Jeffrey Epstein: Let The Conspiracy Theories Begin!

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Jeffrey Epstein: Let The Conspiracy Theories Begin!

I’m old enough to have been around when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, on November 22, 1963. The suspected assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald, was caught by Dallas police within about an hour after the shooting. They initially put him in a lock-up at Dallas police headquarters, where Oswald instantly became the highest-profile prisoner in the country. Just two days later, on November 24, the police undertook to transfer Oswald from the police headquarters to the county jail. They allowed a group of reporters into the basement of the police headquarters to observe as they escorted Oswald out to a waiting armored car to take him to the jail. Suddenly, with TV cameras rolling, a guy named Jack Ruby emerged from the group of reporters and shot Oswald dead at point blank range. By the end of the day, pretty much everybody in the country (myself included) had seen the clip of the shooting.

Who was this Ruby? He owned a couple of nightclubs in Dallas, but had a highly sketchy background that included alleged mob ties and involvement in drug dealing. No direct links between him and Oswald were ever revealed. His motive for killing Oswald? Excellent question. . . .

You can easily understand why there has been an endless profusion of alternatives to the official “lone gunman” theory of the Kennedy assassination. If Oswald had been working with or backed by some powerful interests, they would clearly want him disposed of as soon as possible once he was arrested. Now Oswald had been silenced before ever saying a word. Ruby had no obvious personal motive for the shooting, and was just the kind of guy who might be carrying out a “hit.” And the Ruby hit doesn’t gibe very well with the “lone gunman” hypothesis of the Kennedy assassination. Thus we have had half a century of theories — officially going by the name “conspiracy theories” — as to who might have been working with Oswald to kill Kennedy, and why. Multiple official inquiries, most notably the Warren Commission, have tried to put these speculations to rest, but have never fully succeeded.

And now once again, in the person of Jeffrey Epstein, the highest profile prisoner in the country has died while in official custody, this time of the Federal Bureau of Prisons at the Manhattan Correctional Center.

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Some "Climate" Humor For The Week

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Some "Climate" Humor For The Week

As you undoubtedly know, saving the planet from the scourge of climate change is the official religious cult of the progressive left. The planet (and all of our souls) shall be saved by eliminating the use of the evil fossil fuels, and replacing those with perfectly clean and free renewable energy from the sun and wind. The problem here is that we keep running into what I like to call the “Big Disconnect.” The Big Disconnect comes about because the sun and wind don’t work very much at all, aren’t available when you need them, cost way too much, and don’t provide the wealthy and powerful with sufficient opportunities to puff up their egos by showing off their wealth and power. Result: lots of good hilarity. Here’s a roundup from the past week or so. You get to vote on which is the funniest.

The Google Climate Summit

This one comes courtesy of Rex Murphy of Canada’s National Post on August 2. It seems that last week Google held a “climate summit,” or something like that, outside Palermo in Sicily. There were about 300 attendees. This being a top-level Google conference, the attendees were not nobody. It was a who’s who of the wealthiest and most powerful people who have sought to make themselves high priests and priestesses of the climate cult; people like Woody Harrelson, Diane von Furstenberg, David Geffen, Chris Martin, Leonardo DiCaprio, Sacha Baron Cohen, Orlando Bloom, Katy Perry, Prince Harry, etc., etc., etc. And how did they get to this exotic location? From Murphy:

How did this coven of illuminati get to Sicily? . . . Official count of the private jets wafting into Palermo air for the “great consult” stands at 114. This for a maximum 300 people attending — three persons per jet. . . .

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Has Any Democrat-Controlled City Come Up With A Good Solution For African-American Poverty?

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Last week — after President Trump via Twitter had accused Representative Elijah Cummings of Baltimore of “incompetent leadership” and making a “mess” of his very-high-crime, high-poverty district, and after numerous media critics had responded by hurling the charge of “racism” at Trump — I weighed in with a post titled “It’s About Time That Someone Pushed Back About The Disaster Of Democrat-Controlled Cities.” The post made what I think is the obvious point that when a group of people have for decades promoted certain government spending programs as the appropriate solution to low incomes and poverty in African American communities, and when after decades of time and trillions of dollars of spending the problems of low income and poverty persist and indeed worsen, it is entirely appropriate to hold the promoters of these spending programs accountable for their failure.

On July 30, the often-creative Kevin Williamson of National Review offered his own even more contrarian view on the subject, in a piece titled “Which Party Can We Blame For Poverty And Crime?” (More contrarian than the Manhattan Contrarian? How is that even possible?) Williamson points out that Census data from around the U.S. give no clear correlation between poverty and crime on the one hand, and Republican versus Democratic governance on the other. He notes that the very poorest county in the whole country is Owsley County, Kentucky — a place with almost entire white demographics (98+%) and very strongly Republican politics. Meanwhile, there are numerous examples of Democrat-run cities that Williamson says are “very good places to live,” with relatively low-ish rates of crime and poverty. He cites Austin and Denver as prime examples.

Fair enough. But with all due respect, I think that Williamson is asking the wrong question here. The important question is, what (if anything) can be done by a governmental entity to facilitate bringing African Americans to higher levels of income and wealth, and to reduced levels of crime commission and victimization? Unfortunately, the examples cited by Williamson, including Owsley County, Austin and Denver, teach almost nothing to answer this question. The examples (not discussed by Williamson) of heavily black and Democrat-controlled cities like Baltimore, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland, and many others have enormous amounts to teach on this important question. And what those places have to teach is that the suites of massive in-kind handout programs — promoted by Democrat politicians for my entire lifetime, and still promoted today by Democrats all the way from local jurisdictions up to presidential candidates — don’t work. Indeed, for these programs it’s far worse than that they merely don’t work. They promote dependency, idleness and resentment, and trap the supposed beneficiaries in unproductive lives from which it is extremely difficult to escape. . . .

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Are Any Of The Democratic Candidates For President Not Completely Crazy?

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Perhaps President Trump is not particularly your cup of tea, and you are thinking that you might consider as an alternative supporting one or another of the Democratic contenders for the presidency. If so, here is an important question to consider: Is any one of these people not completely crazy?

To start with, I’m willing to grant that the bar for selecting a candidate to support for President is of necessity a low one. A person matching your idea of the perfect candidate simply does not exist in the real world; and even if such a person did exist, he or she would not make it past the first week of the campaign. Working strongly against the potential for even any half-way decent candidate is the fact that everybody who throws a hat into this ring is almost by definition a self-centered ego-maniac. Plus, every one of them deeply believes that each word they utter, no matter how ridiculous, is a pearl of God’s wisdom. And then, by the time you get to the general election, you will only have two options left to choose from. It goes without saying that both will be very deeply flawed.

But “deeply flawed” is not nearly the same as “completely crazy.” Surely, we can find some among the Democratic candidates who can pass the “not completely crazy” test.

Well, good luck trying. To evaluate the question of whether any of these people are not completely crazy, I’m going to look today at what they have said recently — mostly in the debates — about the federal government’s appropriate role with respect to “climate.” . . .

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It's About Time Someone Pushed Back About The Disaster Of Democrat-Controlled Cities

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On Sunday, after taking some criticism from Representative Elijah Cummings of Baltimore about conditions on the Southern border, President Trump unleashed a series of tweets excoriating Cummings about conditions in his own district. Some excerpts:

If racist Elijah Cummings would focus more of his energy on helping the good people of his district, and Baltimore itself, perhaps progress could be made in fixing the mess that he has helped to create over many years of incompetent leadership. His radical “oversight” is a joke! . . . Baltimore’s numbers are the worst in the United States on Crime and the Economy. Billions of dollars have been pumped in over the years, but to no avail. The money was stolen or wasted. Ask Elijah Cummings where it went. He should investigate himself with his Oversight Committee!

All I can say is, I can’t believe that it has taken so long to get some serious push-back going about the abject failure of any Democrat-controlled city to alleviate poverty and improve the lives of its citizens. Although in these tweets President Trump focused on Baltimore, it’s not just Baltimore. Other examples include Detroit, Cleveland, St. Louis, Gary, Camden, and even Chicago and Philadelphia. And there are many others. All share the characteristics of massive spending by governments at all levels on “programs” to alleviate poverty — welfare, food stamps, housing, Medicaid, clothing assistance, phones, energy assistance, and on and on. (One list has some 76 categories of federal “anti-poverty” programs.) All those cities also share the characteristic of unbroken rule by Democrats for decades on end. And poverty that only worsens, particularly relative to what is going on in the rest of the country.

Rather than reinventing the wheel today, I just want to point out that the Manhattan Contrarian was way ahead of the world on this issue, with two posts on April 28 and 29, 2015, titled “Do You Think That The Government Can Fix Poverty? Look At Baltimore” and “Can The Government Fix Poverty? — Part II.” . . .

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Should We Be Optimistic About The Future Of The United States?

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At the Manhattan Contrarian family dinner table the other day, the subject of conversation turned to this question: Should we be optimistic about the future of the United States? Good and valid points were made on both sides of the issue. But the most important point weighed for the side of optimism. That point was that, of all the countries in the world, the United States is the place where the people — rather than the government — really run the country. Here, more than anyplace else, people can pursue their own initiatives and dreams without the government having the ability to obstruct and stymie private efforts, and force resources into pathways chosen by elite government functionaries.

Why does this matter? It’s not complicated. From the perspective of aggregate economic performance, the simple answer is that a trial-and-error process with hundreds of millions of participants will come up with much better and more numerous solutions to human problems than the small number of the very smartest people with government authority can ever come up with. From the perspective of the individual, the answer is that the only worthwhile life to lead is the life of freedom, where you make your own choices and take responsibility for your own success or failure. . . .

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