Cory Booker says elementary school yoga can help end the ‘school-to-prison pipeline’ 

Can’t tell?

I have concluded that California is run by nincompoops, voted into office by a nincompoop majority, and doing the things that nincompoops do.

Nate Gartrell:

“…California inmates are now free to possess marijuana without fear of legal consequences by the state, thanks to a new appeals court ruling.

The 3rd District Court of Appeal overturned criminal convictions for five Sacramento defendants who had been caught with marijuana in their prison cells. The 20-page ruling says, “Consumption, not possession, is the act voters determined should remain criminalized if the user is in prison.”

The reason? The authors of California Proposition 64 — which voters passed in 2016, allowing recreational marijuana use — did not put anything in there that outlaws marijuana possession for incarcerated folks, the court ruled.

But the ruling comes with a major caveat: Consumption of marijuana by California prisoners remains a violation of the state penal code, and possession can still be punished as a rule violation by the California Department of Corrections. But if an inmate wants to keep a jar of weed next to his or her bunk, the district attorney can’t file charges, according to the ruling…”

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Jon Gabriel:

“…Politicians love fighting the last battle. Every four years, we see a slew of candidates relitigating the last presidential race, often using the same strategy that lost the previous time.

This trend is dominant in 2019 with the rise of Biden’s candidacy and the continuing rear-guard battle by anti-Trump Republicans. Joe’s main message is a return to the supposed normalcy of 2008-2016. “Know what I was most proud of?” Joe said Wednesday, “For eight years, there wasn’t one single hint of a scandal or a lie.”

Hey, there’s a lie right there. Has it never occurred to him that the Obama years are what created Trump?

Meanwhile, a handful of institutional Republicans are pushing their own return to normalcy. Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan or former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld will save the GOP with center-left branding and Acela-approved personalities.

Washington sophisticates, and the DC press corps in particular, are deeply parochial. Trump didn’t create worldwide skepticism about globalism, resentment of sinecured elites, or frustration with an out-of-touch cultural vanguard. He merely rode them to power.

Politicians and pundits can disagree with this populist trend, but it’s electorally suicidal to ignore it. As I note in USA Today, one look around the globe shows that, in many ways, Trump is the new normal…”

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Mexican president selling his ‘luxurious presidential plane’ to pay for US immigration deal.

Hard to tell, isn’t it?

Liz Sheld:

“…The intelligence community’s crisis communication firm, The New York Times, spun into action yesterday, “reporting” that A.G. Barr is going to investigate the CIA’s participation in the RUSSIA-collusion hoax.

Before I get into the details of this press release written by and published in the NYT, take a moment and ask yourselves, should there be oversight for the CIA? Who conducts that oversight? The CIA “sources” referenced in the NYT press release seem a little miffed that some folks want to check their math.

According to the press release:

The ties between the efforts by the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. to examine Russia’s election interference are broader. In the summer of 2016, the intelligence community formed a task force housed at the C.I.A. to investigate Russian interference. The group shared intelligence with F.B.I. investigators who opened the bureau’s Russia inquiry in an effort to determine whether any Americans were working with the Russians on their interference during the election.

What about CIA activity before “the summer of 2016”? This is the time period when some foreign intel assets were recording and trying to entrap George Papadopoulos (Papa-D.) Papa-D met with a fake “RUSSIAN spy” (but likely Western intelligence asset) Joseph Mifsud in April 2016. Now the pretend story is that after Papa-D met with Mifsud and “learned” the RUSSIANS had dirt on Hillary, he shared that information with Australian diplomat/spy Alexander Downer and a honey pot in May. Downer waited until July (“the summer of 2016”) to tell the U.S. and that kicked off the counterintelligence investigation. Why would a Western asset like Mifsud, who trains spies in Italy at The Link, tell a low-level volunteer what he “heard” about the RUSSIANS? Did the CIA deploy Mifsud to fish Papa-D back in April? Was it that punk Brennan? The British spooks? Let’s find out…”

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Ben Bland:

“…Hong Kong is facing an existential threat. A vast protest on Sunday reflects the culmination of angst over changes that are undermining the foundations of the Chinese city’s economic prosperity and its distinct identity. How the impasse is resolved has implications not only for this former British colony and global financial center, but for the future of relations between China and the Western democratic world.

When the U.K. handed back control of Hong Kong to China in 1997, Beijing promised the city that it could maintain an independent legal system, democratic freedoms and a “high degree of autonomy” for at least 50 years. This “One Country, Two Systems” formula has underpinned the city’s success because it allowed Hong Kong to maintain access to global markets as a separate, law-abiding and free-trading member of the World Trade Organization. But as President Xi Jinping has concentrated more power than any Chinese leader since Mao Zedong, Hong Kong’s autonomy – and therefore its economic raison d’etre – has come under ever greater threat.

The proximate reason for the protest, which drew hundreds of thousands of people, was a proposed amendment to the law that for the first time would allow Hong Kong to extradite people to mainland China, and other jurisdictions with which it has no formal extradition treaty. This seemingly technical change has alarmed everyone from local judges to foreign bankers because it lowers the shield that protects Hong Kong’s legal system from the capricious and repressive judicial practices across the border.

The Hong Kong government, while making some concessions, has refused to back down, and the extradition bill will receive its second reading in the city’s Legislative Council on Wednesday. The government’s efforts to allay concerns have failed partly because the extradition issue is just the latest in a long list of threats to the city’s autonomy and rule of law. In the past few years the Hong Kong government has disqualified elected lawmakers, outlawed a political party, jailed pro-democracy protest leaders, expelled a senior Financial Times journalist, and looked the other way when Beijing’s agents kidnapped a bookseller and a billionaire from Hong Kong.

The violations of One Country, Two Systems have become so blatant that Western governments have warned the city’s success as an international business hub is in danger. On Monday, the U.S. State Department expressed “grave concern” over the extradition law. “The continued erosion of the ‘One Country, Two Systems’ framework puts at risk Hong Kong’s long-established special status in international affairs,” spokeswoman Morgan Ortagus said…”

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Joel Kotkin:

“…The recent California Democratic Party convention in San Francisco exposed the divide between the state’s progressive and working-class voters. Progressives, in their militant certitude, support left-wing policies that often don’t affect them; it’s the working class that suffers the consequences of these proposals. But the Green New Deal, widely embraced by party leaders, pushed too far, triggering a backlash at the convention. The state’s private-sector labor unions, notably the building trades, organized a “Blue Collar Revolution” protest against the Democrats’ climate legislation.

The Democrats are calling for the elimination of fossil fuels by 2030, which would result in California’s immiseration, especially for workers in the state’s energy-production sector, the nation’s fourth-largest. In 2012, the oil and gas industry employed over 400,000 Californians, but these workers—unionized and well-paid—can expect pink slips with the green package. California’s renewable mandates also threaten the building-trades unions, which count 400,000 members statewide—a sizable contingent, though considerably below the industry’s 2007 numbers.

While new wealth drives demand for expensive housing, building restrictions that stymie expansion into suburbia limit the sector’s growth. Not long ago, building-trade union members were considered part of California’s aristocracy, but they can no longer afford median-priced homes in any of the state’s urban counties. Residential sales have dropped statewide, and California’s rate of new housing permits has fallen behind the national average, making construction workers’ economic prospects even dimmer. And the manufacturing sector has stagnated—this despite a 4 percent national expansion, along with 5 percent and 14 percent growth in neighboring Arizona and Nevada.

California’s working- and middle class can expect this trend to continue as the state’s climate-regulation polices become ever more draconian. The cost of living will rise, and Californians can anticipate more taxes on items like soda, guns, and tires. Yet progressives ignore the burdens these put on residents in the name of equity and climate change. In an effort to hide their huge carbon footprint, it’s worth noting, Silicon Valley’s tech leaders have transferred servers and relocated facilities to Texas, the Midwest, and China—places with higher rates of greenhouse-gas emissions—and sending jobs out of state, too.

California elites insulate themselves against an economy that saddles workers with high energy and house prices, especially in the state’s less-temperate interior. In mild coastal climates like the Bay Area or west Los Angeles, electricity prices aren’t such a burden, but in inland cities like Bakersfield, summer temperatures regularly soar over 100 degrees, leading to massive cooling costs. In a state with the nation’s highest poverty rate, high energy bills can be devastating.

The blue-collar revolt isn’t limited to a party convention. In an unprecedented lawsuit against the state Air Resources Board—the agency leading the implementation of green mandates—some 200 civil-rights leaders claim that these expensive policies disproportionately affect minorities and the poor…”

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Victor Davis Hanson:

“…One of the media and beltway orthodoxies we constantly hear is that just a few bad apples under James Comey at the FBI explain why so many FBI elites have been fired, resigned, reassigned, demoted, or retired — or just left for unexplained reasons. The list is long and includes director James Comey himself, deputy director Andrew McCabe, counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok, attorney Lisa Page, chief of staff James Rybicki, general counsel James Baker, assistant director for public affairs Mike Kortan, Comey’s special assistant Josh Campbell, executive assistant director James Turgal, assistant director for office of congressional affairs Greg Bower, executive assistant director Michael Steinbach, and executive assistant director John Giacalone. In short, in about every growing scandal of the past two years — FISA, illegal leaking, spying on a presidential candidate, lying under oath, obstructing justice — someone in the FBI is involved.

We are told, however, that the FBI’s culture and institutions are exempt from the widespread wrongdoing at the top. Such caution is a fine and fitting thing, given the FBI’s more than a century of public service. Nonetheless, many of those caught up in the controversies over the Russian-collusion hoax were not recent career appointees. Rather, many came up through the ranks of the FBI. And that raises the question, for example, of where exactly Peter Strzok (22 years in the FBI) learned that he had a right to interfere in a U.S. election to damage a candidate that he opposed.

And why would an Andrew McCabe (over 21 years in the FBI) think he had the duty to formulate an “insurance policy” to take out a presidential candidate? Or why would he even consider overseeing an FBI investigation of Hillary Clinton’s improper use of emails when his wife had been a recent recipient of Clinton-related PAC money? And why would McCabe contemplate leaking confidential FBI information to the press or even dream of setting up some sort of operation to remove a sitting president under the 25th Amendment? And how did someone like the old FBI vet Peter Strozk ever end up at the center of the entire mess — opening up the snooping on the Trump campaign while hiding that fact and while briefing the candidate on Russian interference in the election, interviewing Michael Flynn, preening as a top FBI investigator for Robert Mueller’s dream team, right-hand man of “Andy” McCabe, convincing Comey to change the wording of his writ in the Clinton-email-scandal investigation, softball coddling of Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills, instrumental in the Papadopoulos investigation con — all the while conducting an affair with fellow FBI investigator and attorney Lisa Page and bragging about his assurance that the supposedly odious Trump would be prevented from being elected. If a group of Trump zealots were to call up the FBI tomorrow and allege that a member of Joe Biden’s family has had unethical ties with the Ukrainian or Chinese government, would that gambit “alarm” the FBI enough to prompt an investigation of Biden and his campaign? How many career-professional Peter Strozks are still at the agency?…”

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Eric Felten:

“…Ohr has since confirmed to Congress who the conspiracy theorists were: “Chris Steele, as I understand it, was hired by Fusion GPS to do research or gather information. He provided information to me,” Ohr has testified. “Glenn Simpson, who is, as I understand it, a principal of Fusion GPS, on a couple of occasions, he provided information to me. And on one occasion my wife, who was a contractor with Fusion GPS, provided some information to me.”

The average opposition researcher would be hard-pressed to get the attention of an associate deputy attorney general, let alone his cooperation. But the Fusion GPS crowd had the right connections. Steele and Ohr are close enough that Steele could sign an email to his old friend with “Love and Best Wishes to you, Nellie and all the family.” Simpson is an acquaintance of long standing. Nellie is, well, Ohr’s wife.

Fusion GPS didn’t just get Bruce Ohr’s valuable attention, the firm used it to make an ask. Nellie Ohr acknowledged in her own congressional interview what Fusion GPS had in mind when Steele invited her and her husband to breakfast at the Mayflower Hotel on July 30, 2016. “Chris Steele was hoping that Bruce would put in a word with the FBI to follow up on the information in some way.” He did just that.

With one phone call, Ohr arranged to take an assortment of unverified accusations — some of them lurid, all of them partisan-financed — directly to the deputy director of the FBI…”

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120 whoopie pies are missing after fairground booth break-in

LIZ SHELD:

“…On Monday, Judiciary Committee chair Rep. Jerry Nadler held a hearing with three rabid anti-Trump characters and  constitutional scholar, John Malcolm, from Heritage. The main attraction was disgraced, convicted felon John Dean, who was there to say that Trump is just like Nixon and the RUSSIA collusion conspiracy theory is just like Watergate. Everything is just like Watergate to Dean, who made similar claims under the Bush/Cheney administration and against Reagan. Watergate is Dean’s schtick, he’s a one-trick pony. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

At issue is whether the president can exercise his constitutional powers illegally. Since the #resistance activists fancy themselves experts at identifying and prosecuting thought crimes, they are arguing that Trump’s intent was to cover up a crime he didn’t commit and that he wanted the investigation to end to hide his non-existent crime rather than because his political opponents were using it to interfere with his ability to govern. We live in a universe where Hillary Clinton engaged in actual criminal behavior but didn’t intend to so and was given a pass, while Trump did not engage in the accused crime but “intended” to cover up his non-crime so he needs to be removed from office and thrown in jail. No one ever accused these folks of being logical.

One exchange in the hearing worth highlighting is when Rep. Jim Jordan got Dean to admit that he advised Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s lawyer, to withhold Cohen’s testimony from the GOP. Sounds kind of obstruction-y.

Remember, the point of these hearings is to put on a show, have selected segments air on television and disseminated on the internet, hope the public turns to support impeachment and then go forward with impeachment. Sadly for Fat Jerry, the NYC helicopter crash directed media coverage away from the Judiciary’s freak show so he didn’t get the intended media coverage…”

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Sanders Vows to Bypass Snowballing Hyperinflation Phase Of Socialism, Go Directly To Brutal Government Crackdown On Public Gatherings Protesting Food Shortages.

Thomas Lifson:

“…Lack of respect for juries can be very, very costly. The landmark jury verdict awarding $11 million (with the possibility of triple damages to come) to members of the Gibson Family, owners of a 5-generation bakery boycotted and slandered by students with the encouragement of a College official, is looking to be as much about social class as it is about the excesses social justice warriors (SJWs). I write this, not to castigate the local folk who made up the jury and sympathized with the “townies” attacked by the “gowns” of Oberlin, but rather in recognition of what William A. Jacobson of Legal Insurrection, who owns this story, pointed out about Oberlin’s response to the verdict. It appears that Oberlin, a relatively wealthy and elite college, is so arrogant – full of hubris as Clarice Feldman pointed out yesterday – that it forgot (or never knew?) The First Law of Holes: “If you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.”…

…The entire higher education industry is on the edge of an apocalypse. Prices have been jacked up to unsustainable levels, in large part to fund an unproductive bureaucracy, much of it devoted to “diversity,” just as a demographic decline in the age cohort eligible for college is upon them. The broader public observes the excesses on campuses from Berkeley to Oberlin, and realizes the contempt with which denizens of the ivory tower regards them. I have a hard time believing that the alumni of Oberlin College are going to open their wallets to finance the costs of this fiasco, nor do I foresee state legislatures or the federal government expanding their aid to higher education  in the face of its excesses and contempt…”

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Background that I have been following, but have not posted.

Catering to the PC mob is going to cost Oberlin College big bucks

Oh-oh! Oberlin College’s insurance company says their policy doesn’t cover the huge verdict against it

House Democrats Draft Legislation That Would Make It A Hate Crime To Eat At Chick-Fil-A.

Hard to tell, isn’t it?

RALPH VARTABEDIAN:

“…Up and down the San Joaquin Valley, farmers have similar stories. The state can take land with a so-called order of possession by the Superior Court while it haggles over the price.

But farmers often face out-of-pocket costs for lost production, road replacement, repositioning of irrigation systems and other expenses, which the state agrees to pay before the final settlement.

Those payments and even some payments for land have stretched out to three years. State officials have offered endless excuses for not paying, the farmers say…

…Mark Wasser, an eminent domain attorney in Sacramento who has represented more than 70 farmers and other businesses losing land to the rail project. ‘I would draw an analogy to Napoleon’s invasion of Russia.’…”

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Beto on being at 2% in the polls: No early poll of the Texas Senate race said I was going to win that one either.

Hat Tip: He didn’t win the Texas senate race. He lost to Ted Cruz. The race was not that close.

I & I Editorial Board, John Merline:

“…Lake Erie and Lake Superior — two of the five that make up the Great Lakes — broke records for water levels this May. Lakes Michigan and Huron could follow suit.

Naturally, climate change is getting the blame. “We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” says Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist.

But just a few years ago, climate scientists were insisting that a warming climate would cause water levels to decline.

In 2008, Science Daily reported on a study that attributed the decline in Great Lakes water levels to global warming. The researchers who conducted the study said that the drop “raised concern because the declines are consistent with many climate change predictions.”

In 2009, Columbia University’s Earth Institute informed us that “most climate models suggest that we may see declines in lake levels over the next 100 years; one suggests that we may see declines of up to 8.2 feet.”

In 2011, the Union of Concern Scientists said that “scientists expect water levels in the Great Lakes to drop in both summer and winter, with the greatest declines occurring in Lakes Huron and Michigan.”

In 2013, the Natural Resources Defense Council said that “it’s no secret that, partially due to climate change, the water levels in the Great Lakes are getting very low.”

That same year, Think Progress reported that “Several different climate models for the Great Lakes region all predict that lake levels will decline over the next century.”

Since the Great Lakes account for 21% of the world’s surface fresh water, these stories were all wrapped in doom-and-gloom scenarios about the impact on drinking water, shipping, recreation, and so on.

The very next year, however, water levels started rising.

So what are scientists saying now? Simple. They’re now claiming that the fall and rise of Great Lakes’ water levels are due to climate change.

“Climate change is driving rapid shifts between high and low water levels on the Great Lakes,” is the new “consensus.” 

The truth, of course, is that water levels in the Great Lakes vary over time. And, as a matter of fact, they varied far more in the past than they do now. A U.S. Geological Survey notes that “prehistoric levels exceed modern-day fluctuations.”

It says that “Prehistoric variations in lake levels have exceeded by as much as a factor of 2 (that is, more than 3 meters) the 1.6-meter fluctuation that spanned the 1964 low level and the 1985-87 high level.”

And, as anyone who’s ever lived near the Great Lakes knows, the lakes themselves were formed in the wake a massive change in the earth’s climate — when the glaciers receded at the end of the Ice Age roughly 14,000 years ago.

So if the lakes’ huge fluctuations in the past weren’t caused by mankind’s burning fossil fuels, why are scientists so convinced that the far more minor changes happening today are?

The reason is simple. Climate scientists can blame anything they want on global warming. The climate models are imprecise enough that no matter what is happening they can point to it as proof that man-made climate change is happening. Too much rain, too little rain, bitterly cold winters, mild winters, more snow, less snow, rising water levels, falling water levels — they can attribute “climate change” as a cause of it all.

But if nothing can disprove a theory, and every event, no matter how contradictory, is proof that the theory is valid, is that really science? Sounds more like a religion to us…”

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Rick Mills:

“…It’s a little known fact that the United States was once the largest producer of rare earths in the world, at the Mountain Pass Mine in California.

Little happened at Mountain Pass during the 1950s except for the odd bit of research by the defense and scientific communities, but that all changed in the 1960s with the color TV. The discovery of europium, which emits a brilliant red light when bombarded with electrons, ushered in the age of technicolor, and Mountain Pass, which had abundant europium, flourished. Rare earths mined there were also used in medical scanners, lasers, fluorescent lights and microchips.

In 1980, a mis-classification of rare earths had catastrophic consequences for US rare earth mining. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the International Regulatory Agency placed rare earth mining under the same regulations as mining thorium – a radioactive element that drops out when processing heavy rare earth minerals like monazite. As we have written, the nuclear industry and its future would look a whole lot different if thorium rather than uranium was pursued as the main nuclear fuel. But that’s a different story.

New, onerous regulations on thorium made the mining and refining of thorium-bearing rare earth elements risky. Over the next two decades, the US rare earth mining industry collapsed. Defense One notes that, even though American mining companies extract enough rare earth ore, through mining other metals, to meet 85% of global demand, it is discarded because the regulations make it uneconomic to mine. How’s that for irony…”

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