Daily Digest |  |
- Regarding JFK
- The Green Fantasy Is a Nightmare
- The Blockbuster Book of 2021
- Twitter has banned Trump, but permits celebration of attacks on Israel
- Aggravating Chauvin’s sentence
| Posted: 12 May 2021 05:04 PM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) Yesterday, Steve wrote about how the left has turned on John Kennedy. To me, the wonder is that it didn’t turn on him years ago. Kennedy’s presidency might have been liberal as that term was understood at the time, but it wasn’t “progressive.” In fact, today it might reasonably be considered conservative. Kennedy gave Americans a big tax cut on the theory that this would stimulate the economy. It did. Kennedy proposed sweeping civil rights legislation based on the idea that individuals shouldn’t be discriminated against on the basis of race. Today, conservatives uphold this view. The left believes that “equity” requires discrimination against Whites. Kennedy was stridently anti-Communist. He authorized an invasion of Cuba. He called for a substantial buildup of America’s military (claiming falsely that we had fallen behind the Soviet Union in terms of missiles). There is nothing for the contemporary left to like about any of this. Regarding women, it’s not clear to me how the left should view Kennedy. The writer Steve quoted says that “Kennedy treated an unending series of other women as disposable receptacles for his lust.” Should the left hold this against him? As far as I know, Kennedy never sexually harassed or assaulted anyone. What the quotation above really means is that Kennedy enjoyed casual sex. Is this problematic for the left in the post-sexual revolution, hook-up age? Apparently so at least in certain precincts. For some, feminism has taken a puritanical turn. If Kennedy’s sex life was truly problematic, that’s due to its recklessness. If, as president, Kennedy had an affair with Judith Exner, who was connected to the mob, that was reckless. If, as president, Kennedy had an affair with an East German spy, that was beyond reckless. However, I don’t know that it has been established that the woman in question, Ellen Rometsch, was either a spy or Kennedy’s mistress. There’s no dispute that Kennedy had plenty of extra-marital sex. However, Kennedy is hardly unique among presidents in this regard. I doubt the left wants to toss him overboard for this. In my view, Warren Harding is the president most analogous to JFK. I made that case in some detail here. This is not to disparage Kennedy. Harding was a fairly good president during his limited time in office. So was JFK in my view, though I think Harding was probably better.     |
| The Green Fantasy Is a Nightmare Posted: 12 May 2021 03:21 PM PDT (John Hinderaker) California is cruising toward a 100% “green” energy future, or so the state’s leaders tell us. But how, exactly, will that objective be brought about? In March of this year, the responsible state agencies issued a plan to achieve 100% carbon dioxide-free electricity by 2045. That is an achievable goal if you use nuclear power. Unfortunately, California is trying to do it with wind and solar. Francis Menton weighs California’s plan in the balance and finds it wanting:
Of course, the intractable problem with wind and solar is that most of the time, they don’t generate any electricity. California’s solution to this problem is battery storage. But this is where elementary mathematics comes in:
Which will cost, including the new wind and solar facilities, a mere $6.4 billion more per year. But there is a problem with California’s arithmetic:
Not to keep you in suspense, the answer is something like $6.7 trillion, given that electricity would have to be stored for up to seven or eight months. California’s gross domestic product is less than half that amount. My colleague Isaac Orr carried out a similar calculation for just one state, Minnesota. Isaac found that to store enough electricity to meet Minnesota’s needs for one day would cost around $38.7 billion. He used a battery cost, $250 per kilowatt hour, that is in the same range that Francis used, based on pricing data from Tesla, which ostensibly will supply California’s batteries. Battery storage is prohibitively expensive, and if you think it is expensive now, just wait until the world’s supplies of lithium and cobalt are further depleted by governments’ voracious appetite for “green” energy. The idea that wind and solar power will ever fuel our power generation sector, let alone our entire economy, is ludicrous. But the amount of damage that will be done by pursuing that chimera will be incalculable.   |
| Posted: 12 May 2021 11:10 AM PDT (John Hinderaker) That is what Mollie Hemingway’s forthcoming Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections promises to be. The Federalist has a lengthy description of the book by Mollie herself. You should read it all. Here are some quotes:
Mollie says that she has interviewed many of the principals involved in the 2020 election, including President Trump, and her book will explore, among other things, “what went wrong during the electoral challenges in battleground states, and who was responsible for them.” She concludes with a prediction that no doubt will come true:
You can preorder Rigged here. Publication date is September 21.   |
| Twitter has banned Trump, but permits celebration of attacks on Israel Posted: 12 May 2021 08:37 AM PDT (Paul Mirengoff) Donald Trump, the former president of the Untied States and the current de facto leader of the Republican Party, is barred from Twitter. The ban is permanent. Twitter says that even if Trump were to run for president again, he could not use its platform. The ban is for “inciting violence.” I think it’s true that Trump’s words inspired violence on January 6. However, Trump did not advocate violence, nor did he celebrate it. Hamas, by contrast, is engaging in violence and celebrating it on Twitter. Here is what Hamas’ leader posted:
Then, there’s Iran’s leader, Iran's Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. He funds the violence against Israel and backs it on Twitter with these words:
Nor is this the only time the Ayatollah has urged Palestinians to attack Israel. Philip Klein provides a sampling. Will Twitter ban Khamenei and Hamas for inciting and supporting violence on its platform? I doubt it, given Twitter’s tolerance of the Ayatollah’s past writings and what I take to be its sympathies and biases. But we’ll see.   |
| Aggravating Chauvin’s sentence Posted: 12 May 2021 08:02 AM PDT (Scott Johnson) Having been convicted of second-degree murder at trial for the death of George Floyd, Derek Chauvin is subject to a presumptive sentence of 12 and 1/2 years under the Minnesota Sentencing Guidelines. Prosecutors moved for an aggravated sentence in the case based on five so-called Blakley factors and applicable Minnesota law. Sentencing is scheduled for June 25. Chauvin chose to submit the required findings of fact to Judge Cahill in place of, or rather than, the jury. The court has just posted Judge Cahill’s findings here. In his findings Judge Cahill adopts four of the five grounds urged by the prosecutors for aggravation of Chauvin’s sentence. He makes each of his four findings beyond a reasonable doubt. He rejects the fifth proposed finding. The findings are based on the evidence at trial, the facts the jury must have found to convict Chauvin, and on the verdict itself. By the time we reach finding 4 — “Defendant committed the crime as a group [sic] with the active participation of three other persons” — they take on an absurd quality. All public filings in the case are accessible via the court page dedicated to the case here. The prosecutors’ memorandum supporting aggravation of the sentence is posted here. Chauvin’s memorandum in opposition is posted here. Judge Cahill adopted the the procedure to resolve the issue of aggravation in his January 26 order posted here. As I read paragraph 2 of the order, Judge Cahill has yet to determine whether his findings constitute “substantial and compelling circumstances justifying an aggravated durational departure from the presumptive sentence…” We will accordingly hear the rest of the story when he sentences Chauvin at the June 25 hearing, but the suspense on this point cannot be great.   |
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