Wednesday Potpourri

First, you will be happy to hear that our Pentagon officials have found their enemy-- pronouns. They have declared war on singular gendered pronouns. Now, it’s no longer he or she; it’s they and them. 

Note the use of the illiterate use of “themself” in the following instruction:

Superior Meritorious Service (e.g., PCS and Retirement awards): (Rank) First M. Last, Jr., United States (Military Service), distinguished themself by superior meritorious service in a position of significant responsibility as (position and duty assignment), from (month year) to (month year).

The revised rules, found in Department of Defense Manual 1348.33, Volume 4, will apply to the most prestigious joint awards given by the Department of Defense, including the Defense Distinguished Service Medal, the Defense Superior Service Medal, the Defense Meritorious Service Medal, the Joint Service Commendation Medal, the Joint Service Achievement Medal, and the Joint Meritorious Unit Award.

Second, we believe that diversity is our strength and that we are morally superior to everyone else. To which Lawrence Summers wrote on Twitter:

I do think in many ways the most profound question for American foreign policy, and it’s one that very much implicates economic policy, is that as right and just as we feel we are, there are just a large number of countries that are not aligned with us or that are only weakly aligned with us. I heard a comment from somebody in a developing country who said, “Look, I like your values better than I like China’s. But the truth is, when we’re engaged with the Chinese, we get an airport. And when we’re engaged with you guys, we get a lecture.”

Third, the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that had been dedicated to the fight against anti-Semitism, has become completely woke. It has joined other organizations, like the NAACP, in promoting censorship on Twitter. What happened to its commitment to free speech? Among those the ADL wants to censor, Libs of Tiktok, an account run by a Jewish woman from Brooklyn. 

The account has specialized in exposing, via retweets, the depravity of trans activists. You would think that the ADL would not want to associate itself with those who are trying to shut down the account.

Her name- Chaya Raichik. Her response, from Human Events:

The ADL targeted me, a young conservative Jewish woman, for speaking out against wokeness, far-left indoctrination of children, and the medical mutilation of minors under the guise of gender ideology.

Now, Elon Musk is going to sue the ADL:

The ADL are just massive bullies who have way too much power. They are not about anti-defamation. They are only anti defamation as long as you go along with their far-left viewpoints. If you disagree with them, they will defame you. So in other words, they really aren’t anti defamation at all and now Elon is going to expose them like never before.

Fourth, some of us recall the case of one Chris McCandless, a bright-eyed graduate of Emory University who applied the lessons he learned in college by going off the grid in Alaska. As you know, thanks to Jon Kraukauer, he did not survive his return to nature.

Now, another group tried the same thing in Colorado, with the same results. Alexandra Petri reported:

A 14-year-old boy who was living off the grid with his mother and his aunt in the Colorado wilderness was down to 40 pounds when he died, according to autopsy reports.

The boy, his mother Rebecca Vance, 42, and his aunt Christine Vance, 41, all died of malnutrition and hypothermia, and the deaths were accidental, the autopsies found.

Fifth, speaking of wind power and the war against the weather, the outlook for renewable energy seems less rosy:

Orsted, the Danish renewable energy giant, has warned that it may write off as much as $2.12 billion because of supply chain problems and other issues at three giant offshore wind installations off the United States’ East Coast.

The announcement from the company, which has been a global pioneer in offshore wind energy, is the latest sign of trouble in an industry expected to supply an increasingly large portion of clean energy to meet the climate-change goals of many countries, including the United States.

“This will not be the last that we will see this year,” said Soeren Lassen, the head of offshore wind at Wood Mackenzie, a consulting firm.

Wind turbine manufacturers like Siemens and General Electric have reported huge losses for the first half of this year, almost $5 billion for the former and $1 billion for the latter. 

Among other problems, turbine quality control has suffered, forcing manufacturers such as Siemens and Vestas to incur costly warranty repairs. 

Sixth, as for the current hysteria about the climate emergency, Patrick Moore, one of the founders of Greenpeace, wrote this:

It’s time to put the ridiculous assertion that 1.5C of warming will cause a “climate emergency”. During the Eocene Thermal Maximum 50M yrs ago the seas were 16C warmer, mainly towards the poles. The ancestors of all life today lived through that. 1.5 C is a hoax.

Seventh, when the climate change hysterics told Gov. Ron DeSantis that the recent hurricane was a clear sign that the climate was getting worse, he replied:

“If you look, there was a storm that went on this almost exact track in 1896, and it had 125 mph winds just like this one,” DeSantis said at a press conference in Yankeetown, Fla., when asked about the role of climate change in the deadly ‘cane that just pelted his state.

“If you look at the state of Florida, the most powerful hurricane we’ve ever had … the anniversary is now — it’s the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935,” the GOP presidential hopeful said. “It had 185 mph sustained winds.

“So, I think sometimes people need to take a breath and get a little bit of perspective here,” added DeSantis, who has long been skeptical about what he describes as “climate change alarmism.”

It’s reassuring to see a politician who knows what he is talking about and who can articulate cogent points.

Eighth, Joel Kotkin opines about environmental agitprop, in Spiked Online:

Even the heatwave panic is dubious. The oft-repeated claim that this summer was ‘the hottest’ in human history is another long-favoured agitprop myth. For one thing, reliable global measurements did not exist prior to satellites and certainly cannot tell us what happened in the distant past. We may well have seen hotter temperatures before, for example, during the Dust Bowl era. The annual heat index has measured plenty more heat-intense periods during the 1930s than today.

Ninth, speaking of the labor market and of replacement workers, apparently, native born Americans have been losing their jobs-- to migrants. Is this Bidenomics?

The Daily Mail reported the story:

Staggering figures reveal 1.2MILLION US-born workers lost their jobs last month - replaced by 688,000 foreign-born staff - as Joe Biden allows migrants to flood across the border.

Tenth, as Goldman Sachs reduces the likelihood to recession to 15%, market strategist David Rosenberg is less optimisti:

Temp agency jobs down in each of the past 7 months by a cumulative -119k. We’ve never seen this before without the economy heading into recession. After all, when the headhunters are chopping off their own heads, what does that mean for the rest of us?

Eleventh, last week, on August 31, I wrote that, considering all the bad economic news coming out of China, it might be time to invest in the Middle Kingdom. It was what market players call a contrarian play.

Now, on cue, James Mackintosh writes this in the Wall Street Journal. 

Given the endless bad news about China’s economy, the contrarian in me wants to be bullish.

It’s true that debt, housing, local government and consumer demand are all a mess, and dire demographics raise the prospect of a Japanese-style economic disaster. But there are three things working in China’s favor as an investment destination: Stocks rarely have been this cheap compared with the U.S.; its entire weight in a global benchmark is smaller than Apple’s; and a weaker dollar might help.  

The basic case is that China is cheap. MSCI China, which includes Hong Kong stocks, trades at just 10.8 times the next 12 months’ earnings, about half the 20 times earnings of both the S&P 500 and MSCI USA. Even that hides the cheapness of much of the market, as Tencent Holdings  makes up more than 12% of the index, ad trades at 17.5 times forward earnings.

Readers of this blog and my Substack were ahead of the curve. 

Twelfth, Michael J. Petrilli analyzes the current state of education in America, for the New York Times.

The bad news about U.S. schools just keeps coming. We already knew from federal studies that students lost significant ground during the Covid pandemic and its related school shutdowns. What’s alarming about the latest research, published in July by the research organization NWEA, is that American children continued backsliding over the most recent school year, making less progress in reading and math than their counterparts before the pandemic. 

Thirteenth, as a coda to yesterday’s post about the prospects for American empire, given the newly expanded BRICS, we learn that the latter group now controls-- 42% of the world’s oil supply; 72% percent of rare earth minerals, with three of the five nations with the largest reserves; 75% of the world’s manganese; 50% of global graphite; 28% of nickel.

Of course, we are all optimistic about America’s future, but still….

Thirteenth, on the therapy front. Don’t think that the Biden State Department is not cool:

State Department employees were so distressed by President Joe Biden’s botched 2021 withdrawal from Afghanistan that the deputy secretary of state, Wendy Sherman, found diplomats working on the evacuation in tears. At Foggy Bottom, leadership sought to ease their pain—by bringing in a therapy dog, according to a new book.

Of course, that’s the same Wendy Sherman who helped negotiate Bill Clinton’s sellout to North Korea and who was also instrumental in the Obama administration’s Iran nuclear deal. Apparently, she has now found her level of competence.

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