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In a recent editorial excoriating the US in general and President Trump in particular, German magazine Der Spiegel unwittingly laid out Trump’s European logic.
The West as we once knew it no longer exists. Our relationship to the United States cannot currently be called a friendship and can hardly be referred to as a partnership.
It was hardly a partnership before either. The US was expected to shoulder the burden while Europe came along for the ride. All the while complaining about US imperialism.
President Trump has adopted a tone that ignores 70 years of trust.
Yep, Europe can no longer trust that it can play us for fools.
He wants punitive tariffs and demands obedience.
Turnabout is fair play; Europe demanded preferential trade and demanded acquiescence.
It is no longer a question as to whether Germany and Europe will take part in foreign military interventions in Afghanistan or Iraq. It is now about whether trans-Atlantic cooperation on economic, foreign and security policy even exists anymore. The answer: No. It is impossible to overstate what Trump has dismantled in the last 16 months. Europe has lost its protective power.
Europe should protect itself. Stand and be recognized.
It has lost its guarantor of joint values.
Europe tossed its values over the transom decades ago.
And it has lost the global political influence that it was only able to exert because the U.S. stood by its side.
Cory Booker (aka, Snowplow Cory), Kristen Gillibrand, and now Bernie Sanders have gone full Socialist. Each has unveiled plans to guarantee a job (paying at least $15 per hour plus benefits) to any and all Americans who want one. Naturally, no word on where the money for this comes from.
I recall seeing a political cartoon from the glory days of the FDR makework programs of the 1930s.
The first panel showed Moses leading the Israelites out of Egypt.
Caption: Load up your camels. Mount your asses. I will lead you to the promised land.
Second panel depicted some WPA guys sitting and smoking cigarettes in a half-dug ditch.
Caption: Light up a Camel. Sit on your asses. This is the promised land.
The environmental movement is frequently charged by those on the political right as being a front for advancing an agenda unknown to the eco-movement’s rank-and-file membership. That the true goals of the leadership of the movement are separate and distinct from those of the grassroots members. A new documentary film accidentally shows that it has been like that from its inception in the late 1950s and early 1960s and exposes the lie at the birth of environmentalism.
Saving The Great Swamp: Battle to Defeat the Jetport is a new one-hour documentary about the events, people and politics behind the struggle to preserve a rural area of New Jersey between 1959 and 1968. The fight began when the powerful Port of New York Authority announced plans to construct a huge 10,000-acre “jetport” 26 miles west of New York City in a little-known place called the Great Swamp. In the name of progress, entire towns would be obliterated, the aquifer and wildlife destroyed, and a way-of-life threatened for thousands of people.
That is from the film’s website. I had the opportunity to watch it last night. They portray it as a David vs. Goliath tale but they gloss over the real story. One of the towns threatened by the Port Authority’s proposed Jetport was Harding Township, NJ, home to very old, very white-shoe money and multi-million dollar estates. Forget about Meyersville, Green Village, Long Hill, and the rest. The middle-class residents of those small towns counted for little. Harding Township mattered. The film shows how the monied elite in gated estates created the environmental movement for their own ends. To quote one of them — Chairman of the Board of Remington Arms Marcellus Hartley Dodge Sr. — “They want to put an airport in my backyard. We have to find a way to stop them.”
At the dawn of the jet age, it was anticipated that the existing airports in the NYC area — Newark, LaGuardia, and Idlewild (now JFK) would be unable to handle the new larger, faster, and heavier jets. The powerful Port Authority of NY and NJ wanted to build a fourth major airport in the region with four 12,000-foot runways and state-of-the-art facilities to cope with the new technology and increased traffic. The “Jetport.” They chose an area 26 miles west of the city in rural NJ. An area with the unappealing name of The Great Swamp.
The proposed site sat cheek by jowl with Harding Township. The Port Authority had ample powers and, under eminent domain, could take the land they wanted. Even the phalanx of lawyers deployed by the Harding estates were powerless to stop it. The attorneys did discover that the only group the Port Authority couldn’t take land and property from under eminent domain was the Federal Government.
If only there was a way to get the Federal Government to preempt the Port Authority by claiming the land. But why on earth would the Feds want The Great Swamp? Thus was born the wetland, the pristine aquifer, and the “grassroots” movement to protect them. The fight to keep the “Jetport” out of Hartley-Dodge’s backyard morphed itself into a fight to “save The Great Swamp.”
The residents of Meyersville and Green Village were early adopters of the new environmentalism. Whatever. They didn’t want the Jetport either. And if it looked like environmentalism could stop it … they were on board. Under this emblem, groups were formed. Rallies were held. Money was raised. Congress was lobbied. All in the name of securing wildlife habitat. Along with a bankroll provided by Hartley-Dodge and other Harding residents, land in the Great Swamp was acquired. And when 1,000 acres were in hand, they were quietly donated to the Department of the Interior.
In November 1960, by an act of Congress, the Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge was established on that land. Because this result was still challenged by the Port Authority, the eco-push continued, culminating in The Great Swamp Wilderness Act of 1968 which established the first “wilderness area” designated within the Department of the Interior.
Wilderness. 26 miles outside of NYC. An area with roads and houses and farms. Not what you’d think of as “Wilderness.” But there it is.
Don’t get me wrong. I live not far away. I’m a beneficiary too. But it’s interesting and illuminating to see how it was done. And why. And to discover the most important environments being protected were the manicured estates of the monied elite.
Spring is officially here. And on the very first pitch of the very first game of the 2018 baseball season, the Cubs lead off hitter, Ian Happ, hit a home run. I bet this guy wishes he never sent this Tweet…
If Ian Happ leads off today's game with a home run, I will jump in Lake Michigan later today.
The students assert that they want to be safe. That the adults have failed them. That they are tired of being victims of gun violence. The obvious question is this. Adults aren’t the perpetrators of the gun violence they reference. Their peers are.
Why are they shooting each other? Adults aren’t shooting them. They are. What is their problem?
We had lots of guns on school grounds. During deer season, or duck season, or turkey season, probably 40% of the cars in the parking lot had a gun inside. We didn’t shoot up our schools or each other. This seems to be a current-generation phenomenon. (And keep in mind that the signature school shooting — Columbine — occurred during the Assault Weapons Ban.).
Someone ask little boy Hogg … what is their problem?
The left is touting a study by Harvard and Stanford allegedly showing that race explains income inequality. America is racist against blacks regardless of class. Hokum. What they have done is bury the lede. The real story is that for boys, fathers matter. A lot.
Black American men, even from wealthy families, are much more likely to end up in lower income brackets than white men who grew up poorer.
But why? Because it is isolated to black men.
The study finds that this black-white income gap is also entirely created by differences in outcomes for men, not women. Among those who grow up in families with comparable incomes, black women earn slightly more than white women. Black men, by contrast, earned “substantially” less than white men with similar parental incomes.
For men, this disparity is also seen in high-school completion rates, college attendance rates, and incarceration.
Hmmmmm. There must be a reason. It turns out that fathers matter.
There are some environments that lead to smaller black-white gaps in intergenerational outcomes: low-poverty neighborhoods with, importantly, low levels of racial bias among whites and higher rates of fathers being present among blacks. (This doesn’t necessarily need to be the child’s own father, just within the community.)
The authors of the report find that black men who moved to these better areas at a young age have higher incomes and lower rates of incarnation as adults. The problem is that fewer than 5% of black children currently grow up in areas with a poverty rate below 10% and more than half with fathers present, while 63% of white children do.
Without fathers as role models, even if that father figure is not your own, boys struggle and founder. How on earth did Harvard and Stanford let this study see the light of day?! Gender matters. Fathers matter. Go figure.
In beta testing now, algorithms in China analyze citizens digital footprint to determine a “Social Credit” score. Low-scoring citizens can be blacklisted, prevented from buying plane or train tickets, buying property, getting loans…
It is all about what the authorities in Beijing call “social credit”, and the kind of surveillance that is now within governments’ grasp. The official rhetoric is poetic. According to the documents, what is being developed will “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step”.
It is much more invasive than the traditional credit score. The algorithms include consumer purchases, interpersonal relationships, and other behaviors. Buy too many video games or spend too much time playing them? Get docked. Don’t recycle? Get docked. Friends with someone with a low score? Get docked.
A lengthy planning document from China’s elite State Council explains that social credit will “forge a public opinion environment that trust-keeping is glorious”, warning that the “new system will reward those who report acts of breach of trust”.
Details on the inner workings of the system are vague, though it is clear that each citizen and Chinese organization will be rated. A long list of people in certain professions will face particular scrutiny, including teachers, accountants, journalists, and medical doctors. The special list even includes veterinarians and tour guides.
A national database will merge a wide variety of information on every citizen, assessing whether taxes and traffic tickets have been paid, whether academic degrees have been rightly earned and even, it seems, whether females have been instructed to take birth control.
Think people are horrified at the intrusion of the surveillance state into their lives? You’d be wrong. Apparently, people proudly display their social credit scores on their cell phones and feature them in online profiles. The system is scheduled to become a standard countrywide by 2020.
And folks think I’m a Luddite for railing against self-driving cars, the internet of things, and a cashless society.
Susan Rice categorically denied the allegations that the Obama administration used the NSA for partisan political purposes. The graduate of Stanford and Oxford says: “I leaked nothing to nobody.”
Perhaps grammar is different at Stanford and Oxford, but I suspect Rice is aware that this actually means: “I leaked everything to everybody.”
The environmental movement is frequently charged by those on the political right as being a front for advancing an agenda unknown to the eco-movement’s rank-and-file membership. That the true goals of the leadership of the movement are separate and distinct from those of the grassroots members. A new documentary film accidentally shows that it has been like that from its inception in the late 1950s and early 1960s and exposes the lie at the birth of environmentalism.