Jordan Peterson: 'Post-Modernists' Are Teaching Your Kids

A great new video, from Prager University:

'Operation Finale' Trailer (VIDEO)

Looks like a very high caliber (MGM) production, including Ben Kingsley starring as Adolf Eichman.

From the promotional blurb:

Mossad agent Peter Malkin embarks on a covert mission to Argentina in 1960 to track down Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi officer who masterminded the transportation logistics that brought millions of innocent Jews to their deaths in concentration camps.

'Rapture'

Heard on the way in to my office (to finish posting semester grades) during drive-time, at Jack F.M. 93.1.

Blondie "Rapture":

Brown Eyed Girl
Van Morrison
10:24am

All Apologies
Nirvana
10:20am

Rapture
Blondie
10:15am

Rock 'N Me
The Steve Miller Band
10:12am

Clocks
Coldplay
10:07am

Don't Stop Believin'
Journey
10:03am

The Love Cats
The Cure
9:59am

(Oh) Pretty Woman
Van Halen
9:49am

Today
Smashing Pumpkins
9:45am

One Love/People Get Ready
Bob Marley
9:43am

Set Fire To The Rain
Adele
9:34am

American Girl
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
9:22am

Whip It
Devo
9:19am

Better Man
Pearl Jam
9:15am

You Make Lovin' Fun
Fleetwood Mac
9:11am

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BONUS: Bradley Campbell and Jason Manning, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars.

Jennifer Delacruz Summer Sunshine Weather

It's not officially summer until June 21st, but it sure does feel like it already. We've had temperatures in the mid-80s in the O.C. the last few days, and folks are out walking and enjoying their time off, gulping down some cold slushies while out strolling with friends.

I love summer!

Here's the lovely Ms. Jennifer, for ABC News 10 San Diego:

Charles Krauthammer's 'Unipolar Moment'

I had been reading Charles Krauthammer's column's back in the 1980s, when he was a columnist for Time Magazine. So, I was familiar with him by the time he published a path-breaking essay in 1990 at Foreign Affairs, "The Unipolar Moment":

I'm not sure I've ever agreed with anything Charles Krauthammer ever wrote (there must surely have been something) but I always admired his confidence and his clarity of thought and expression. This is very sad news. https://t.co/xynlcHclwu

— David Capie (@davidcapie) June 9, 2018

Indeed... but his 1990 Unipolar Moment is a good piece. "In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era." https://t.co/Gde7pGlFwm

— Charles Labrecque (@Charles2L) June 9, 2018

Ever since it became clear that an exhausted Soviet Union was calling off the Cold War, the quest has been on for a new American role in the world. Roles, however, are not invented in the abstract; they are a response to a perceived world structure. Accordingly, thinking about post-Cold War American foreign policy has been framed by several conventionally accepted assumptions about the shape of the post-Cold War environment.

First, it has been assumed that the old bipolar world would beget a multipolar world with power dispersed to new centers in Japan, Germany (and/or "Europe"), China and a diminished Soviet Union/Russia. Second, that the domestic American consensus for an internationalist foreign policy, a consensus radically weakened by the experience in Vietnam, would substantially be restored now that policies and debates inspired by "an inordinate fear of communism" could be safely retired. Third, that in the new post-Soviet strategic environment the threat of war would be dramatically diminished.

All three of these assumptions are mistaken. The immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States, attended by its Western allies. Second, the internationalist consensus is under renewed assault. The assault this time comes not only from the usual pockets of post-Vietnam liberal isolationism (e.g., the churches) but from a resurgence of 1930s-style conservative isolationism. And third, the emergence of a new strategic environment, marked by the rise of small aggressive states armed with weapons of mass destruction and possessing the means to deliver them (what might be called Weapon States), makes the coming decades a time of heightened, not diminished, threat of war.

II

The most striking feature of the post-Cold War world is its unipolarity. No doubt, multipolarity will come in time. In perhaps another generation or so there will be great powers coequal with the United States, and the world will, in structure, resemble the pre-World War I era. But we are not there yet, nor will we be for decades. Now is the unipolar moment.

There is today no lack of second-rank powers. Germany and Japan are economic dynamos. Britain and France can deploy diplomatic and to some extent military assets. The Soviet Union possesses several elements of power-military, diplomatic and political-but all are in rapid decline. There is but one first-rate power and no prospect in the immediate future of any power to rival it.

Only a few months ago it was conventional wisdom that the new rivals, the great pillars of the new multipolar world, would be Japan and Germany (and/or Europe). How quickly a myth can explode. The notion that economic power inevitably translates into geopolitical influence is a materialist illusion. Economic power is a necessary condition for great power status. But it certainly is not sufficient, as has been made clear by the recent behavior of Germany and Japan, which have generally hidden under the table since the first shots rang out in Kuwait. And while a unified Europe may sometime in the next century act as a single power, its initial disarray and disjointed national responses to the crisis in the Persian Gulf again illustrate that "Europe" does not yet qualify even as a player on the world stage.

Which leaves us with the true geopolitical structure of the post-Cold War world, brought sharply into focus by the gulf crisis: a single pole of world power that consists of the United States at the apex of the industrial West. Perhaps it is more accurate to say the United States and behind it the West, because where the United States does not tread, the alliance does not follow. That was true for the reflagging of Kuwaiti vessels in 1987. It has been all the more true of the world's subsequent response to the invasion of Kuwait.

American preeminence is based on the fact that it is the only country with the military, diplomatic, political and economic assets to be a decisive player in any conflict in whatever part of the world it chooses to involve itself. In the Persian Gulf, for example, it was the United States, acting unilaterally and with extraordinary speed, that in August 1990 prevented Iraq from taking effective control of the entire Arabian Peninsula.

Iraq, having inadvertently revealed the unipolar structure of today's world, cannot stop complaining about it. It looks at allied and Soviet support for American action in the gulf and speaks of a conspiracy of North against South. Although it is perverse for Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein to claim to represent the South, his analysis does contain some truth. The unipolar moment means that with the close of the century's three great Northern civil wars (World War I, World War II and the Cold War) an ideologically pacified North seeks security and order by aligning its foreign policy behind that of the United States. That is what is taking shape now in the Persian Gulf. And for the near future, it is the shape of things to come.

The Iraqis are equally acute in demystifying the much celebrated multilateralism of this new world order. They charge that the entire multilateral apparatus (United Nations resolutions, Arab troops, European Community pronouncements, and so on) established in the gulf by the United States is but a transparent cover for what is essentially an American challenge to Iraqi regional hegemony.

But of course. There is much pious talk about a new multilateral world and the promise of the United Nations as guarantor of a new post-Cold War order. But this is to mistake cause and effect, the United States and the United Nations...

RTWT.

Anthony Bourdain Heartbroken After Split from Asia Argento?

I know, from having my heart broken too many times, if there's one sure thing to drive a man over the cliff it's the rejection of a beautiful woman. And Bourdain had problems before. He'd been a heroin addict at one point.

The Other McCain tweeted the other day:

Bourdain had a history of serious drug abuse. He was divorced twice, and had just been dumped by his girlfriend. Stop pretending that his suicide was mysterious, caused by some "chemical imbalance." That's bullshit.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) June 9, 2018

Why don't you mention that the reason Bourdain killed himself was because Asia Argento recently dumped him? https://t.co/rM1bxLBfCr

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) June 9, 2018

I wrote about my pal Tony https://t.co/4STkQsUxVV

— your friend Helen (@hels) June 8, 2018

Also at TMZ:

ANTHONY BOURDAIN
EVERYTHING SEEMED GOOD WITH GF
... Until This Week https://t.co/nJQ1UQvHHl

— ☮️ 🕊 🌎 tmarie (@Syr829) June 9, 2018

Here's where things get murky. We know Anthony was shooting his show in France this week -- he'd been there for at least 4 days. However, Asia was back in Rome, strolling around with a French reporter named Hugo Clément. There were photos of them holding hands and hugging, but the Italian photographer who shot the pics pulled them off the market on the heels of Anthony's death.

It's unclear if Anthony and Asia had broken up. If they did, there was no public announcement. Their last public appearance together was at an event was back in April in NYC.

Amber Heard in Thin White Shirt

At Taxi Driver, "Amber Heard Breasts in Really Thin White Shirt."

Kate Upton, Alexis Ren in Sexy Aruba (VIDEO)

Nice:

White House Economic Adviser Peter Navarro Says 'There's a Special Place in Hell' for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (VIDEO)

I love this! At LAT, "White House officials accuse Canadian leader of 'stab in the back,' intensifying fight with U.S. ally":

White House officials lashed out at the leader of Canada, one of America’s closest allies, with extraordinary ferocity Sunday as they accused him of trying to make President Trump look weak heading into his summit with the leader of North Korea.

Two of Trump’s top economic advisors branded Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a backstabber, betrayer and double-crosser who pulled a “sophomoric political stunt” that threatened to embarrass Trump before his much-anticipated meeting with Kim Jong Un in Singapore on Tuesday.

“There’s a special place in hell for any foreign leader that engages in bad-faith diplomacy with President Donald J. Trump and then tries to stab him in the back on the way out the door,” White House trade advisor Peter Navarro said on “Fox News Sunday.”

The administration’s actions drew rebukes from Canada’s foreign minister as well as Democrats and some Republicans in Washington, including Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), who on Twitter called out his party members after Navarro’s comments: “Fellow Republicans, this is not who we are. This cannot be our party.”

The White House anger stemmed from Trudeau’s criticism of Trump’s trade policies at a news conference Saturday after the annual Group of 7 summit, which Trudeau hosted at a resort in Charlevoix, Quebec.

Trump left the summit early, and an administration official told reporters he had joined a lengthy communiqué from the world leaders crafted on Friday and Saturday.

That night, however, Trump abruptly announced via Twitter that he would not sign the joint statement, calling Trudeau “very dishonest & weak” for his trade criticism.

Navarro sharply criticized the G-7 final statement, referring to it as “that socialist communiqué.”

Larry Kudlow, the director of the White House National Economic Council, offered a somewhat different account, saying Sunday that Trump agreed with the language in the communiqué, which Kudlow helped draft. The statement outlined a shared commitment to work on a variety of economic, social, environmental and security issues.

And at the New York Times:

"All Canadians will support the prime minister in standing up to this bully," a former Canadian ambassador to the United States said. "Friends do not treat friends with such contempt." https://t.co/k5In4Fm6dC

— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 11, 2018

Charles Krauthammer Announces Cancer, Has Just Weeks Left to Live (VIDEO)

I mentioned Dr. K. at my post on Anthony Bourdain yesterday. I'm still trying to process this. If you've seen the outpouring on Twitter, you can't count the number of people who've said that Charles Krauthammer was literally the most important influence on their lives, morally, intellectually, spiritually, and in so many other ways. I don't know if he's the most important for me, but yesterday I literally couldn't think of someone more important, especially intellectually and ideologically. I just love listening to him. I'd watch Fox News' Special Report just to tune into the All-Star Panel, since Dr. K. was the staple of that segment. It was just so good. So good.

In any case, he's not dead yet, and it was a little sad seeing folks speak of Dr. K. in the past tense yesterday, so let's pray and hope for a miracle. Maybe he's still got some time left.

Here's a video from Fox News with the announcement, and I'll have more later:

Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential

The Los Angeles Times has a very affecting obituary, "Anthony Bourdain, globe-trotting chef who explored culture through cuisine, dies at 61 in apparent suicide."

The more I read about the guy the more I like him, and I already liked him.

And at Amazon, Anthony Bourdain, Kitchen Confidential Updated Edition: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly.

Demi Rose Showcases Busty Curves in Sheer Maxi-Dress for Sizzling Photo Shoot in Ibiza

At London's Daily Mail, "Demi Rose set pulses racing in a VERY daring semi-sheer maxi dress."

Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter

I have a lot of signed books, but I'd love to have a copy of this one signed by Dr. K.

At Amazon, Charles Krauthammer, Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics.

Anthony Bourdain Has Died

Today's a sad day. Charles Krauthammer released a statement saying he's got just weeks to live. He's been recovering from a successful surgery to remove a tumor of the stomach, but now the cancer's returned, very aggressively it turns out. More on that later, but it makes me sad. I think I've been just amazed by Krauthammer all these years, even when I disagreed with him, but he's so good. Just so good. It's a wonderful thing that he was able to share some final thoughts with everybody, so folks can respond with their well-wishes.

Meanwhile, celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain committed suicide. See CNN, via Memorandum, "CNN's Anthony Bourdain dead at 61."

Bethany Mandel has written about suicide this week, first about Kate Spade's death, and the loss of her father to suicide, at the New York Post. And then again today, with the news of Bourdain. It's very profound reading:

In the wake of Kate Spade's death, I wrote about my father's suicide for the first time. Thank you to my amazing husband @SethAMandel for editing this, I don't usually submit things to him because he's brutal, but this time he was kind. https://t.co/nlgHdfBmzJ

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) June 7, 2018

To all suicide survivor kids, a note: https://t.co/d3kmxndiRA

— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) June 8, 2018

Dana Loesch: America Doesn't Watch Samantha Bee (VIDEO)

on Fox & Friends this morning:

Barack Obama Bent Over Backwards to Advance Islamic Totalitarianism in Iran

This is a must-read.

From Sohrab Ahmari, at Commentary, "Anything for the Ayatollah":

My column on Obama bending over backward to help the mullahs cash in on the Iran deal made @RealClearNews this morning. Read it here. https://t.co/aHdMaE1c6n

— Sohrab Ahmari (@SohrabAhmari) June 7, 2018

The full history of the Obama administration’s nuclear dealings with Iran has yet to be written, not least because many of the details remain shrouded in secrecy. The bits of the story that do seep out into the public sphere invariably reinforce a single theme: that of Barack Obama’s utter abjection and pusillanimity before Tehran, and his corresponding contempt for the American people and their elected representatives.

Wednesday’s bombshell Associated Press scoop detailing the Obama administration’s secret effort to help Tehran gain access to the American financial system was a case study. In the months after Iran and the great powers led by the U.S. agreed on the nuclear deal, the Obama Treasury Department issued a special license that would have permitted the Tehran regime to convert some $6 billion in assets held in Omani rials into U.S. dollars before eventually trading them for euros. That middle step—the conversion from Omani to American currency—would have violated sanctions that remained in place even after the nuclear accord.

That’s according to the AP’s Josh Lederman and Matthew Lee, citing a newly released report from the GOP-led Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. Lederman and Lee write: “The effort was unsuccessful because American banks—themselves afraid of running afoul of U.S. sanctions—declined to participate. The Obama administration approached two U.S. banks to facilitate the conversion . . . but both refused, citing the reputational risk of doing business with or for Iran.”

Put another way: The Obama administration pressed American banks to sidestep rules barring Iran from the U.S. financial system, and the only reason the transaction didn’t take place was because the banks had better legal and moral sense than the Obama Treasury.

This was far from the first instance in which the Obama administration bent over backward, going far beyond the requirements of the deal, to help the Iranian regime cash in on the deal...

Still more.

'Sheena is a Punk Rocker'

I had this song on the brain for almost a week, since Jack F.M. was playing it repeatedly during my drive time.

Well the kids are all hopped up and ready to go
They're ready to go now they got their surfboards
And they're going to the discotheque Au Go Go
But she just couldn't stay she had to break away
Well New York City really has is all oh yeah, oh yeah
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Well she's a punk punk, a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Well the kids are all hopped up and ready to go
They're ready to go now they got their surfboards
And they're going to the discotheque Au Go Go
But she just couldn't stay she had to break away
Well New York City really has is all oh yeah, oh yeah
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Well she's a punk punk, a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Punk punk a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker
Sheena is a punk rocker now...

Jennifer Love Hewitt Rule 5

I haven't posted on the lovely Ms. Jennifer in ages.

Seen on Twitter:

Jennifer Love Hewitt pic.twitter.com/zj2vjwV52k

— Celebrities (@CeIebritease) June 5, 2018

Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?

At Amazon, Christina Hoff Sommers, Who Stole Feminism?: How Women Have Betrayed Women.