Greenland Deal. Media Outlets Banned from White House. Billionaires Touting Apocalypse: What Do They Really Want? ’60 Minutes’: Pat Clancy Held Callan’s Hand As He Died. 1619 Mom Sends Her Kid to Crummy School. More
Wow!
President Trump scored a huge Greenland deal that nets pretty much everything he wanted. What’s more, he didn’t have to rename a single one of Greenland’s fabled icy mountains. So far.
An op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (“Trump Scores a Win in Greenland“) starts a few perfunctory harumphs over Trump’s antics, but doesn’t minimize what the Greenland deal, announced Friday, means for U.S. national security:
More important, it resolves a security challenge that has bedeviled American presidents since the 1860s and, in the process, strengthens the U.S. and European position in the Arctic in the face of Russian and Chinese ambitions.
While additional details are needed, the outline of Friday’s deal among the U.S., Denmark and Greenland solves the most pertinent security issues…. Mr. Trump has improved on the work of presidents from Andrew Johnson to Harry S. Truman, who sought to improve the U.S. security position in the High North from the great-power adversaries of their eras.
The agreement opens the door to investments from U.S. companies and bans any military bases from non-NATO countries in Greenland. Barrons calls the deal a triple win:
A new Greenland security deal gives President Donald Trump a triple win: smoother relations with the European Union, stronger Arctic security, and potential access to massive mineral reserves. Actually, extracting those resources won’t be simple,
The situation in Iran is a bit more up in the air (literally?) with President Trump reportedly “considering ‘blowing up entire nation’ of Iran“:
The US president also suggested he could “let them rot economically”, as Tehran is squeezed by a naval blockade, or strike a peace deal.
Iran on Sunday said it was preparing for possible air strikes and threatened to retaliate. US embassies and the US state department issued security alerts this weekend amid fighting between Saudi Arabia and Yemen’s Houthis.
While Iran threatens to “expand the geography of the war,” a story in the Jerusalem Post quotes Iran’s exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlevi, who has secret channels to people in Iran, telling a rally that Iran is seeing quiet but significant defections from its military and civilian establishment.
Meanwhile, shipments getting through Hormuz are at a six-month high, and the stock market responded positively early this morning.
President Trump took to Truth Social to announce that he is banning CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House. The three media outlets are suing to restore access. George Washington University law professor and Fox Contributor Jonathan Turley takes a dim view of the White House ban:
I have previously expressed my disappointment with the ban. While I have been one of the most vocal critics of biased coverage on these outlets, I view this as an ill-considered, damaging move. Putting aside the constitutional concerns, it is a policy that undermines core values and traditions related to the free press.
The revamped (by Bari Weiss) “60 Minutes” scored a big “get” last night with Ross Douthat’s sensitive interview of Patrick Clancy, whose ex-wife Lindsay Clancy trial for killing the couple’s three children ended in a hung jury. Clancy is now remarried, and he and his new wife are expecting a child. Eight-month-old Callan was found alive and lingered for four days before dying in his father’s arms. Lindsay Clancy never asked for forgiveness, but Patrick says he gave it to her. I wonder how you ask forgiveness for killing three small children—and how you give it.
“Beware of Billionaires Touting the Apocalypse” is the headline on a London Spectator story. Geoffrey Cain writes that the billionaires are modern Cassandras—with one lamentable twist:
The kingdom of artificial intelligence is now producing a stream of its own Cassandras. On September 8, a 27-year-old AI researcher named Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic – and explained why on X. The company and its rival OpenAI, where he had also worked, were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives.” By breakfast, tens of millions of people had seen his post.
But in the Silicon Valley version of Troy, there’s a twist to the Cassandra story. Instead of ignoring the Cassandras, the elders hear them out, agree with every word, then… wheel the horse in through the gates, right on schedule.
Meanwhile, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a tech billionaire not touting the apocalypse, argues that the ones who do are really trying to sidestep existing regulations. No fun at all, Mr. Huang further argues that there’s a “0% chance” AI will end the world by 2030. In “A Doomsday Scenario for American AI,” Tyler Cowen argues, “The U.S. is slouching toward heavy regulation while China is poised to rush ahead. Beijing will then dominate everything from global arms sales to healthcare.”
President Trump, who has so far been resistant to the tech Cassandras, announces the formation of an “AI Force,” modeled on the Space Force, for AI oversight. Axios uses the term, “AI Czar.”
Woke advertising has scored another boo boo. Wait until you get a load of the latest high end Converse sneakers ad:
The ad, which has been removed from the Nike subsidiary’s social media pages, featured K-pop singer Karina of the girl group aespa promoting the Chuck 70 X and Run Star Crush sneakers. In the ad, Karina held a pair of black high-top shoes under a star-shaped spotlight while wearing a long white skirt.
Several social media users asserted that Karina resembled a KKK member, with the shoes resembling a lynching victim. Critics included Rep. Troy Carter, D-La., who released a statement on the ad on Friday.
“Nike and Converse, what the hell were you thinking?” Carter said. “Your campaign shows what looks like a hooded Klansman, framed by what appears to be the dangling feet of a lynching victim. There is nothing creative or artistic about it. It is racist, reckless and deeply offensive.”
After facing backlash, Converse eventually pulled the ad and released a statement apologizing for the campaign.
Nike already has paid a high price for pushing left-wing ads.
We had a lot of stories on the importance of recess way back when Christina Hoff Sommers had just popularized the term “war against boys.” Reducing or eliminating recess was part of the story. But boys and girls need to have recess. City Journal reviews a new book entitled “Why Recess Matters“:
A new book shows how unsupervised play offers children something that increasingly expensive and competitive youth sports can’t provide: some time and space of their own.
Mommie Dearest. “Woke NYT, 1619 Project writer deliberately sent daughter to troubled schools as a ‘sacrifice’ — and it backfired spectacularly“:
The writer behind the New York Times’ controversial 1619 Project deliberately sent her daughter to poor Big Apple schools as a “sacrifice” to try to boost the education system — and no one is angrier than the kid.
The teen is now “boiling” mad — badly behind her peers after finally being allowed to enroll in a more rigorous high school, her mother revealed in a bombshell bizarre essay.
Nikole Hannah-Jones, 50, enrolled her only child in two struggling Brooklyn public schools beginning in 2015 — as part of a battle to change what she characterized as systemic racism, despite having the “connections and time and status” to get the girl into the city’s best schools, she wrote in the Times Magazine on Sunday.
By her own account, Hannah-Jones’ daughter Najya knows she was cheated by her parents.
I don’t know if National Review editor Rich Lowry has kids. But if he does, they will be spared the ordeal of Najya. Lowry loves western civ. Don’t miss his column headline “Book of the year’: How a 12-pound tome can save Western civilization“:
At a time when Western civilization has been successfully “de-centered” in academia and Western civ classes relegated to the dustbin of history, the book is a counter-cultural act.
It’s devoted to the idea that learning about our own civilization should take priority over learning about others, and that we won’t realize why it’s so vital to defend our tradition without first understanding it.
