FOREIGN POLICY Comments turned off

Showdown in the Arabian Gulf Deployment of aircraft carrier battle group and B-52 bombers demonstrates unmistaken U.S. resolve. Ari Lieberman

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273816/showdown-arabian-gulf-ari-lieberman

During his presidential run, Donald Trump argued that the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, colloquially known as the Iran deal, was among the worst deals ever negotiated by the United States with a foreign power and promised to withdraw from the JCPOA if elected. In May 2018, Trump kept his word but granted waivers to eight countries to continue purchasing Iranian oil. In May 2019 those waivers expired, further constricting Iran’s ability to export oil.

Sanctions instantly affected all aspects of the Iranian economy including its banking sector. The U.S. Treasury Department succeeded in disconnecting Iran’s banking industry from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT). SWIFT enables banks to communicate with each other and facilitates international transactions. Even if rogue nations, like Turkey, attempted to skirt sanctions and purchase Iranian contraband, it would be nearly impossible for Iran to receive payment given its cutoff from SWIFT.

Iran’s economy is contracting and its currency is in freefall. It is estimated that the ban on oil exports alone is costing the regime some $35 billion a year and that’s before the expiration of the waivers. In April, the U.S. declared the IRGC a Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) and this past week, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Iran’s industrial metals industry.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Against “Practical” Knowledge The value of a Classical Liberal Arts Education. Jack Kerwick

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273760/against-practical-knowledge-jack-kerwick

Given the mess that is today’s politicized college campus, students have even more reason to wonder, as they so often have wondered, why it is that they are being made to enroll in courses that at least appear to be devoid of all “practical” value. Why should a mathematics major have to spend a semester enrolled in courses studying philosophers and poets?

This is not an unreasonable question. Nor should we expect for students to think otherwise given our culture’s emphatic, indeed, dogmatic, insistence that the only type of knowledge worth having is “practical” knowledge, i.e. knowledge that regularly lends itself to uses from which one can expect substantive (typically monetary) dividends.

Nevertheless, just a moment’s reflection on daily life readily puts the lie to the conventional wisdom that “useless” knowledge isn’t worth possessing, for such awareness reveals that it is wholly inaccurate to describe much of what human beings value, and what they value most, as “practical.”

Whether it is love, compassion, honor, or honesty, it would be a gross injustice to characterize the worth of these virtues in terms of their “practical” value. The relationship between friends, say, is not a mutually advantageous transaction, a “practical” arrangement that serves the interests of both parties. And millions of human beings don’t spend endless hours on social media perusing the posts of “friends,” followers, and strangers alike because they think that the knowledge that they’re deriving from doing so is going to serve a “practical” purpose.

One resolutely non-practical, “useless” activity in which people tend to relish (even if they aren’t always so good at it) is that of conversation. This undeniable fact about the human situation supplies faculty with an answer to this common inquiry among students: A classical liberal arts education is necessary because in being exposed to a variety of disciplines, students are becoming conversant with the several voices that compose the civilization to which they belong.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

John Stossel Video: Academic Hoax Fake papers on ridiculous subjects submitted to prominent academic journals.

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/273779/stossel-video-academic-hoax-frontpagemagcom

In his new video, John Stossel focuses on Academic Hoax, unveiling how three people conducted what they call a ‘grievance studies’ experiment. They wrote fake papers on ridiculous subjects and submitted them to prominent academic journals in fields that study gender, race, and sexuality. Don’t miss it!

P.C.-CULTURE Comments turned off

The Simple Preschool-Level Question That No Leftist Can Answer: Matt Walsh

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://www.dailywire.com/news/47257/walsh-simple-matt-walsh

For the last few weeks I have been trying with increasing desperation to get a leftist — any leftist — to answer one simple question: what is a woman?

You’ll notice that folks on the Left use the word “woman” quite a bit. They make many claims about women. They say that these creatures known as women have something called “women’s rights.” They say that these rights are under attack. They say that women are persecuted and disadvantaged by something called male privilege. They say that women are the victims of a wage gap. They say things like, “We need a woman President.”

They also say that biological males can be women. They say transwomen are women. They say that someone can start out life as a male and transition into a woman. They make many other claims in this vein.

But how can I understand any of these claims and declarations if I do not know what they mean by the word woman? And how can they make any meaningful statements about women if they themselves do not know what they mean by it? So I ask again very simply: what is a woman?

I feel in fairness I should provide my own definition. I tend to agree with Merriam-Webster that woman means “an adult female person.” I agree not only with the dictionary but with the whole history of human civilization, which, collectively, has always understood woman in this way.

IMMIGRATION Comments turned off

Trump’s Immigration Pitch Has Real Merit By Rachel Bovard

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/19/trumps-immigration-pitch-has-real-merit/

President Trump on Thursday rolled out his administration’s first, substantive take on immigration reform, and the reactions have been what you’d expect.

Democrats and some Republicans immediately panned the proposal because it doesn’t provide amnesty to recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (otherwise known as President Obama’s illegal executive amnesty), or to anyone else.

Republicans, in general, were more circumspect. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) gave a noncommittal response, with a nod toward the dispute he is currently embroiled in with Democrats, who continue to block the administration’s request for more humanitarian funding at the border. (Yes, the same party who lambasts the president for his supposed lack of humanitarian care for migrants also refuses to give him funding to do exactly that.)

But a review of the plan itself, which deals largely with the legal immigration system, suggests that it fills a critical role for Republicans.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

He Did It, Not Me! By Victor Davis Hanson

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/19/he-did-it-not-me/

“No longer are Brennan, Clapper, Comey, and McCabe along with a host of others insisting that they acted nobly. No longer are they in solidarity in their defiant opposition to Donald Trump. Now, for the first time, they are pointing fingers at one another, because they have come to realize that their prior criminality may not be rewarded, praised, or even excused, but rather prosecuted. And so in response, we now hear: “He did it, not me!”

There is something Kafkaesque about the current round of investigating possible FBI, CIA, National Security Agency, Justice Department, and National Security Council wrongdoing during the 2016 election, Trump transition, and early presidency.

Special Counsel Robert Mueller had been permitted to range well beyond his mandate of “Russian collusion.” He outsourced much of the selection of his “dream team” and “all-star” staff of attorneys to his deputy, Andrew Weissman. In turn, Weissman—who commiserated with Hillary Clinton at her ill-fated “victory” party on the evening of her defeat—stocked the team with Trump-haters, liberals and progressives, Clinton donors, a few who had previously served as attorneys for the Clinton Foundation, and Clinton or Obama aides. Most of these were themselves briefed during the early dissemination of the fraudulent Steele dossier.

Yet after all the bias, prosecutorial leveraging, the process crimes, the perjury traps, and after 22 months, $34 million, and a 440-plus page report, Mueller’s “hunter-killer” team did not establish that President Trump colluded with the Russians to warp the 2016 election.

In fact, Mueller could not find prosecutable “obstruction” of justice by Trump to impair the investigation of what Mueller concluded was not a crime.

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

Australia’s Voters Reject Leftist Ideas By John Fund

Posted By on May 20th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/05/australian-election-voters-reject-leftist-ideas/

A stunning conservative win has lessons for the U.S.

Hell hath no fury greater than left-wingers who lose an election in a surprise upset. Think Brexit in 2016. Think Trump’s victory the same year. Now add Australia.

Conservative prime minister Scott Morrison shocked pollsters and pundits alike with his victory on Saturday, and the reaction has been brutal from supporters of the opposition Labor party. They can’t seem to decide whether Australia’s electorate is stupid, evil, or both.

Cathy Wilcox, a newspaper cartoonist, tweeted: “It seems unfair that the morons outnumber the thinking people at election time.” Broadcaster Meshel Laurie concluded that “Australians are dumb, mean-spirited, and greedy. Accept it.” Some were ready to write off the whole country. Brigid Delaney, a columnist for the Guardian, wrote, “It’s the country that’s rotten.” She reported from the Labor party’s Election Night event. People there had to face “the fact that their vision for Australia’s future was not affirmed,” she wrote. That “made them feel estranged and alienated from their own country.”

By contrast, Zareh Ghazarian, a political-science lecturer at Monash University in Melbourne, was snobbishly restrained: “We have completely expected an opposite thing for two years,’ he told the Washington Post. “Voters rejected the big picture.”

By that, he meant that voters have rejected a sweeping Labor-party platform that urged Australia to move in a dramatically leftward direction on everything from higher taxes on retirement income to greater benefits for indigenous people to an ambitious program to reduce carbon emissions by 45 percent from 2005 levels over the next decade. Labor was heavily promoting renewable energy and electric vehicles; many Australians called the plan Labor’s version of the Green New Deal in the U.S.

The sweeping nature of these ideas gave Prime Minister Morrison the opening to paint his Labor challenger, former union head Bill Shorten, as a risky, job-killing opponent of traditional Australian values. Morrison “ran a targeted, presidential-style campaign with a tight message focusing on tax increases under Labor,” lamented Osmond Chiu, editor of the Australian left-wing magazine Challenge. “He often appeared as if he himself was not in government but rather the insurgent.”

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

Posted 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.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

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

Posted 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.

POLITICS Comments turned off

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

Posted 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.