HISTORY Comments turned off

Five Things They Don’t Tell You about Slavery By Rich Lowry

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/five-things-they-dont-tell-you-about-slavery/

It didn’t begin or end in the United States.

The same people most obsessed with slavery seem to have little interest in the full scope of its history.

There has been an effort for decades now — although with new momentum lately, as exemplified by the New York Times’ 1619 project — to identify the United States and its founding with slavery.

To the extent that this campaign excavates uncomfortable truths about our history and underlines the central role of African Americans in our nation, it is welcome. But it is often intended to undermine the legitimacy of America itself by effacing what makes it distinctive and good.

Yes, slavery and racial prejudice were our great original sins. It would have been better if we had, like the British, been leaders against the slave trade and for abolition (the representation of slaveholders in Congress and the rise of King Cotton forestalled this). But we didn’t invent slavery, even in its race-based form.

Slavery didn’t make us unique, which is obvious if we consider its history in a little broader context. Critics of the American Founding don’t like to do this because it weakens their case and quickly brings them up against politically inconvenient facts that they’d prefer to pass over in silence.

Let’s dwell, then, on a few things they don’t tell us about slavery. None of these are secrets or are hard to find, but they are usually left out or minimized, since they don’t involve self-criticism and, worse, they entail a critical look at societies or cultures that the Left tends to favor vis-à-vis the West.

None of what follows is meant to excuse the practice of slavery in the United States, or its longevity. Nor is it to deny that the Atlantic slave trade was one of history’s great enormities, subjecting millions to mistreatment so horrifying that it is hard to fathom. But if we are to understand the history of slavery, it’s important to know what happened before 1619 and what happened elsewhere besides America.

POLITICS Comments turned off

ThinkProgress Smears Dan Crenshaw on ‘Universal Background Checks’ By Charles C. W. Cooke

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/thinkprogress-smears-dan-crenshaw-on-universal-background-checks/

Dan Crenshaw has every right to oppose a ‘universal background check’ bill.

At ThinkProgress, Josh Israel miscasts Dan Crenshaw’s argument against the “universal background check” bill that the House of Representatives passed earlier this year (and which Crenshaw opposed):

“With universal background checks, I wouldn’t be able to let my friends borrow my handgun when they travel alone like this. We would make felons out of people just for defending themselves,” he tweeted.

It is unclear why Crenshaw does not believe his friends could pass background checks to get their own weapons or to borrow his. If they are convicted felons who are not allowed to possess weapons, it would seem important for Crenshaw or other friends to know that before arming them.

Israel’s reading of Crenshaw’s tweet is based upon a misunderstanding of the bill (H.R. 8) that Crenshaw opposes. Under current federal law, Crenshaw is allowed to loan, gift, or sell a gun to any adult within his home state of Texas, provided he believes that that adult is permitted to own one. If H.R. 8 were signed into law, this would change. Specifically, H.R. 8 would prevent Crenshaw from selling a gun to anybody without the buyer undergoing a background check; it would limit his ability to gift or loan a gun to recipients within his own family; and it would narrow the circumstances in which he could effect a “temporary transfer” dramatically, to those in which the temporary transferee feared “imminent death or great bodily harm.” Because he has read H.R. 8, Crenshaw knows this, and he knows, therefore, that if H.R. 8 were to become law it would prevent him from loaning his friends guns per se — not because his friends are unable to pass a background check, but because there would be no such thing as loaning a friend a gun.

POLITICS Comments turned off

New Marquette Poll: Trump Trails Biden by Nine Points in Wisconsin, But Ties Warren and Harris By John McCormack

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/new-marquette-poll-trump-trails-biden-by-nine-points-in-wisconsin-but-ties-warren-and-harris/

According to the latest Marquette Law School poll of registered voters in Wisconsin, Joe Biden leads Donald Trump 51 percent to 42 percent, while Elizabeth Warren and Trump are tied at 45 percent. Trump is also tied with Kamala Harris at 44 percent, while Bernie Sanders narrowly leads Trump 48 percent to 44 percent.

The Marquette survey is another data point backing up the argument that Biden is actually more electable than his Democratic rivals. He leads Trump by 9.4 points in the RealClearPolitics average of national polls, while Warren leads Trump by 3.6 points in the RCP average and Harris leads by 3.0. 

In 2016, of course, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by 2.1 points, but lost the Electoral College because 78,000 voters in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan gave Trump the edge.

Trump can afford to let Pennsylvania and Michigan flip in 2020, but he would still win the Electoral College 270 to 268 if he holds Wisconsin and the rest of the 2016 map stays the same. 

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Wisconsin remains a strong contender to be the “tipping-point” state in the Electoral College in 2020, and Biden will likely be touting the fact that the “gold-standard” pollster in Wisconsin shows him with a big lead, while his rivals would make the race a toss-up. 

Biden’s rivals can counter by pointing out that at this point in the 2016 presidential race (when Trump had been running in the GOP primary for less than three months) Marquette showed Hillary Clinton leading Trump 51 percent to 35 percent.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Storming Back to the Impeachment Charade By Andrew C. McCarthy

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/impeachment-charade-jerry-nadler-house-democrats/

Jerry Nadler claims to be conducting an impeachment inquiry, but his committee has never actually voted to have one. Here’s why.

Elections have consequences. This was a point we tried to make many times in the run-up to the 2018 midterm elections. The Democrats won control of the House fair and square. That means they get to drive the agenda.

Their agenda, kinda sorta, is the impeachment of President Trump — which is to say, the quixotic quest to build political support for it. According to the Washington Post, that effort is about to sink deeper into farce: Hearings on Stormy Daniels and the hush-money payments to conceal trysts that Donald Trump had — allegedly, of course — a decade before he ran for president.

Such a quest is a two-edged sword, though. If this is how the Democrats choose to spend the public’s time and money, they must be accountable for it. They must be pressured to demonstrate the courage of their anti-Trump convictions. So far, for all the bluster, they’ve gotten away with cowardice.

Most of the impeachment quasi-action is in the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Representative Jerrold Nadler (D., N.Y.). We have to qualify the word “action” because, while Nadler claims to be conducting an impeachment inquiry, his committee has never actually voted to have one.

This reflects the political needle Democrats cannot thread.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Senator Ron Wyden: (D_OR)Mark Zuckerberg Should Face Prison Time For Privacy Lapses By Tristan Justice

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/ron-wyden-mark-zuckerberg-should-face-prison-time-for-privacy-lapses/

U.S. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) suggested last week that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg should face jail time for his company’s mishandling of user data that allegedly violated privacy laws.

“Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly lied to the American people about privacy,” Wyden complained to the Willamette Week. “I think he ought to be held personally accountable, which is everything from financial fines to – and let me underline this – the possibility of a prison term. Because he hurt a lot of people.”

Wyden justified the suggested punishment by likening the crime to offenses committed by those who work in the finance industry.

“There is precedent for this: in financial services: if the CEO and the executives lie about the financials, they can be held personally accountable,” Wyden argued.

Wyden put out a draft bill last year to penalize executives who mishandle user data with up to 10 to 20 years in prison. The Oregon senator has been one of the central figures in Washington D.C. leading the effort to enhance federal regulation of big tech. In April, Wyden requested that the Federal Trade Commission hold Zuckerberg “individually accountable” for “repeated violations of Americans’ privacy.”

“Given Mr. Zuckerberg’s deceptive statements, his personal control over Facebook, and his role in approving key decisions related to the sharing of user data, the FTC can and must hold Mr. Zuckerberg personally responsible for these continued violations,” Wyden wrote in a letter to the agency.

EDUCATION Comments turned off

Left Pushes To Erase High Achievers From University Halls Simply Because They’re White And Male Looming within academia, there is a strange desire to be attentive to history by erasing it. By Erielle Davidson

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/left-pushes-erase-high-achievers-university-halls-simply-theyre-white-male/

Perched in the old city of Akko, Israel, is an enormous citadel, one that has been built, leveled, and rebuilt again by various powers. When I visited the citadel, I recall mentally organizing the history, asking my friend to translate from Hebrew the timeline of the citadel’s ever-fraught ownership. From the Crusaders to the Ottomans to the British, the walls of Akko tell a story, one that locals are eager to both preserve and tell through intensive restoration projects.

I was reminded of this mantra­—walls tell stories—when I heard of a recent push within academia to remove pictures of scientists, Nobel Prize winners, deans, and various other accolade recipients from the walls of university halls under the auspices of their insufficient racial and sex differences. Most of the suspect portraits are of older white men.

In many instances, such as in the case of the Molecular & Integrative Physiology Department at the University of Michigan, the “dude wall” (as coined by Rachel Maddow of MSNBC) has simply been moved to a less-prominent location. But the relocation hasn’t always been received warmly. For example, Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, a teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School, speakers presenting at Bornstein Auditorium now orate within the confines of bare walls, a situation in which former Dean of Harvard Medical School Dr. Jeffrey Flier has expressed public disappointment.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Blasey Ford Attorney Admits Abortion Support ‘Motivated’ Anti-Kavanaugh Accusations !!!!!By Mollie Hemingway

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/blasey-ford-attorney-admits-abortion-supported-motivated-anti-kavanaugh-accusations/

The attorney for a woman who made unsupported allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh admitted that she and her client Christine Blasey Ford were motivated by their support for abortion. The admission, first reported in Ryan Lovelace’s new reported book “Search and Destroy: Inside the Campaign Against Brett Kavanaugh,” was confirmed with video footage.

Tarnishing the reputation of a justice who would have the power to overturn abortion law Roe V. Wade “is part of what motivated Christine,” her attorney Debra Katz said. “Elections have consequences, but he will always have an asterisk next to his name,” she said of Kavanaugh.

Kavanaugh’s nomination for the Supreme Court was nearly derailed by last-minute unsubstantiated allegations that he had attempted to rape Ford when they were in high school decades prior. She said she feared he might kill her as well.

No evidence emerged in support of the allegations, and the four witnesses Ford named all denied any knowledge of the incident. She said she was unable to remember the date or location of the alleged event, or any other specific information that could be independently evaluated. The witnesses, who included Ford’s lifelong friend Leland Keyser, said they remembered no such event, even though some of them remembered the summer in question quite well.

ENVIRONMENT AND JUNK SCIENCE Comments turned off

Global Warming or Bad Data? Garbage in… by John Steele Gordon

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://www.commentarymagazine.com/politics-ideas/climate-global-warming-data-locations/

Al Gore likes to say that the science of climate change is “settled.” But of course, science, almost by definition, is never settled.

And climate science has always suffered from the problem of shaky and missing data. Seventy percent of the globe is covered by ocean, where data is hard to collect. Reliable weather records only go back to about 1850 and, in many parts of the world, are far more recent. Modern recording weather stations date only to the early 20th century.

And many of those stations have a big problem. While they haven’t changed appreciably over the years, the land around them has changed, often profoundly, with the great growth in urban and suburban areas. The weather station that was put, say, in the middle of a Nassau County, Long Island, potato field in 1923 is still in the same spot. But the potatoes are long gone, and now it’s behind a strip mall, twenty feet from the kitchen exhaust fan of a Chinese take-out joint.

A study by meteorologist Anthony Watts found that almost 90 percent of the 1221 weather stations in the U.S. did not meet the National Weather Service’s setting standards, which requires that they be at least 100 feet from any artificial heat source or radiating surface. You can see some of the most egregious violators here. To deal with this defective information, climate scientists, have “adjusted” the data to solve this problem. Invariably, these adjustments have made earlier data show lower temperatures, and recent data show higher ones.

To develop reliable data, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) placed 114 state-of-the-art weather stations relatively evenly spaced about the lower 48 states. They were carefully sited to be away from urban areas, which are heat islands, airports, which can be affected by jet exhaust, etc.

The system became operative in 2005. Now, realclearenergy.com is reporting that there has been no increase in average temperatures in the continental United States over the last 14 years, as measured by these new stations. If anything, overall temperatures are slightly cooler than they were.

One big reason for this lack of warming is surely the explosion in U.S. natural gas production, thanks to fracking. The U.S. is now, by far, the number-one producer of natural gas, producing 90 billion cubic feet a day, 25 percent more than second-place Russia. This has brought the price of natural gas to its lowest point in 20 years, which has resulted in a big shift from producing power by burning coal to burning natural gas, which produces 50 percent less carbon dioxide. (The shale gas revolution has vast geopolitical implications, of course, as well as climatic ones.)

WORLD NEWS Comments turned off

U.K. Parliament Gives A Full-Fledged Finger To The British People By Sumantra Maitra

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/04/u-k-parliament-gives-full-fledged-finger-british-people/

The British parliament is nominally more powerful than the monarch or the prime minister. Ever since Brexit, it is aspiring to be more powerful than the people.

The British Parliament stood firmly opposed to the British people, as 21 Conservative Party members of Parliament (MPs) defected and joined the Liberals-Democrats to damage the new Boris Johnson government and oppose a No-Deal Brexit on October 31. In a win for the European Union, keenly being watched from the Americas and the European continent, the British government is now paralyzed, with no majority for any Brexit, even a diluted one; no mandate for another election; no unified opposition to win in an election; and no government strong enough to push through.

Modern Western democratic societies, whether parliamentary or senatorial, have never faced a situation where the declared majority result is straddled against the checks for majoritarianism. The British parliament is nominally more powerful than the monarch or the prime minister. Ever since Brexit, it is aspiring to be more powerful than the people. And the outcome and direction of this will be a lesson for the entire English-speaking world.

A bit of background is necessary. The British system was a compromise from the chaos in the continent, and miraculously has managed without a written constitution, or a revolution, since the end of the Cromwellian Tyranny. The power lies in Parliament, which is the supreme authority in the country.

NATIONAL NEWS & OPINION Comments turned off

Squad Dems Raise Money to Help Activists Arrested in Boston, Including Antifa Goons Who Assaulted Cops Debra Heine

Posted By on September 4th, 2019

amgreatness.com/2019/09/03/squad-dems-raise-money-to-help-activists-arrested-in-boston-including-antifa-goons-who-assaulted-cops/

Far-left Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley lent a helping hand to violent antifa agitators over the weekend after a number of them were arrested on assault and battery charges.

The two “Squad” members urged their followers on Twitter to contribute to the bail fund for the “counter-protesters” who tangled with law enforcement while protesting the Straight Pride Parade in Boston on Saturday. A masked Antifa protester told reporters that the violence was necessary in order to shut up Straight Pride marchers.

The FundRazr page said that the monies raised would go toward “any legal fees, as well as supplies for jail support.”

The purpose of the parade was to “take a stand for free speech and demonstrate that the ‘oppressed majority’ of straight Americans have just as much right to celebrate their sexuality as does the LGBTQ community,” organizer John Hugo told the Boston Herald. Organizers insisted that the parade was open to “all races, genders and sexual orientations.”

AOC urged her followers to contribute to the crowdfunding campaign to “support the local LGBTQ community impacted by Boston’s white supremacist parade.” Pressley thanked the “allies & accomplices who stood in the gap & laid their bodies on the line …”

The FundRazr page said that “fascists and white supremacists, under the front organization Super Happy Fun America, are descending on Boston,” vowing that “Boston will repel them with beautiful and bold direct action!”