was paying attention to the work of the museum. He quickly proved me wrong. As he turned from the display he said to me, ‘You know, they love me in the Netherlands.’ All I could say was let’s continue walking.”

Real nice, Squirrel-Hair.

And now he's considering a tax cut commensurate to the amount raised by tariffs. Um, how about cutting out that extra step and just not impose the tariffs?

David Boaz‏ @David_Boaz

“A middle-class tax cut would be: Don’t impose the tariffs on China,” said Marc Goldwein at Comm for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates lower deficits, last week. “That’d be an easy middle-class tax cut Trump doesn’t even need Congress for.”

As always, it's going to be interesting to see the shills spin this, which they will.

The serious grownup: a vanishing species

But God-haters and identity-obsessives we have aplenty.

Faculty and staff, mind you, not the snot-nosed tabula rasas seated in the classrooms taking in their indoctrination, are the ones making the fuss at this particular outpost of civilizational rot:

Faculty and staff at the University of Kansas sent a letter to the school's chancellor, calling for a boycott of Chick-fil-A on campus over the company's stance on LGBTQ issues, according to The Hill.

Over the summer, the university allowed Chick-fil-A to open a location inside the student union, and entered a contract agreement with the company to sponsor the "Chick-fil-A coin toss" at home football games in coming years. Faculty and staff have protested Chick-fil-A's support of organizations "hostile to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer LGBTQ people, families, and communities."

"KU granted Chick-fil-A, a bastion of bigotry, a prime retail location in the heart of our campus," the letter reads.
More from the letter:

Moving Chick-fil-A to the Union and granting it a role at the start of all home football games violates the feelings of safety and inclusion that so many of us have striven to create, foster, and protect on campus, and sends a message that the Union, KU Athletics, and the administration at large are more concerned about money and corporate sponsorship than the physical, emotional, and mental well being of marginalized and LGBTQ people.

The faculty and staff are demanding that the University of Kansas not renew its contracts with Chick-fil-A once they expire, and that future decisions about companies to bring on campus be more "transparent, principled, and inclusive." The letter also calls on the campus community to boycott Chick-fil-A in the meantime.

Just stop it, right now. No one at Chick-fil-A, not the CEO, no board member, no spokesperson, even weighs in on "LGBT issues." Some years ago, the founder stated, in the course of an interview, the plain and, until our society went nuts, universally recognized fact that marriage consisted of one man and one woman. It's true that the company is overtly Christian, but hires and serves plenty of homosexuals every day of the week - well, except Sunday, when its restaurants are closed.

And now we have to endure a dustup over chocolate:

Cadbury, that confectionist purveyor or such delights as the Fruit & Nut Bar and the Creme Egg, has apparently come under fire for its newest chocolatey offering—which, ironically enough, the company created to demonstrate its commitment to diversity.

Read on, but be warned that my IQ dropped a full ten points just from reading the headline:

The British confectionery giant Cadbury has been facing some backlash on social media for a new candy bar that it introduced in India, which features four types of chocolate — dark, blended, milk and white — to promote diversity.

“This is as absurd as Kendall Jenner fighting police brutality with a Pepsi,” tweeted legal analyst Imani Gandy.

“Congratulations to cadbury for solving racism,” wrote restaurant critic Tejal Rao.

Cardbury rolled out the multi-flavored chocolate bars on Aug. 15 — teaming up with the global advertising agency Ogilvy — to celebrate India’s Independence Day.

I used to think that chocolate was a lot like bacon. Is there nothing it can’t do? But now, at least according to the woke scolds of social media, even my candy bar has to check its privilege, lest I commit some racial faux pas by eating it.

So what does ethnically insensitive chocolate look like? See for yourself—but be prepared, because once you gaze upon the face of such hateful bigotry, you will never be the same:

“Limited edition,” eh? Something tells me this edition is gonna be a lot more limited than Cadbury ever intended.

This is everything wrong with diversity,” tweeted one person. “You force in a set amount of predefined difference and it’s going to taste awful. I would rather see a range where you don’t know what you’re going to get, but it’s going to taste amazing whatever it is.”

Well, that’s one opinion. But we all remember what Dirty Harry said about opinions, don’t we?

Another person said, “You would THINK, if they were going for unity, that all of the types would be interspersed instead of segregated (from light to dark, no less). This is the problem with playing to the woke crowd; you BETTER get it right.”

Yes, it’s 2019 and we’re talking about segregated chocolate. 

I'm so embarrassed for my species.

Thursday roundup

The Left is big on using poster children for its causes. Erick Erickson at The Resurgent takes on the one it's currently gushing over for her stunt in service of the lie that the global climate is in a state of crisis:

All you need to know about Greta Thunberg, the 16 year old autistic child from Sweden, is that the left expects you to listen to her, comply with her, and never question her. She is the newly appointed high priestess of climate change.

It is eye opening that the left has decided an obnoxious and spectacularly unaccomplished child must be the voice to which we must listen. It is a cult. Her arrival has been met with top of the fold status in various publications as if she is some conquering hero.

She is no hero. She is a child. She is known for being brash and rude, which the left says is the super power autism gives her. Yes, they actually believe this. She is known for wanting civic protest to advance her cause. She is the child leader of the global warming cult who got the privilege to sail on a yacht owned by a prince.

Secularism has become a religion unto itself. Thunberg is just the latest in a growing hierarchy of religious leaders for secularism. Her arrival is heralded like a visit from a pope. There is a messianic zeal that she will bring some level of repentance and revival. The media will cover her every move and thought.

The thoughts, though, are what exactly? She thinks the world is warming and everyone must do something, including protest. She is fueled by progressive mythology currently fixated on an Amazonia fire that is being exaggerated in the press as celebrities circulate decades old photographs of previous Amazonia fires.

Go home, Greta. The people who worship you do so because they are using you as a shield against themselves. They demand we not question you and give your ramblings a level of authority most reserve for scripture. It is by faith they believe you will lead them to some promised land. You won’t. Why? Because you are an unaccomplished sixteen year old whose only power is making older progressives swoon and TV reporters smile.

Elijah Cummings's staffers are disinvited for return trips to an ICE facility after acting like complete jerks on the one last week.

Universities understandably liked to brag about their alums and faculty who have achieved great things in fields such as medicine and science by putting their portraits together on a wall.  Now some of them are becoming "uneasy" with those walls because of lack of "diversity."

Hugely important essay by John Hood at National Review on how Trumpism will likely flame out after its namesake moves offstage. There's just no core set of principles or philosophical basis for it:

Contrary to the calumnies offered by both progressives and populists, Trump isn’t just a blunter version of previous Republican presidents and conservative leaders. He isn’t Ronald Reagan with a shorter IMDb page. He isn’t an Internet-age Barry Goldwater. To the extent Trump has had consistent political convictions over the decades, they have little to do with American constitutionalism, individual liberty, resistance to totalitarianism, or defense of traditional values. Trump has long advocated a strident protectionism — Japan was the main villain of his narratives during the 1980s, as China is today — and expressed contempt for politicians with significant political experience. Both exemplify garden-variety American populism. Both are also rhetorical devices designed to cloak the schemes of special interests in the apparel of popular sovereignty.

When conservative leaders and voters embraced the Trump candidacy in 2016, many did so as a political transaction. If he agreed to nominate constitutional conservatives to the federal bench, pledged to advance traditionally conservative approaches to tax and regulatory policy, and focused relentlessly on beating Hillary Clinton, they’d sign up. He did. They did. This arrangement did not in theory require reshaping American conservatism in any fundamental or lasting way. In practice, however, some who supported Trump grudgingly in 2016 have found themselves thrust by our polarized politics into a role of Trump-explainer, if not Trump-whisperer. Others, for various reasons, have freely and enthusiastically become reflexive defenders of the president. Among the latter are leading voices of the new nationalists. They are playing with fire. They may well get burned. I’d rather not see the wider conservative movement scorched with them.

To be fair, the new nationalists have done their best, explicitly and repeatedly, to distance their emerging movement from white nationalists, alt-right fakirs, strident isolationists, and other assorted cranks. That’s much appreciated. Alas, their precautions will likely prove inadequate, in part because their cause has so many prominent champions, including but not limited to the president, who are prone to rhetorical excess and theatrical provocation. Trump can’t help himself, truly. He’s going to wake up tomorrow, or the next day, with some stray thought that a prudent leader would set aside. Trump will tweet it. When tragedy strikes, as we saw in the aftermath of mass shootings in California, Texas, and Ohio, the president will recite some well-written remarks and likely mean them. Before too long, though, he’ll be back on Twitter. He’s not winning new converts to the conservative cause there.

I don’t know if Donald Trump will be reelected in 2020. Neither, respectfully, do you. We should have learned from 2016 not to predict election outcomes with great confidence. I do feel comfortable predicting, however, that Trumpism as a political phenomenon will not long outlast him. He is wearing on America’s nerves. He is wearing us out. To the extent that the new nationalism looks and feels like an attempt to flesh out the political and economic dimensions of Trumpism into a durable political coalition and governing philosophy, its fate is bound up with his own. I would not bet on a favorable long-run outcome. I hope American conservatives don’t, either. 

While LITD is recommending hugely important essays, this one by Mary Eberstadt of the Faith and Reason Institute at Quillette entitled  "'The Great Scattering: How Identity Panic Took Root in the Void Once Occupied By Family Life" is a bracing read. In the course of articulating her main point, she also talks about the role of family dissolution in the ruination of popular music:

Pop culture weighs in, too. In a 2004 Policy Review essay called Eminem Is Right, I documented how family rupture, family anarchy and family breakup had become the signature themes of Generation-X and Generation-Y pop. If yesterday’s rock was the music of abandon, today’s is that of abandonment. The odd truth about contemporary teenage music—the characteristic that most separates it from what has gone before—is its compulsive insistence on the damage wrought by broken homes, family dysfunction, checked-out parents, and (especially) absent fathers. Papa Roach, Everclear, Blink-182, Good Charlotte, Snoop Doggy Dogg—these and others have their own generational answer to what ails the modern teenager. That answer is: dysfunctional childhood. During the same years in which progressive-minded and politically correct adults have been excoriating Ozzie and Harriet as artifacts of 1950s-style oppression, millions of American teenagers have enshrined a new generation of music idols whose shared signature in song after song is to rage about what not having had a nuclear family had done to them.

In 2004, identity politics was not the omnipresent headline subject it is today. Even so, the effect of family decline on the sense of self already was appearing writ large across popular music. Tupac Shakur rapped about life with a single mother and no male parent, including in his 1993 Papa’z Song, about a boy who has to play catch by himself. Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam and Kurt Cobain of Nirvana, both towering figures in 1990s rock, were children of divorce, and both referred back to that event repeatedly in their songs and interviews.

Jacki Deason at the Washington Examiner says that the G7 nations, rather than try to impose "green" energy policy on their developing brethren, should level the playing field so that the developing world can have access to normal-people forms of energy and thereby grow economically and enjoy societal advancement.

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

Continuing a streak of unprecedentedly reckless tweets, the Very Stable Genius let loose with this earlier today:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....I don’t want to Win for myself, I only want to Win for the people. The New @FoxNews is letting millions of GREAT people down! We have to start looking for a new News Outlet. Fox isn’t working for us anymore!

7:03 AM - 28 Aug 2019

It appears that journalism, like free-market economics and marital fidelity, is one of those things that is beyond his grasp.

I was gratified to see Brit Hume and Guy Benson - so far; perhaps there are others by now - on the case, both chiming in with their own versions of the basic message that the network doesn't exist to push his agenda.

Along with some tweets that gratuitously disparage the government of Puerto Rico - not that it doesn't merit having its corruption pointed out; it's just that, with Dorian breathing down its neck, this is about as inappropriate time as one could pick to get into that - it's been another cringe-worthy day of "presidential" social media blurts.

Boris Johnson and Angela Merkel put the squelch on Macron's attempt to preen at the expense of free trade

One of the more amusing developments at this year's G-7 was seeing the UK prime minister and the German president get their hackles up over French president Emmanuel Macron (also the host of this year's pow-wow) trying to block a trade agreement between the EU and the Mercosur-agreement (Latin American) countries as a grandstanding gesture because of the Amazon-region fires in Brazil.

A few things to note:

• Merkel goes in for the climate-crisis hooey, but she still has the sense to know you don't walk away from an economic opportunity that took 20 years to craft
• Brazil is not a G-7 member, so Jair Bolsonaro wasn't on hand to rebut Macron's stance
• Most of the fires that have the climatistas' panties in a knot have been set by farmers in Amazon-adjacent areas. They are clearing them for next year's crops.

At the above link, there's a very noteworthy graphic that originally appeared in the New York Times showing that Amazon-region deforestation rates since 2008 have been nowhere near their 1985 - 2007 levels.

Let people engage in economic activity. The climate is not in any kind of crisis.

Get your kids out of government schools - yet this morning

It's being introduced in the New York City curriculum, but don't think for a moment that you won't be seeing it seep into your local school system's indoctrination methods soon.

"Social and Emotional Learning". Take a good whiff of the odor wafting off that term.

Shortly after launching his candidacy for president, New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced a landmark new initiative to promote “Social and Emotional Learning” (SEL) in New York City schools.

SEL is America’s latest education-policy fad — the Common Core of the latter half of this decade. As with the Common Core, proponents declare that everyone simply must be for it. The refrain “Who could be against higher standards?” has become “Who could be against SEL?” But, as with the Common Core, there’s ample reason for parents to be concerned.

These are those reasons:

. . . why not simply assign students William J. Bennet’s The Book of Virtues? Because, as SEL advocates will privately admit, progressive pedagogues can’t abide the word “virtue.” Too conservative, too wrapped up in the idea of human nature and teleological ends.

SEL is an effort to promote means shorn of ends, to stress value-neutral methodological “competencies” while remaining outwardly agnostic about the particular or universal good toward which those competencies are directed. Because promoting a value-neutral notion of human conduct is itself a value-laden enterprise, the confused result is a technique-driven approach to social and emotional engineering that teeters between ideologies of relativism and progressivism.

The NYC Department of Education has adopted the SEL curriculum of Sanford Harmony, the fastest growing SEL curriculum provider in America, serving 8 million students in 18,000 schools. In the Sanford curriculum, the norm-setting process that has traditionally been implicit and internal becomes explicit and external. Students learn to behave and relate to each other through games such as “Emotions Bingo,” to map out “think-feel-do” chains,” to role-play “communications boosters” and “communications bloopers,” and to engage in “whole-body-listening.”

As the name implies, it's designed to legitimize an all-about-me focus on the part of the little tabula rasas seated on the classroom floor:

An SEL advocate once gushed to me about a classroom he observed in which every student made a “mood thermometer” to communicate and regulate their internal states. It is, however, far from clear that gamifying human relations and encouraging students to understand and project themselves through a pop–mental-health prism is a positive development. There is reason to fear that SEL will bring the “coddling of the American mind” — with its counterproductive emphasis on viewing everyday human problems as issues of mental health and “safety” — from college campuses down to the elementary level.

Sanford trains teachers to understand themselves through a lens of intersectional “awareness”: categorizing themselves by age, ability, race, ethnicity, indigenous membership, social class, sexual orientation, and gender identity; to commit to “self-care”; to recognize and set aside “biases”; and be on careful guard against “micro-aggressions.”

The ideology behind these exhortations will likely fill the outwardly value-neutral “competencies” encouraged by the curriculum. The top priority of Sanford Harmony is “diversity and inclusion,” a notion that goes beyond simply respecting one’s peers.

Teachers are told to “reduce the saliency of gender in the classroom,” and press students to “critically evaluate gendered information.”

Teachers will also “increase students’ awareness of how the media influences their thoughts and behaviors,” and train students to “critically evaluate and change stereotyped messages.”

There is, of course, nothing wrong with encouraging students to critically evaluate stereotypes. But parents ought to be wary about what that will mean in practice when it’s implemented by teachers reporting to bureaucrats who are trained to fight “toxic whiteness” and abhor a “sense of urgency” and “objectivity” as manifestations of “white supremacy culture.”

I've really had it up to here with the state of education in post-America. The public school system in the small city where I live has hired a "multicultural diversity director." It has been putting on "implicit bias" workshops for some time.

I also think about the strong law enforcement presence in the local institutions. The public K-12 system has school resource officers supplied by the county sheriff's department, and the small university campus where I am adjunct faculty has its own police department.

Did you have uniformed and armed officers in your school when you were a kid or a college student?

"But the entire social climate is different now. Mass shootings have become so much more common that you just can't take a chance anymore."

And why is that? This is exactly why: Our society has become exponentially nuttier in the last 50 years. Entertainment has become an infantile exercise in celebrating animal impulses. Heroin is as cheap and plentiful as marijuana. No one studies actual history anymore. Per a Wall Street Journal-NBC poll, religion has dropped 12 percent, having children 16 percent, and patriotism 9 percent as values deemed important by post-Americans.

I don't care what the GDP does, or how manufacturing output is doing, or how much more safe and convenient technology is making our lives. Post-America is rotting from within and the prospects for reversing the trend are not good.

If you have school-age children, you have a place where you can take a stand, do something to reverse it. Pull your kids out of government schools today.

 

 

A Massachusetts law-enforcement trade group's letter to Fauxcahontas

It's in response to her filthy rotten lie that Michael Brown was murdered in Ferguson, Missouri:

. . . a major law enforcement organization in Warren’s home state has lashed back at the Senator. The Massachusetts Chiefs of Police Association complains that Warren’s repeated attacks on law enforcement are putting the lives of police officers in danger.

In a letter to their Senator, the Chiefs call her rhetoric “appalling” and “another slap in the face” that endangers cops. They state:

Having had two Police Officers murdered in your own state, in the past 18 months, we expect our elected Officials to condemn the murder and assaults of Police Officers. Instead on multiple occasions, you choose to fan the fires of divide for you own political gains. Shame on you!

Yarmouth police Chief Frank Frederickson, commander of one of the two murdered officers, has invited Warren to spend time in a police department in order to understand what actually takes place. Warren, of course, has not accepted the invitation.

This must be kept front and center until she has to address it, in the same fashion the she had to come clean about her supposed Cherokee ethnicity.

Barney & Clyde - Episode 13

Here it is.

Technology difficulties precluded the video component, so it's just our mellifluous voices - although these portraits of your intrepid hosts are flattering, are they not?

So pour yourself something bracing, pull up a bar-stool at the Libation Station, and get in on the fortnightly exchange of libertarian and conservative perspectives on the weighty matters of the day. Specifically: 

1. They Really Said That?! - Miley Cyrus blows the patriarchy!

2. Parties Acting Stupidly - Does Amash Smoke Enough Pot to Run as a Libertarian?

3. Yes, it Can Get More Toxic - The Left's disgusting reaction to the passing of David Koch.

4. History to Fit the Agenda - NY Times' 1619 Project 

5. Meanwhile, Back in Athens - Our Local Vaping Ban + Indiana House Representative Jim Lucas' controversial noose post. 

Send your feedback to barneyandclydeshow@gmail.com

This guy's supposed to be the grown-up Palestinian

. . . the one who can speak at the UN, get invited to peace conferences, the foil to Hamas in Gaza.

Does he sound like it here?

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas threatened this week that "million of fighters" would swarm Jerusalem and topple the Jewish state's capital city, warning that "no matter how many houses and how many settlements they declare that they [plan to build] here and there—they shall all be destroyed."

Abbas, in an Arabic language speech at Jalazone Refugee Camp near Ramallah that was heavy with threats of destruction, doubled down on the Palestinian government's policy of using public money to pay convicted terrorists and their families, telling his audience, "We will not accept their designation of our martyrs as terrorists. Our martyrs are the martyrs of the homeland."

Abbas went on to rally those in attendance to swarm the city of Jerusalem and destroy all Jewish people living there. His remarks are the clearest sign to date that the leader has no interest in playing a role in a revamped peace process spearheaded by President Donald Trump's White House.

"To Jerusalem we march, martyrs by the millions!" he was quoted as saying, according to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, a media watchdog site.

"We shall enter Jerusalem—millions of fighters! We shall enter it! All of us, the entire Palestinian people, the entire Arab nation, the Islamic nation, and the Christian nation," Abbas said. "They shall all enter Jerusalem."

Homes and cities built by Jews and other ethnic groups living in Israel "will all go to the garbage bin of history," Abbas said.

I don't think there's much point in looking to him as a partner in patty-cake.

Leftist glee over David Koch's passing

This:

Pam Keith‏Verified account @PamKeithFL

Good riddance Mr. Koch. You spent a lifetime making the world uglier &perverting our democratic process. The world feels a smidge lighter w/out you. In the end, you. can’t take a red cent of your money w/you. You will face your maker standing on the impact you made. I pity you

5:57 AM - 23 Aug 2019

This:

True to form, the obituary notice for David Koch in the New York Times today offers up yet another classic case study in media bias and ignorance:

Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement, strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party and played a significant role in the election of Donald J. Trump as president in 2016.

Typical. The Kochs hated Trump in 2016, opposed him vigorously throughout the entire nomination process (Vanity Fair ran a story in February 2016 entitled “Can the Koch Brothers Stop Trump?“), and have said more recently they are open to supporting Democrats in part because of their continuing dislike of Trump. But never mind: for the Times, everything has to come back to Trump (and racism).

By noon today, the Times had amended this paragraph and dropped the final clause:

Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party.

Maybe somebody in the newsroom had an old copy of Vanity Fair lying around. You’d think any informed newsroom might know this in the first place.

You’d expect the openly left Guardian to have a nasty obituary notice about David Koch’s passing, but on the whole the Guardian‘s story is less snarky than the Times. But then you get to the very last paragraph:

Alexander Kaufman, an environmental commentator at HuffPost, tweeted: “He deployed his stupendous fortune funding climate denial in the years when the science was clear and there was still time to avert catastrophic warming. He died as fires raged from the Amazon to the Arctic.”

That’s what you call staying on message! And also why the tedious fanaticism of the climatistas turns off more and more people every day.

And this:

Shadowproof managing editor Kevin Gosztola tweeted the Koch family should “drop his body out of luxury jet into blazing Amazon rainforest in Brazil.” CNN commentator Keith Boykin said the late Koch used “dark money to support right-wing causes and Republican candidates for office.”

David Koch wanted to abolish public schools, Social Security, Medi

care, Medicaid and rent control. He financed groups that denied the research on climate change. He funded the Tea Party. And he used dark money to support right-wing causes and Republican candidates for office. https://t.co/x08wiaOh9p

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) August 23, 2019

Frederick Joseph, writer and founder of We Have Stories, tweeted the late Koch was “pure evil” and added “the world is a better place with him gone.” Joseph also wrote the death was a “celebration.”

“But imagine the turn up when orange satan is taken back to hell,” Joseph said in another tweet, likely referring to President Donald Trump.

British political journalist Mehdi Hasan mentioned David Koch’s beliefs on climate change and suggested headlines on the death should refer to the billionaire as a “climate denier.” Hasan added that “his [David Koch’s] long-term legacy” will be “funding the effort to downplay an existential threat to all of us.” 

Re: Boykin's list of stuff that Koch wanted to abolish: Yay! Anybody who doesn't hate freedom wants to see all those things go away. And regarding Koch's financing of "groups that denied the research on climate change," "the research" is an arrogant assumption that no research has concluded what anyone who doesn't hate human advancement knows: the global climate is not in a state of crisis.

The Left has become terrifyingly vicious. And it wants absolute power over our lives.

 

It's this kind of stuff - today's edition

With such signs of economic cooling-off emerging around the world as Europe's recent tepid performance and the US-China trade war - more on that in a moment - the Very Stable Genius chooses the present moment to beat up on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell:

In its latest assessment of the world economy, the International Monetary Fund emphasizes the toll that President Trump’s America First trade policy has taken on the global economy. From a situation of a synchronized global economic recovery in 2018, the world has now moved to one of a global economic slowdown. It has done so as investors both in the United States and abroad have held back on investment decisions due to heightened uncertainty as to future trade arrangements. 

Judging by Trump’s continued hardline stance on the Chinese trade issue and by his recent threats to impose punitive import tariffs on European automobiles, he either doesn’t  appreciate how damaging his trade policy has been for both domestic and foreign investor confidence, or he is willfully ignoring the consequences. Instead, he chooses to blame the Federal Reserve for raising interest rates in December and for its reluctance now to  cut interest rates more radically and to engage in a new round of quantitative easing. 

While using Powell as a punching bag might be a smart political ploy in the run-up to the 2020 election, it is doubtful that it will do much to boost the U.S. economy. Indeed, it’s all too likely that such hectoring will make it more difficult for the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, even if there were a reasonable case for so doing, for fear of appearing to be bowing to political pressure. It also likely will have the effect of further undermining investor confidence in the economy’s long-run performance by highly politicizing a key economic institution.

At a more basic level, there is no empirical support for President Trump’s repeated assertions that, if only the Fed had not raised interest rates in December and if only the Fed was now more aggressive in loosening monetary policy, the U.S. economy would now be growing in excess of 3 percent. 

Rather, most mainstream economists would subscribe to Milton Friedman’s view that monetary policy operates only with long and variable lags. They would also subscribe to the view that the main factor now holding back U.S. and global economic growth is not an excessively restrictive Federal Reserve but rather President Trump’s contribution to an uncertain economic environment.

Here's a very recent - as in a few minutes ago - example of that:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....My only question is, who is our bigger enemy, Jay Powell or Chairman Xi?

7:57 AM - 23 Aug 2019

And another thing . . . I thought Xi was his friend. This outburst is no doubt of a piece with the VSG's pattern of insulting and humiliating others and then assuming they'll still come to the table to cut a "beautiful deal."

But to characterize a Federal Reserve chairman as an enemy? File this one under "hyperbole has consequences."

What has prompted this latest bit of throbbingly purple invective is China's utterly unsurprising announcement of a fresh $75 billion in tariffs on additional US products.

Which spurred not only an indulgence in take-my-ball-and-go-home pouting, but an authoritarian insertion of the government into the affairs of private-sector businesses that make their decisions based on what serves their own interests, such as profitability, streamlined supply chains and efficient use of resources:

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

Our Country has lost, stupidly, Trillions of Dollars with China over many years. They have stolen our Intellectual Property at a rate of Hundreds of Billions of Dollars a year, & they want to continue. I won’t let that happen! We don’t need China and, frankly, would be far....

7:59 AM - 23 Aug 2019

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....better off without them. The vast amounts of money made and stolen by China from the United States, year after year, for decades, will and must STOP. Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing..

7:59 AM - 23 Aug 2019

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....your companies HOME and making your products in the USA. I will be responding to China’s Tariffs this afternoon. This is a GREAT opportunity for the United States. Also, I am ordering all carriers, including Fed Ex, Amazon, UPS and the Post Office, to SEARCH FOR & REFUSE,....

7:59 AM - 23 Aug 2019

Donald J. Trump‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

....all deliveries of Fentanyl from China (or anywhere else!). Fentanyl kills 100,000 Americans a year. President Xi said this would stop - it didn’t. Our Economy, because of our gains in the last 2 1/2 years, is MUCH larger than that of China. We will keep it that way!

7:59 AM - 23 Aug 2019

Suddenly, this becomes about fentanyl.

I am now utterly convinced that Donald Trump, in addition to having the most stunted maturity level of any public figure in US history, is none too bright. He clearly has no grasp of free-market economics.

And, no, none of the alternatives being considered on the fringes - William Weld, Joe Walsh, Jeff Flake - are the least bit viable. And any Democrat presidential candidate is a walking disaster.

We are so hosed.

It is so very late in the day.