The Case for Israel Has to Be Made Over and Over (Because of the Left's Incessant Demonization)

From Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, for Prager University:

San Diego Hash Oil Labs

Jennifer Delacruz reports, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Black Woman Facing Murder Charge for Pushing Elderly Man Off Las Vegas Bus (VIDEO)

The old guy asked her to be more respectful, and the black bitch murdered him, pushed him right off the bus. Damn!

At ABC News:

A 74-year-old man who was pushed off a Las Vegas bus -- allegedly by a woman he had told to "be nicer" -- has died from injuries he suffered when he hit the sidewalk, and the 25-year-old suspect has been charged with his murder. https://t.co/2K8HTD5fnx pic.twitter.com/gN0y9qMtVx

— ABC News (@ABC) May 16, 2019

Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down

The movie's been at Showtime on rotation this month, plus I watched it on Netflix as well.

So I decided to finally pick up and read the copy I bought back in 2002 after seeing the movie in theaters. It's gripping. I haven't put it down this week.

At Amazon, Mark Bowden, Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War.

Amazing Woman

Nude, she's taking care of herself in bed.

Plus, gif featuring a hot busty blonde.

Battleground Pennsylvania

At the Los Angeles Times, "Trump and Biden, potential 2020 rivals, both head to Pennsylvania, a key battleground":

President Trump and @JoeBiden have twin obsessions: with each other and with the state of Pennsylvania. w @elistokols https://t.co/5rEpeD26am

— Janet Hook (@hookjan) May 17, 2019

President Trump and Joe Biden have twin obsessions: with each other and with the state of Pennsylvania.

Like iron filings to a magnet, both will be drawn in the coming days to Pennsylvania, which was key to Trump’s victory in 2016 and would be central to almost any scenario for a Democratic victory in the 2020 presidential campaign.

Their trips — Biden on Saturday, Trump on Monday — elevate an emerging rivalry that has them locked in a wrestler’s grip long before Democrats even choose a nominee.

Trump, fearing Biden poses the most serious threat in industrial states like Pennsylvania, is trying to diminish him with a barrage of tweets and derisive comments. Biden welcomes the attention and sees it as validating his central argument to Democratic voters: that he’s the candidate best equipped to beat Trump.

Together they are paying little attention to the 22 other Democrats running for the party’s presidential nomination, acting as if the starting gun has already been fired on the general election.

Their Pennsylvania itineraries are emblematic of their competing political strategies. Trump, aiming to energize the white working-class voters who brought him to victory, plans to hold a rally in rural Lycoming County in the central part of the state, which went for Trump by nearly 45 percentage points in 2016.

Biden, hoping to make up for his party’s 2016 shortfall among black and working-class voters, will hold his first large-scale 2020 campaign rally in Philadelphia, a bastion of black Democratic strength. Biden’s first campaign event was a union-heavy affair in Pittsburgh three weeks ago, when he threw down the glove before the president.

“If I’m going to be able to beat Donald Trump in 2020, it’s going to happen here,” he said.

Trump’s visit, during which he is slated to campaign for a GOP candidate in a special election who looks to be a shoo-in, comes at a perilous time politically. Public surveys show Biden leading the president in this crucial battleground. The latest Quinnipiac University poll in Pennsylvania found Biden out-polls Trump 53% to 42%, with especially wide margins among independent voters and women.

The Trump team’s own polling shows him trailing in the state.

That’s a far cry from his stunning 2016 victory in Pennsylvania, which, along with narrow wins in Wisconsin and Michigan, demolished Democrats’ “blue wall” of support across the industrial heartland. Not since 1988 had a Republican presidential nominee carried Pennsylvania or Michigan. Wisconsin hadn’t voted for a Republican nominee since 1984.

But Trump’s margin of victory in Pennsylvania was only about 44,000 votes out of about 6 million cast.

Ever since that upset, warning signs for the GOP have been flashing in Pennsylvania. In special elections in 2017, Democrats flipped some long-held GOP local offices, and Democrat Conor Lamb, a centrist, won a House seat in the heart of Trump country. The 2018 midterm election was a statewide blowout as Democrats won the U.S. Senate and gubernatorial races by double-digit margins.

Moving to get a grip on the situation, the Trump political team a few weeks ago traveled to Harrisburg, Pa., for a meeting with Republican National Committee and state GOP officials to address concerns over party infrastructure, organizational readiness and their string of losses, according to two officials with knowledge of the meeting.

The Trump campaign officials — including David Urban, who oversaw Trump’s 2016 operation in Pennsylvania, and Trump 2020 political directors Bill Stepien and Chris Carr — “came to make it clear that they’ll be running the show,” one attendee said.

Trump’s hope for holding on to the state depends heavily on galvanizing Trump voters who may not have turned out in 2018...

Still more.

Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming

Atkinson's a great historian.

Out this week, Rick Atkinson, The British Are Coming: The War for America, Lexington to Princeton, 1775-1777 (The Revolution Trilogy).

'Semi-Charmed Life'

From yesterday morning's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles, Third Eye Blind:

Let's Dance
David Bowie
6:51am

Fat Bottomed Girls
Queen
6:47am

Semi-Charmed Life
Third Eye Blind
6:42am

You Shook Me All Night Long
AC/DC
6:39am

Tainted Love
Soft Cell
6:35am

Come Out And Play
Offspring
6:24am

Something Just Like This
Coldplay / The Chainsmokers
6:20am

Limelight
Rush
6:15am

99 Luftballoons
Nena
6:12am

What's My Age Again
Blink 182
6:09am

Everybody Wants To Rule The World
Tears For Fears
6:05am

American Girl
Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers
5:54am

Don DeLillo, White Noise

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Don DeLillo, White Noise (Penguin Orange Collection).

'Under the Bridge'

From yesterday morning's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles, the Red Hot Chili Peppers:


The Chain
Fleetwood Mac
8:50am

Been Caught Stealing
Jane's Addiction
8:47am

Don't You Forget About Me
Simple Minds
8:42am

Jump
Van Halen
8:38am

867-5309 Jenny
Tommy Tutone
8:35am

Hey Ya!
Outkast
8:24am

Eyes Without a Face
Billy Idol
8:19am

Walk This Way
AEROSMITH
8:15am

Under The Bridge
Red Hot Chili Peppers
8:11am

Whip It
Devo
8:08am

Salvatore Babones, The New Authoritarianism

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Salvatore Babones, The New Authoritarianism: Trump, Populism, and the Tyranny of Experts.

'What I Like About You'

From Thursday morning's drive-time, the Romantics, "What I Like About You," at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles:

Livin' On A Prayer
Bon Jovi
7:03am

She Blinded Me With Science
Thomas Dolby
6:52am

My Hero
Foo Fighters
6:48am

What I Like About You
Romantics
6:45am

Open Arms
JOURNEY
6:42am

Beat It
Michael Jackson
6:37am

Vaseline
Stone Temple Pilots
6:35am

Surrender
Cheap Trick
6:31am

Girls On Film
Duran Duran
6:21am

Better Man
Pearl Jam
6:17am

Go Your Own Way
Fleetwood Mac
6:13am

Pride
U2
6:09am

Why God is Masculine

From the awesome, incredible Dennis Prager. The dude's a freakin' rabbi!

At Prager University:

Douglas E. Schoen, Collapse

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Douglas E. Schoen, Collapse: A World in Crisis and the Urgency of American Leadership.

Danielle Gersh's Tuesday Forecast

Here's the beautiful Ms. Danielle, for CBS News 2 Los Angeles:

'Drive'

From this morning's break-time, where I listen to the radio in my car in the parking lot and have a vape (which is prohibited on campus).

At 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles, Incubus, "Drive":

Modern Love
David Bowie
9:10am

Buddy Holly
Weezer
9:07am

Another Brick In The Wall
Pink Floyd
9:04am

Beat It
Michael Jackson
8:53am

Drive
INCUBUS
8:49am

Drive
Incubus
8:49am

Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
Clash
8:46am

Barracuda
Heart
8:41am

Enjoy The Silence
Depeche Mode
8:37am

Hitler's in the Charts Again

That's the name of the Exploited's hit song, here.

And, apparently, at the L.A. Times, "Fascism is on the minds of book buyers — and publishers are taking notice":

Gang: I've been thinking about, reading around on, and working on this story for months -- runs in LA Times on Sunday https://t.co/zAvTC8Rxgp

— Scott Timberg (@TheMisreadCity) May 3, 2019

Remember “The End of History?” Elizabeth Drummond, who spent the 1990s studying at Georgetown University, recalls Francis Fukuyama’s groundbreaking essay well, which announced "an unabashed victory of economic and political liberalism.” The Soviet Union had just collapsed in a peaceful devolution, Germany was reunified as Champagne popped alongside the crumbling Berlin Wall and democracy seemed to be inevitably settling across the globe like a gentle rain. Politicians in the U.S. talked about a smooth and comfortable “third way” between Left and Right.

“There was a lot of optimism,” Drummond remembered. The topic of her studies — European Fascism of the 1920s and 1930s — seemed distant in both time and place.

But a quarter-century later, things look a bit different. Around the world, democracy appears to be losing ground to authoritarian populism in places like Hungary, Poland and the Philippines. Neo-Fascist, anti-immigrant movements brew in much of Europe and the United States. American politics is polarized in a way it’s not been in a century. And whatever’s going on in Venezuela, Turkey, Russia and North Korea, it’s hard to describe them as democracies.

Today, the subject of Drummond’s research no longer feels like a black-and-white film from decades ago.

“When I was a grad student, I didn’t think the link between past and present would be this strong,” says Drummond, now a professor at Loyola Marymount University. “One of the challenges of teaching history is to make it relevant. But I’m not sure modern European historians ever wanted to be this relevant.”

One of the challenges of teaching history is to make it relevant. But I’m not sure modern European historians ever wanted to be this relevant.

Drummond is not alone in seeing these connections. College students, book buyers and newspaper columnists are taking a renewed interest in the bad old days of interwar authoritarianism, as well as books about threats to the present. Several scholars have even started a crowd-sourced website called The New Fascism Syllabus.

The last few years have not been great for democracy around the world. But they have been, for people who write about or teach the subject, good for business. As a book review from the Washington Post put it, “Fascism is back in fashion.”

Despite parallels like attacks on the press, racial scapegoating, demonization of opposition parties, or the constant sense of alarm dictators rely on, no credible observer says that Hungary’s Viktor Orban, the leaders of Brexit or Vladimir Putin are replays of Hitler or Mussolini.

But some in the literary world are taking more direct looks at authoritarian regimes of the past and present, while trying to imagine the future.

In the immediate aftermath of the election of President Donald Trump, a number of novels about authoritarian states — George Orwell’s “1984,” Sinclair Lewis’s 1935 book “It Can’t Happen Here,” Philip Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” in which the demagogue Charles Lindbergh defeats President Roosevelt – saw their profiles rise. Some even returned to the bestseller list. Readers continue to consume authoritarian fiction – British author John Lanchester has a new dystopian novel called “The Wall,” inspired by American insularity and the Brexit vote.

Other writers have been perceptive to the global political shifts. Recent books — Pankaj Mishra’s “Age of Anger,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt’s “How Democracies Die” — have become steady sellers and regular references for political commentators.

We never fall twice into the same abyss. But we always fall the same way, in a mixture of ridicule and dread.

Charles Hauther, head buyer for Los Feliz’s Skylight Books, says globally focused books like these sell better than anti-Trump tomes, and some old texts about authoritarianism are returning. “‘Anatomy of Fascism’ is back in style,” Hauther says of the Robert Paxton title from 15 years ago.

Some books — like Madeleine Albright’s ”Fascism: A Warning” from 2018, informed by her family’s flight from Nazi-occupied Central Europe — have a personal angle. Some aim for a mass audience, like 2017’s “On Tyranny,” by Yale historian Timothy Snyder. Others — “Artists Under Hitler: Collaboration and Survival in Nazi Germany,” by Claremont McKenna College historian Jonathan Petropoulos, or this year’s “Cultural Backlash: Trump, Brexit and Authoritarian Populism,” by political scientists Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart — are scholarly but also readable for a general public.

Authors are also searching for root causes, like Jonathan Weiler, a political scientist and YouTube star interested in the “authoritarian personality” and co-author (with Marc Hetherington) of “Prius or Pickup?” Even more broadly, London economist William Davies writes in the new “Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason” that these shifts are caused by that fact that truth and rationality itself are now under assault.

Ziblatt cites income inequality, the lack of civics education and the disappearing of public spaces as potentially increasing the erosion of democratic norms. “The main way democracies die used to be military coups,” says Ziblatt. “Now it’s elections.”

Teachings on totalitarianism

Students have been intrigued by Nazis and Fascism for decades, but their interest has surged alongside global changes taking place from Beijing to Brazil. Ziblatt offered a Harvard class on the subject last autumn: 150 students applied for 12 spaces. When he originally offered the course, in the wake of George W. Bush’s wars in the Middle East, he called it, “Is Democracy Possible Everywhere?” Now, after the failure of democratic nation-building in the region and the widespread eruption of authoritarianism, he jokingly refers to it as, “Is Democracy Possible Anywhere?”

Students are not only enrolling, they are making connections between what they study and what they read in the news. It was exactly those parallels that drove Eva Baudler, an LMU junior whose grandparents were German resistance fighters, to take Drummond’s course on Nazi Germany. The first day involved watching a short film about the neo-Nazi rally in Charlottesville, Va...

More.

Jennifer Delacruz's Fabulous Forecast

This was for yesterday, but look at this week's forecast.

Ms. Jennifer is da kine.

Democrat Enthusiasm Weakens Ahead of 2020

At NBC, "Democrats lose their enthusiasm advantage in latest NBC News/WSJ poll":

The D enthusiasm advantage was why the Ds did so well in the 2107/2018 special elections. It’s a big part of why they took the House in 2018. If the advantage is gone, it has huge implications for the 2020 race. https://t.co/HUdLQ4bysK

— Ari Fleischer (@AriFleischer) May 6, 2019

WASHINGTON — Democrats had two advantages that fueled their midterm victories in November 2018 — an edge in enthusiasm and success with independent voters.

Six months later, just one of those advantages remains.

In the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 75 percent of Republican registered voters say they have high interest in the 2020 presidential election — registering a “9” or “10” on a 10-point scale — versus 73 percent of Democratic voters who say the same thing.

That’s quite a change from the 2018 cycle, when Democrats held a double-digit lead on this question until the last two months before the election, when the GOP closed the gap but still trailed the Dems in enthusiasm.

It’s just one poll, but the numbers are a reminder that presidential elections are always different than midterm cycles.

And they should correct any Dem thinking that assumes — “Hey, we have Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the bag because we won there in 2018” — since GOP enthusiasm now is much higher.

Oh, one other thing: overall enthusiasm for 2020 is sky-high, with 69 percent of all voters expressing a high level of interest in the upcoming election.

That’s just 3 points shy of the 72 percent who said the same thing in October 2016.

And we are still more than 500 days away from the 2020 general election.

So, yeah, turnout in 2020 is going to be through the roof...

More.

OMG! No Way! We're Doomed! Civilization is Accelerating Extinction and Altering the Natural World at a Pace 'Unprecedented in Human History'

More doomsday hysteria from the climate cult.

At the New York Times, "Humans Are Speeding Extinction and Altering the Natural World at an ‘Unprecedented’ Pace":

WASHINGTON — Humans are transforming Earth’s natural landscapes so dramatically that as many as one million plant and animal species are now at risk of extinction, posing a dire threat to ecosystems that people all over the world depend on for their survival, a sweeping new United Nations assessment has concluded.

The 1,500-page report, compiled by hundreds of international experts and based on thousands of scientific studies, is the most exhaustive look yet at the decline in biodiversity across the globe and the dangers that creates for human civilization. A summary of its findings, which was approved by representatives from the United States and 131 other countries, was released Monday in Paris. The full report is set to be published this year.

Its conclusions are stark. In most major land habitats, from the savannas of Africa to the rain forests of South America, the average abundance of native plant and animal life has fallen by 20 percent or more, mainly over the past century. With the human population passing 7 billion, activities like farming, logging, poaching, fishing and mining are altering the natural world at a rate “unprecedented in human history.”

At the same time, a new threat has emerged: Global warming has become a major driver of wildlife decline, the assessment found, by shifting or shrinking the local climates that many mammals, birds, insects, fish and plants evolved to survive in. When combined with the other ways humans are damaging the environment, climate change is now pushing a growing number of species, such as the Bengal tiger, closer to extinction.

As a result, biodiversity loss is projected to accelerate through 2050, particularly in the tropics, unless countries drastically step up their conservation efforts.

A previous report by the group had estimated that, in the Americas, nature provides some $24 trillion of non-monetized benefits to humans each year. The Amazon rain forest absorbs immense quantities of carbon dioxide and helps slow the pace of global warming. Wetlands purify drinking water. Coral reefs sustain tourism and fisheries in the Caribbean. Exotic tropical plants form the basis of a variety of medicines.

But as these natural landscapes wither and become less biologically rich, the services they can provide to humans have been dwindling.

Humans are producing more food than ever, but land degradation is already harming agricultural productivity on 23 percent of the planet’s land area, the new report said. The decline of wild bees and other insects that help pollinate fruits and vegetables is putting up to $577 billion in annual crop production at risk. The loss of mangrove forests and coral reefs along coasts could expose up to 300 million people to increased risk of flooding.

The authors note that the devastation of nature has become so severe that piecemeal efforts to protect individual species or to set up wildlife refuges will no longer be sufficient. Instead, they call for “transformative changes” that include curbing wasteful consumption, slimming down agriculture’s environmental footprint and cracking down on illegal logging and fishing...

We're all gonna die!