Megan Parry's Friday Forecast

At ABC News 10 San Diego:

Derek Hunter, Outrage, Inc.

At Amazon, Derek Hunter, Outrage, Inc.: How the Liberal Mob Ruined Science, Journalism, and Hollywood.

Chanel West Coast Posing Against a Brick Wall

At Taxi Driver, "Chanel West Coast Pokies Posing Against a Wall."

Tallia Storm in Black Corset

At Taxi Driver, "Tallia Storm Nipples in See Through Black Corset.

How the U.S. Senate Became a Campus Kangaroo Court

Rich Lowry nails it. This is exactly what I was thinking when I saw the idiot Hawaiian Senator Maisie Hirono. Stupid gender theory has infected even supposedly august individuals representing America's highest governmental institutions. It's so juvenile and stupid.

At Politico:

Opinion: "Christine Blasey Ford deserves a hearing, although at the moment it’s not clear if she really wants one. What she doesn’t deserve is to be believed automatically just because she’s a woman making an accusation." https://t.co/aXEGGS6OGT

— POLITICO (@politico) September 21, 2018

Francis Fukuyama

From Francis Fukuyama, at Foreign Affairs, a great piece, "Against Identity Politics":

Leading up to the financial crises on both sides of the Atlantic, policies crafted by elites produced huge recessions, high unemployment, and falling incomes for millions of ordinary workers, damaging the reputation of liberal democracy as a whole.https://t.co/uEAJAx27N3

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) September 14, 2018

Beginning a few decades ago, world politics started to experience a dramatic transformation. From the early 1970s to the first decade of this century, the number of electoral democracies increased from about 35 to more than 110. Over the same period, the world’s output of goods and services quadrupled, and growth extended to virtually every region of the world. The proportion of people living in extreme poverty plummeted, dropping from 42 percent of the global population in 1993 to 18 percent in 2008.

But not everyone benefited from these changes. In many countries, and particularly in developed democracies, economic inequality increased dramatically, as the benefits of growth flowed primarily to the wealthy and well-educated. The increasing volume of goods, money, and people moving from one place to another brought disruptive changes. In developing countries, villagers who previously had no electricity suddenly found themselves living in large cities, watching TV, and connecting to the Internet on their mobile phones. Huge new middle classes arose in China and India—but the work they did replaced the work that had been done by older middle classes in the developed world. Manufacturing moved steadily from the United States and Europe to East Asia and other regions with low labor costs. At the same time, men were being displaced by women in a labor market increasingly dominated by service industries, and low-skilled workers found themselves replaced by smart machines.

Ultimately, these changes slowed the movement toward an increasingly open and liberal world order, which began to falter and soon reversed. The final blows were the global financial crisis of 2007–8 and the euro crisis that began in 2009. In both cases, policies crafted by elites produced huge recessions, high unemployment, and falling incomes for millions of ordinary workers. Since the United States and the EU were the leading exemplars of liberal democracy, these crises damaged the reputation of that system as a whole.

Indeed, in recent years, the number of democracies has fallen, and democracy has retreated in virtually all regions of the world. At the same time, many authoritarian countries, led by China and Russia, have become much more assertive. Some countries that had seemed to be successful liberal democracies during the 1990s—including Hungary, Poland, Thailand, and Turkey—have slid backward toward authoritarianism. The Arab revolts of 2010–11 disrupted dictatorships throughout the Middle East but yielded little in terms of democratization: in their wake, despotic regimes held on to power, and civil wars racked Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen. More surprising and perhaps even more significant was the success of populist nationalism in elections held in 2016 by two of the world’s most durable liberal democracies: the United Kingdom, where voters chose to leave the EU, and the United States, where Donald Trump scored a shocking electoral upset in the race for president.

All these developments relate in some way to the economic and technological shifts of globalization. But they are also rooted in a different phenomenon: the rise of identity politics. For the most part, twentieth-century politics was defined by economic issues. On the left, politics centered on workers, trade unions, social welfare programs, and redistributive policies. The right, by contrast, was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector. Politics today, however, is defined less by economic or ideological concerns than by questions of identity. Now, in many democracies, the left focuses less on creating broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of marginalized groups, such as ethnic minorities, immigrants and refugees, women, and LGBT people. The right, meanwhile, has redefined its core mission as the patriotic protection of traditional national identity, which is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

This shift overturns a long tradition, dating back at least as far as Karl Marx, of viewing political struggles as a reflection of economic conflicts. But important as material self-interest is, human beings are motivated by other things as well, forces that better explain the present day. All over the world, political leaders have mobilized followers around the idea that their dignity has been affronted and must be restored.

Of course, in authoritarian countries, such appeals are old hat. Russian President Vladimir Putin has talked about the “tragedy” of the Soviet Union’s collapse and has excoriated the United States and Europe for taking advantage of Russia’s weakness during the 1990s to expand NATO. Chinese President Xi Jinping alludes to his country’s “century of humiliation,” a period of foreign domination that began in 1839.

But resentment over indignities has become a powerful force in democratic countries, too. The Black Lives Matter movement sprang from a series of well-publicized police killings of African Americans and forced the rest of the world to pay attention to the victims of police brutality. On college campuses and in offices around the United States, women seethed over a seeming epidemic of sexual harassment and assault and concluded that their male peers simply did not see them as equals. The rights of transgender people, who had previously not been widely recognized as distinct targets of discrimination, became a cause célèbre. And many of those who voted for Trump yearned for a better time in the past, when they believed their place in their own society had been more secure.

Again and again, groups have come to believe that their identities—whether national, religious, ethnic, sexual, gender, or otherwise—are not receiving adequate recognition. Identity politics is no longer a minor phenomenon, playing out only in the rarified confines of university campuses or providing a backdrop to low-stakes skirmishes in “culture wars” promoted by the mass media. Instead, identity politics has become a master concept that explains much of what is going on in global affairs.

That leaves modern liberal democracies facing an important challenge. Globalization has brought rapid economic and social change and made these societies far more diverse, creating demands for recognition on the part of groups that were once invisible to mainstream society. These demands have led to a backlash among other groups, which are feeling a loss of status and a sense of displacement. Democratic societies are fracturing into segments based on ever-narrower identities, threatening the possibility of deliberation and collective action by society as a whole. This is a road that leads only to state breakdown and, ultimately, failure. Unless such liberal democracies can work their way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, they will doom themselves—and the world—to continuing conflict...

Still more.

And also, his new book, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment.

Danielle Gersh's Thursday Forecast

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

I'll have more blogging later, and through the weekend.

Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings

*BUMPED.*

This book is really cool.

At Amazon, Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings: A Novel.

Laura Ingraham: The Left's Rush to Judgment Against Brett Kavanaugh (VIDEO)

I've been extremely disgusted by this whole spectacle.

I'm literally furious. And it takes a lot to make me furious at the left, since leftist depravity is literally bottomless.

More later.

Meanwhile, here's an outstanding commentary from Laura Ingraham:

Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools

*BUMPED.*

Available on October 2nd, at Amazon, Tucker Carlson, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution.

And I got a kick out of the piece at CJR, "The Mystery of Tucker Carlson."

Ann Coulter, Resistance Is Futile!

*BUMPED.*

At Amazon, Ann Coulter, Resistance Is Futile! How the Trump-Hating Left Lost Its Collective Mind.

Hat tip: Tucker Carlson, on Fox News, "Ann Coulter: Left hate deplorables, think Trump is 'icky' (VIDEO)."

'1979'

Smashing Pumpkins, from Thursday morning's drive-time, at 93.1 Jack FM Los Angeles.

Addicted To Love
Robert Palmer
6:49am

Pictures Of You
The Cure
6:44am

Livin' On A Prayer
Bon Jovi
6:40am

True Faith
New Order
6:36am

Highway To Hell
AC/DC
6:32am

It's My Life
No Doubt
6:21am

Free Fallin'
Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers
6:16am

She Blinded Me With Science
Thomas Dolby
6:13am

1979
The Smashing Pumpkins
6:09

Red Red Wine
UB40
6:05am

Dirty Laundry
Don Henley
5:59am

Adam Tooze, Crashed

*BUMPED.*

This is a really amazing book, totally recommendable.

At Amazon, Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.

The U.S. Financial Crisis, Leading to the Great Recession, Hit Ten Years Ago Today

Here's the story, at LAT, "The financial crisis hit 10 years ago. For some, it feels like yesterday."

And from Adam Tooze, at Foreign Affairs, "The Forgotten History of the Financial Crisis: What the World Should Have Learned in 2008":

The risk of simultaneous implosion on both sides of the Atlantic made 2008 the most dangerous financial crisis ever witnessed.https://t.co/corEXXxIbA

— Foreign Affairs (@ForeignAffairs) September 8, 2018

September and October of 2008 was the worst financial crisis in global history, including the Great Depression.” Ben Bernanke, then the chair of the U.S. Federal Reserve, made this remarkable claim in November 2009, just one year after the meltdown. Looking back today, a decade after the crisis, there is every reason to agree with Bernanke’s assessment: 2008 should serve as a warning of the scale and speed with which global financial crises can unfold in the twenty-first century.

The basic story of the financial crisis is familiar enough. The trouble began in 2007 with a downturn in U.S. and European real estate markets; as housing prices plunged from California to Ireland, homeowners fell behind on their mortgage payments, and lenders soon began to feel the heat. Thanks to the deep integration of global banking, securities, and funding markets, the contagion quickly spread to major financial institutions around the world. By late 2008, banks in Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Latvia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Spain, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States were all facing existential crises. Many had already collapsed, and many others would before long.

The Great Depression of the 1930s is remembered as the worst economic disaster in modern history—one that resulted in large part from inept policy responses—but it was far less synchronized than the crash in 2008. Although more banks failed during the Depression, these failures were scattered between 1929 and 1933 and involved far smaller balance sheets. In 2008, both the scale and the speed of the implosion were breathtaking. According to data from the Bank for International Settlements, gross capital flows around the world plunged by 90 percent between 2007 and 2008.

As capital flows dried up, the crisis soon morphed into a crushing recession in the real economy. The “great trade collapse” of 2008 was the most severe synchronized contraction in international trade ever recorded. Within nine months of their pre-crisis peak, in April 2008, global exports were down by 22 percent. (During the Great Depression, it took nearly two years for trade to slump by a similar amount.) In the United States between late 2008 and early 2009, 800,000 people were losing their jobs every month. By 2015, over nine million American families would lose their homes to foreclosure—the largest forced population movement in the United States since the Dust Bowl. In Europe, meanwhile, failing banks and fragile public finances created a crisis that nearly split the eurozone.

Ten years later, there is little consensus about the meaning of 2008 and its aftermath. Partial narratives have emerged to highlight this or that aspect of the crisis, even as crucial elements of the story have been forgotten. In the United States, memories have centered on the government recklessness and private criminality that led up to the crash; in Europe, leaders have been content to blame everything on the Americans.

In fact, bankers on both sides of the Atlantic created the system that imploded in 2008. The collapse could easily have devastated both the U.S. and the European economies had it not been for improvisation on the part of U.S. officials at the Federal Reserve, who leveraged trans-atlantic connections they had inherited from the twentieth century to stop the global bank run. That this reality has been obscured speaks both to the contentious politics of managing global finances and to the growing distance between the United States and Europe. More important, it forces a question about the future of financial globalization: How will a multipolar world that has moved beyond the transatlantic structures of the last century cope with the next crisis?

More.

Also, at Amazon, Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World.

Julia Salazar Post-Truth

An excellent piece, from Bari Weiss, at NYT, "Julia Salazar, the Left’s Post-Truth Politician: The democratic socialist lied. And lied. And lied. Then she won handily in Brooklyn."

I wrote about Julia Salazar’s victory. https://t.co/1qlvmlNeFx

— Bari Weiss (@bariweiss) September 15, 2018

Emily Ratajkowski Hailing a Cab

At the Nip Slip, "Emily Ratajkowski in a See Through Top!"

Katie Holmes at an Event Looking Old

She may be getting older, but still fabulous, IMHO.

At Drunken, "Katie Holmes – Big Tits at an Event Looking Old."

And at Elle:

Chatting with Katie Holmes (on a boat! but not the Dawson's boat!) for @ELLEmagazine... https://t.co/uKWsIxvFcE

— Faran Krentcil (@FaranKrentcil) September 14, 2018

Addded: "Katie Holmes in a Gucci Sneakers Heads to a Business Meeting in NYC 09/14/2018."

A's Riding D-List Starting Rotation Right Into October

The Wild Card spot is nice, and the A's have the second American League spot nailed down, but it'd be a lot better if the Athletics could win the American League West division outright. I remember in the 2014 AL Wildcard, the A's played Kansas City in perhaps the best baseball game I've ever seen. Spectacular play, but heartbreaking for Oakland fans.

At least in the division championship series, it's not all on the line in one single game. Boy, that's rough.

In any case, I'm enjoying watching the A's as much as I can. The Angels are eliminated and are currently 19.5 game backs behind the Houston Astros. It's been one of those seasons.

The Astros lost last night to the Arizona Diamonbacks, and Oakland beat the Tampa Bay Rays. The A's are 2.5 game behind Houston, so it's still down to the wire.

More later.

But see ESPN:

“I've never, ever seen anything that comes close to this as far as the injuries to starting pitching," says Oakland manager Bob Melvin. Thanks to Edwin Jackson and a few friends, the #Athletics figured it out. https://t.co/BFKWFEdVnQ

— Jerry Crasnick (@jcrasnick) September 15, 2018

Samanta Lily on Twitter

She's a plus-sized glamour model, and I'm taking PLUS!

See, "Samanta Lily in Her Bra and Panties."

More here (NSFW).

The Left's Despicable 'Sexual-Misconduct Allegations' Against Brett Kavanaugh

Truly evil.

Desperate, despicable, and evil.

At the New Yorker, via Memorandum, "A Sexual-Misconduct Allegation Against the Supreme Court Nominee Brett Kavanaugh Stirs Tension Among Democrats in Congress."

And on Twitter:

Have you ever seen anything so despicable?!

Sen. Feinstein claims she has a letter about Kavanaugh & a girl from high school.

Nasty leftists then post a pic of Kavanaugh & his daughter in her school uniform.

To make him look like a pedophile.

You. Leftists. Are. Gross. pic.twitter.com/7khNe8Qt7C

— Liz Wheeler (@Liz_Wheeler) September 13, 2018

Totally. But we’re dealing with the left, and leftists are evil. 😠

— Donald Douglas (@AmPowerBlog) September 14, 2018