Andrew Sullivan swerves back and forth between lucid analysis and crackpot nonsense. When he’s on, he’s on though, and this paragraph is very good.

Andrew Sullivan:

“…Our modern world tries extremely hard to protect us from the sort of existential moments experienced by Mill and Russell. Netflix, air-conditioning, sex apps, Alexa, kale, Pilates, Spotify, Twitter … they’re all designed to create a world in which we rarely get a second to confront ultimate meaning — until a tragedy occurs, a death happens, or a diagnosis strikes. Unlike any humans before us, we take those who are much closer to death than we are and sequester them in nursing homes, where they cannot remind us of our own fate in our daily lives. And if you pressed, say, the liberal elites to explain what they really believe in — and you have to look at what they do most fervently — you discover, in John Gray’s mordant view of Mill, that they do, in fact, have ‘an orthodoxy — the belief in improvement that is the unthinking faith of people who think they have no religion.’ . . . And so the young adherents of the Great Awokening exhibit the zeal of the Great Awakening. Like early modern Christians, they punish heresy by banishing sinners from society or coercing them to public demonstrations of shame, and provide an avenue for redemption in the form of a thorough public confession of sin. ‘Social justice’ theory requires the admission of white privilege in ways that are strikingly like the admission of original sin. A Christian is born again; an activist gets woke. To the belief in human progress unfolding through history — itself a remnant of Christian eschatology — it adds the Leninist twist of a cadre of heroes who jump-start the revolution…”

Original here

US ends its reliance on foreign oil for the first time in 75 years

The U.S. reduction comes from the switch to cleaner fuels made possible by fracking, which environmentalists opposed.

Jon Gabriel:

“…Nineteen nations “believe” in climate change. How are they backing up their statement of faith?

China was praised for signing on to the Paris Climate Agreement and in Argentina reaffirmed its commitment to controlling greenhouse gas emissions. Last year, however, China increased those emissions by 1.7 percent.

India, the fourth largest source for CO2, saw their emissions grow by 4.6 percent in 2017. Luckily for them, they too were praised for signing that “nonbinding communiqué.”

Overall, the European Union raised their CO2 output by 1.5 percent.

France, home of the Paris Agreement, is leading the diplomatic effort to save the planet. They increased their greenhouse gas emissions by 3.6 percent. . . .

If the nations paying lip service to climate change aren’t meeting their goals, imagine how poorly the oil-drilling, coal-mining Americans must be doing. President Donald Trump was pilloried for withdrawing from the Paris Agreement and for being only G20 leader who refused to sign the climate change statement in Argentina.

From 2016 to 2017, U.S. greenhouse gas emissions decreased by 2.7 percent. Emissions from large power plants declined 4.5 percent since 2016, and nearly 20 percent since 2011. All without signing a piece of paper in Paris or Buenos Aires…”

Original here

As heavy smoke rolls out of the stricken USS West Virginia, a small boat rescues a crew member from the water after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, Dec. 7, 1941 during World War II. Two men can be seen on the superstructure, upper center. The mast of the USS Tennessee is beyond the burning West Virginia. (AP Photo)

“…A U.S. judge ordered the Justice and State departments Thursday to reopen an inquiry into whether Hillary Clinton used a private email server while secretary of state to deliberately evade public records laws, and to answer whether the agencies acted in bad faith by not telling a court for months that they had asked in mid-2014 for missing emails to be returned.

The order risks reopening partisan wounds that have barely healed since Clinton’s unsuccessful 2016 presidential bid, but in issuing the order Thursday, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act required it.

In a narrow but sharply worded 10-page opinion, Lamberth wrote that despite the government’s claimed presumption of transparency, “faced with one of the gravest modern offenses to government openness, [the Obama administration’s] State and Justice departments fell far short” of the law’s requirements in a lawsuit for documents.

Lamberth added that despite President Donald Trump’s repeated campaign attacks against Clinton for not making her emails public, “the current Justice Department made things worse,” by taking the position that agencies are not obliged to search for records not in the government’s possession when a FOIA request is made.

Lamberth wrote he took no pleasure in “questioning the intentions of the nation’s most august” Cabinet departments, but said it was necessary when their response “smacks of outrageous misconduct.”…”

Original here

Professor: Virgin Mary Didn’t Give Consent.

“…The virgin birth story is about an all-knowing, all-powerful deity impregnating a human teen. There is no definition of consent that would include that scenario…”

From: Glenn Reynolds

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Thinks Stopping Climate Change Will End Racism

“The future is female.”

“…It’s a favorite slogan of the identity left that has now gone mainstream. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand tweeted it on Wednesday, adding that the future is also “intersectional” and “powered by our belief in one another.”

But if the future is female, what happens to our boys? And what message are we sending our present-day girls?

Gillibrand is one of about 30 Democrats considering running for president in 2020, and the tweet suggests she’s seizing some strategic left-wing ground (in a primary field crowded with lefties) by appealing to the Dems’ identity-obsessed base…”

Original here

The Price of a Cup of Coffee in Venezuela Is Up 285,614% in a Year

Conrad Black:

“…Conditions in Germany are just as worrisome.

Chancellor Angela Merkel and her chief coalition partner, both leaders of shrinking parties, are now clinging like drowning people to each other but sinking together. The opposition is fragmented between the reasonable but limited pro-enterprise Free Democrats, the very eccentric and militant Greens (who have already pushed Merkel to roll back nuclear power and make Germany dependent on Russian natural gas), the Alternative party which is moving steadily farther right and may actually entertain some of the views falsely imputed to Donald Trump, and the Link—the shriveled and embittered detritus of the old East German Communists. No easily visible successor to Merkel in the grand coalition looks adequate to reverse trends and no combination of the opposition parties looks remotely capable of governing. An ungovernable Germany is a historic menace.

Germany and France have both shaken the world before. Britain and France have on occasion inspired it. All three could do either now. The United States has saved Europe before, too.

It would greatly improve the quality of political conversation in Washington, in this week when it says farewell to a man who was a pillar of service to the nation in war and peace, nearly 45 years from combat hero to commander-in-chief, to set aside Muelleresque intrigue and cable news inanities, and recognize the condition of our esteemed allies.

The G20 meetings over the weekend in Buenos Aires demonstrated what we already knew: Trump and Xi will work it out. Putin is a scoundrel and a gadfly, and there are strong regional players, especially Japan and India. But the stability of the world requires that Western Europe rediscover its talent for self-government, which it spent centuries trying to impart to others…”

https://amgreatness.com/2018/12/05/the-west-needs-to-rediscover-a-talent-for-self-government/

Wasting taxpayer money edition

Feds Spend $230,769 to Increase Diversity of Veterinarians

“…It wasn’t just a “Blue Wave” that swept over California on Nov. 6, according to former GOP state Assembly leader Kristin Olsen. She said it was more like a “Blue Tsunami.” Now, some California Republicans are afraid the only thing that can save their party is the extinction of the state GOP.

“The California Republican Party isn’t salvageable at this time,” Olsen wrote. “The Grand Old Party is dead.”

California Democrats, holding at least 60 out of 80 Assembly seats after the Nov. 6 election, will have a historic supermajority in 2019. Only eight of the 53 California U.S. House seats will be held by the GOP. In statewide races, no Republican got better than 40 percent of the November vote.

So, Democrats go into next year with the largest caucus since California’s legislature went full-time in 1966. “When the nation looks toward California, it will look like the sun is rising in the west. That’s our future, shining bright,” Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon (D) said in a statement.

But, the San Diego Tribune editorial board noted, “the bad news (for Republicans) doesn’t end there.”

“Republicans used to be able to count on anti-tax sentiment among state voters. But a measure to repeal gas tax hikes went down in flames this month,” the Tribuneeditorial board wrote. “Supporters can blame misleading ballot language if they want, but voters’ recent support of tax hikes is also telling.”

How could this be? Life in California is far from perfect. Californians are coping with a housing crisis. More than 130,000 California residents were homeless in September, according to the Sacramento Bee.

Californians also suffer under the yoke of the highest rate of poverty in the U.S. According to the California Poverty Measure, more than 19 percent of Californians, close to 7.4 million people, “lacked enough resources to meet basic needs in 2016.”

U.S. News & World Report in March ranked California’s quality of life as absolutely the worst in the U.S. The Best States ranking graded the 50 states on having a healthy environment and a sense of community.

But, paradoxically, San Diego Tribune editorialists said voters are not blaming the party in power, Democrats, for anything that’s gone wrong.

“Voters seem to endorse Democratic values so strongly that they don’t sweat the details about everyone’s lives improving,” the Tribune wrote…”

https://pjmedia.com/election/california-gop-is-it-too-late-to-save-this-elephant-from-extinction/

THEY LOST THE HOUSE BY DOING NOTHING. THE SENATE CONFIRMED JUDGES, BUT THE HOUSE GOP LEADERSHIP WAFFLED AND FAILED TO DELIVER WHAT PRESIDENT TRUMP PROMISED ON IMMIGRATION AND HEALTHCARE

“…Goodlatte’s statement matches the June statement by Rep. Jim Jordan, who said: ‘If our leadership had put the same whip effort behind that immigration legislation, Chairman Goodlatte’s legislation, it would have passed.’ . . . Retiring House Speaker Paul Ryan made the decision to create the rival bill that blocked Goodlatte’s bill…”

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2018/12/05/goodlatte-house-leadership-blocked-trump-backed-immigration-reform/

The insanity that passes for identity politics on the left

“…The plan was straightforward: After years of being challenged by President Trump and others about a decades-old claim of Native American ancestry, Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts would take a DNA test to prove her stated family origins in the Cherokee and Delaware tribes. But nearly two months after Ms. Warren released the test results and drew hostile reactions from prominent tribal leaders, the lingering cloud over her likely presidential campaign has only darkened. Conservatives have continued to ridicule her. More worrisome to supporters of Ms. Warren’s presidential ambitions, she has yet to allay criticism from grass-roots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr. Trump’s hands…”

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-dna-test-2020.html