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My dear friend and Georgia art lovers equally great friend has announced his retirement. Bill Eiland is unique and, in my opinion, is irreplaceable. His southern heritage, his humor, his exquisite taste in art and world wide contacts made him a treasure.
Bill had many opportunities to leave but he loved Athens, GMOA and chose to be a big fish in a small pond.
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The Savannah Morning News has gone from a good newspaper with imminently qualified staffing to a lousy paper. So much for cheap skating and diversity for the sake of diversity. Sad.
Board of Advisors
As most of you have already heard, Bill has formally announced his retirement. It is impossible to imagine the Georgia Museum of Art without Bill Eiland. We are profoundly grateful for his devotion, leadership, and vision over the last 33 years. We look forward to celebrating him in the coming months and hope you will join us. Stay tuned for more information on upcoming celebrations. I am including (below) the Provost’s official announcement to our UGA community.
Heather Malcom
Director of development
Dr. William Underwood (Bill) Eiland, who has served as Director of the Georgia Museum of Art since 1992, recently announced that he will retire effective March 31, 2023.
Under Dr. Eiland’s leadership, the Georgia Museum of Art has seen its collections, stature, and reach grow dramatically. Over the past 5 years alone, the museum has won 50 awards for its publications, programming, staff, and exhibitions. Over that same period, its collection has grown by leaps and bounds.
Dr. Eiland oversaw the museum’s 1996 move to the Performing and Visual Arts Complex from its former location in what is now known as the Administration Building. He also oversaw a $20 million, privately supported expansion of the Museum in 2011. In recent years, major gifts have grown the Museum’s collections in African American and African diasporic art, contemporary art, and photography.
Dr. Eiland has elevated the museum’s national and international reputation through service on the board of the American Alliance of Museums, as a trustee of the Association of Art Museum Directors, trustee of the International Council of Museums, and as chair of the Arts and Artifacts Indemnity Advisory Panel for the National Endowment for the Arts. He also served as Vice Chair of the Board of the American Association of Museums and Vice-Chair of its Accreditation Commission.
His honors include receiving the American Alliance of Museums Distinguished Service Award; induction into Sigma Pi Kappa, an international fraternity of historic preservationists; the James Short Award for distinguished service in the museum profession from the Southeastern Museums Conference; a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Georgia Association of Museums and Galleries; and a Governor’s Award for the Arts and Humanities.
Dr. Eiland’s passion for the Georgia Museum of Art is undeniable, and his record of achievement is unmatched. Information on a national search for the next Director of the Georgia Museum of Art will be announced in the fall semester. In the meantime, I hope you will join us in congratulating Dr. Eiland on his extraordinary legacy of promoting arts education, scholarship, and outreach.
Thank you,
Michele Turner
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The Savannah Morning News has gone from a good newspaper with imminently qualified staffing to a lousy paper. So much for cheap skating and diversity for the sake of diversity. Sad.
I give them another 2 years at most.
https://www.savannahnow.com/st
https://www.savannahnow.com/st
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Am I missing something here or is this not exactly right?+++
So let me get this straight. It takes between 21 to 35 days for a Russian oil tanker to get to US ports to be offloaded.
It takes between 35 and 60 days for a tanker from the Middle East to make the same trek.
It takes about 10 hours to load the tanker and up to 24 hours to unload. If it has to wait in port to get to an unloading dock, it can take up to 3 days.
The average tanker burns 2,625 gallons of diesel fuel per hour. 22.38 pounds of CO2 are created from burning 1 gallon of diesel fuel.
So, in one hour, a tanker ship hauling oil to a refinery in the US creates 58,757.5 pounds of CO2 per hour. Averaging the travel time of the tankers, that's 27.67 million tons of CO2 per trip.
In comparison, your car creates between 6 and 9 tons per year.
Without going into all the equations of how many tankers come to the US per year, let alone our exports, will someone please explain to me how drilling our own oil and moving it through pipelines, along with importing oil from Canada via pipeline will not be more environmentally "green" for the world.
Please explain to me why buying oil from another country is good for the environment??
Or better yet how buying oil from another country is better than pumping our own oil??
There's nothing green about this other than these elites are lining their pockets with green.
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State Department's Middle East policy assessed
By Ambassador (ret.) Yoram Ettinger, “Second Thought: a US-Israel Initiative” July 28, 2022,
Conventional wisdom vs. evidenced-reality
According to the late Prof. John Kenneth Galbraith, “the notion of conventional wisdom… is commonly understood as knowledge that is accepted within a certain community or among the general public…. [They] tend to hold on to opinions and ideas that fit with their established worldviews. Accordingly, conventional wisdom provides an obstacle for the acceptance of new knowledge or novel and original thinking….
“To its adherents, conventional wisdom provides comfortable padding against inconvenient truths and the complexities of reality…. This is a prime manifestation of vested interest. For a vested interest in understanding is more preciously guarded than any other treasure…. Acceptable ideas are disinclined to change….
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In Iran, Israel Has Everyone Rattled - JIHAD WATCH
By Hugh Fitzgerald
Ever since Israel introduced a computer worm into Iranian computers that caused more than a thousand Iranian centrifuges to speed up and destroy themselves, in an operation that has entered history as Stuxnet, Israel has been performing acts of derring-do that have, through cyberwarfare, sabotage, and assassinations, rattled Iran’s leaders. Between 2010 and 2012, four of Iran’s top nuclear scientists were assassinated, one after the other, in the middle of Tehran traffic, by a man (or sometimes two) on a motorbike who pulled up alongside their cars and let loose a volley of shots, then rode off through that traffic. None of the killers has been found.
In 2018, 20 Mossad agents managed to break into a nondescript building in central Tehran, blast their way through 32 steel doors, and seize the entire nuclear archive of Iran, some 100,000 documents, which they managed to bring back to Israel for analysis, and also to share its information about heretofore unknown nuclear sites with the IAEA. In 2020 and 2021, Mossad agents again managed to sabotage nuclear facilities at Natanz; the second attack was on a facility that had been built deep underground. At the end of 2021 Mossad killed Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the nuclear scientist who was regarded as the “godfather” of Iran’s nuclear program.
And in recent months, Israel has renewed its campaign of assassination, killing nearly a half-dozen high-ranking officials belonging mainly to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. A report on these latest Israeli acts, and their effect on Iranian morale, can be found here: “Iranian politician says Israel ‘freely runs its operations’ in Tehran,” Times of Israel, July 19, 2022:
An Iranian politician indicated that many in his country feel Israel is operating freely in Tehran and targeting security operations with ease.
In a report published Tuesday in the UK-based Financial Times, an official cited only as a “reformist politician” was quoted as saying that “it feels as if Israel has established a large-scale organization in Tehran and freely runs its operations.”
The politician added: “Israel is clearly targeting Iran’s ‘highly secure’ image to tarnish its greatness in people’s eyes.”
A series of assassinations and attacks in Iran have been attributed to Israel in recent months, though Jerusalem rarely if ever publicly takes credit for such operations. But in a rare interview last week — and rarer yet comments on Israeli activity in enemy countries — National Security Adviser Eyal Hulata said Israel had “acted quite a lot in Iran over the past year.”…
“The Financial Times report noted a feeling of “anxiety at the highest levels of the Iranian establishment” over the series of Israeli-attributed attacks. In late June, the IRGC replaced its longtime intelligence chief in a move seen by many as a reaction to the suspected assassinations.
Iran is running scared. Every other month, it seems, the Israelis manage to kill another high official, or to hit another nuclear or non-nuclear facility, or place malware on Iranian computers. in the past, Iran has several times claimed to have “unearthed” a Mossad cell, but no names are ever produced, no prisoners paraded to confess on camera, and nothing more is heard about these so-called Mossad agents. Most analysts suspect that Iran has yet to find a single Israeli agent.
Nevertheless, Iranian officials told the UK newspaper that they are not looking to directly escalate tensions at the moment.
Of course, the key words here from Iran are “not looking to directly” escalate tensions. The Iranians want to conduct their regional aggression not “directly,” but through their two closest proxies, the Houthis in Yemen and Hezbollah in Lebanon. So far, Iran has supplied Hezbollah with 130,000 rockets and missiles that have been hidden in civilian areas all over southern Lebanon, and occasionally Hezbollah launches a rocket or drone toward Israel.
Iran’s policy remains to work with its proxy forces and we will not initiate any attacks against Israel if Israel doesn’t attack Lebanon,” a “regime insider” was quoted as saying. “It’s not wise for us to fight with Israel. And Zionists also show teeth to attack but their teeth are not sharp enough to go as far as striking Iran.”
Gen. Aviv Kochavi, head of the IDF, would beg to differ. Israel has been striking Iran relentlessly all along: what was Stuxnet, what were those eight targeted assassinations, what was that repeated sabotage of nuclear facilities in Natanz and Fordo, what are the continuing mysterious explosions at petrochemical plants and electric plants all over Iran, aif not examples of Israel “striking at Iran”?
In a similar report in The New York Times late last month, Iranian officials told the newspaper that Israel’s operations have had drastic and long-lasting effects.
“The security breaches inside Iran and the vast scope of operations by Israel have really undermined our most powerful intelligence organization,” said former Iranian vice president Mohammad Ali Abtahi.
Unnamed Iranian officials also said at the time that “Israel’s spy network has infiltrated deep into the rank and file of Iran’s security circles.”
The fear is palpable in the ruling circles in Tehran. They are no longer bothering to hide it. The nonstop success of Mossad in its sabotage and assassination efforts has demoralized the Iranians. The “drastic and long-lasting effects” of Israeli deeds has made clear to the Iranians that “Israel’s spy network has infiltrated deep into the rank and file of Iran’s security circles.” Sitting in Tehran, whom can the ayatollahs, or the IRGC commanders, trust? Israel keeps hitting them here, there, and everywhere. It never claims responsibility; it doesn’t have to. Everyone knows who has been behind these attacks. Everyone wonders who else is part of this Mossad network, what Iranians are working with Mossad to undermine and weaken the regime.
High officials, including at least one IRGC commander, have been arrested in a panicky show of force, but nothing has been proved, and it seems the Iranians are announcing that “Israeli agents have been arrested” just to persuade the public that “something is being done.” But not a single trial has yet been held of supposed Mossad agents, none of those agents have been named or paraded before the public. Iranian officials are trying, but failing, to put on a brave face about Iran’s supposed imperviousness to Israeli attacks, even as the Mossad keeps running circles around it. They have no idea where the next Israeli strike, or act of sabotage, or assassination will take place. Iran’s top clerics and military men are now deeply suspicious of one another. Whom they can trust? In whom can they confide? Mossad appears to be, to use Flaubert’s famous phrase, “présent partout, et visible nulle part” – everywhere present, but nowhere to be seen.
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Dispatches from the middle of somewhere
By Salena Zito
In my estimation, there is no patch of geography in this country that is the "middle of nowhere." This is America; everywhere is the middle of somewhere.
Economists and academics can debate the definition of what inflation is or what a recession is, but the messaging from the White House is one of denial. The question is how you communicate with people and show empathy. Biden's inability to do this is puzzling.
In American politics one of the most important things you have to do is validate people. You need to meet people where they are and acknowledge their concerns, even if you privately think to yourself they are unfounded. When Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain” he didn't say, "You guys don't understand what's going on." That's why it worked. Click for the full story
In American politics one of the most important things you have to do is validate people. You need to meet people where they are and acknowledge their concerns, even if you privately think to yourself they are unfounded. When Bill Clinton said "I feel your pain” he didn't say, "You guys don't understand what's going on." That's why it worked. Click for the full story
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Until Very Recently, Biden’s Economic Advisors Defined ‘Recession’ as ‘Two Quarters of Negative Growth’
By Debra Heine
The Republican National Committee has unearthed a number of remarks made by several Biden officials that seriously undermine their efforts to change the definition of a recession.
Until very recently, economic experts—including members of the Biden administration—defined a recession as two consecutive quarters of economic decline. On Thursday, economic data will be released that is expected to show the U.S. economy shrank for two consecutive quarters. With this bad economic report looming ahead of the midterm elections, the Biden regime has been attempting to broaden the “technical definition” of recession to include other variables.
But as recently as May of 2022, Biden’s Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers Cecilia Rouse said “two quarters of negative growth” means the economy is in a recession.
And in May of 2019, Biden’s economic adviser Heather Boushey said: As a “rule of thumb,” a recession refers to “two quarters of negative growth in GDP.” Later that year, Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein defined a recession as “two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”
Biden’s economic adviser Jared Bernstein in September 2019: A recession is “defined as two consecutive quarters of declining growth.”https://t.co/q7EyM7Gh2Q
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 27, 2022
Biden’s economic adviser Heather Boushey in May 2019: As a “rule of thumb,” a recession refers to “two quarters of negative growth in GDP.” pic.twitter.com/E9F5s3nVn6
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 27, 2022
None other than Biden’s National Economic Council Director Brian Deese said in March of 2008: “Of course economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.”
Deese at the time was was working for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign as her economic policy director. After Clinton was defeated in the Democrat primary, Deese joined Barack Obama’s campaign as an economic advisor.
In the past week, Bernstein, Rouse, and Deese, have all attempted to change the traditional definition of recession, even though they have used it themselves in the past.
Citing a “holistic look at the data,” In a White House Council of Economic Advisors post on the White House website, CEA chair Rouse and member Bernstein claimed last week that “it is unlikely that the decline in GDP in the first quarter of this year—even if followed by another GDP decline in the second quarter—indicates a recession.”
Bernstein echoed that narrative on CNN Saturday night.
“Actually two quarters of negative GDP doesn’t necessarily qualify as a recession,” he said, insisting that the variables that National Bureau of Economic Research considers to determine whether we are in a recession “tend to look pretty good.”
Monday morning, Deese also denied that the country is under a “technical definition” of recession.
“The technical definition considers a much broader spectrum of data points, but in practical terms, what matters to the American is whether they have a little economic breathing room, have more job opportunities, their wages are going up,” Deese said on CNN.
Deese repeated the message at the White House on Tuesday.
“Two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession,” he insisted, adding, “it’s not the definition that economists have traditionally relied on.”
Brian Deese, yesterday: "Two negative quarters of GDP growth is not the technical definition of recession.”
Deese, 2008: “Economists have a technical definition of recession, which is two consecutive quarters of negative growth.” pic.twitter.com/MzVk7drq3v
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) July 27, 2022
By any metric, the economy in the United States is not doing well under Biden.
There may be plenty of “job opportunities” throughout the country, but unfortunately many Americans, for whatever reason, have left the work force.
The labor shortage is most acute in the food sector, durable goods manufacturing, wholesale and retail trade, and education and health services, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “These industries have more unfilled job openings than unemployed workers with experience in their respective industry.”
Businesses are going under because they can’t find people willing to work. Economist Lawrence Summers said the government’s juiced-up unemployment benefits created the record labor shortage.
Meanwhile, wages are not going up, as Deese suggested, they’re going down “by quite a bit,” according to Casey Mulligan, former chief economist for the Council of Economic Advisers (CEA) under former President Trump.
“It seems to me that the White House seems to be saying, ‘yeah, you’re working more and earning less, but at least you’re working more,'” Mulligan, who is currently a professor at the University of Chicago, told Fox Business. “I don’t understand the silver lining of that. We work in order to earn. That earning part is not going well.”
“That’s really the GDP. GDP combines both the labor income and capital income, but they tend to move together,” he continued “We’ve seen it in the earnings data as well. Real wages, real earnings have fallen quite a bit just in the last month as well as over the last year.”
Update:
Members of the Biden regime are reportedly twisting the arms of “their allies and sycophants” to amplify their fake narratives about the economy.
Senior administration officials are hitting the airwaves and arm-twisting reporters in private, imploring anyone who will listen that the economy — despised by majorities of both Republicans and Democrats fed up with inflation — is still healthy.
About Debra Heine
Debra Heine is a conservative Catholic mom of six and longtime political pundit. She has written for several conservative news websites over the years, including Breitbart and PJ Media.
And:
RECESSION: Democrat Policies Tank Economy
Prolonged stagnation, fiscal crisis possible
By Christian Whiton
“Destruction,” by Thomas Cole from his Course of Empire series, 1833-1836.
The year of disasters for Joe Biden and the Democrats who control Washington just got officially worse. The Commerce Department announced this morning that the economy shrank by an annualized 0.9% in the second quarter which ran from April through June. Coming on the heels of a 1.6% annual contraction in the first quarter, that confirms two successive quarters of economic decline—the standard definition of a recession.
The development makes official the economic misery that most Americans have been feeling since Joe Biden became president: out-of-control inflation, declining real wages, and a workforce disrupted by big government.
The news is also the latest reminder that our economic and political elite are clueless and dishonest.
The economic disaster began because Joe Biden and his fellow big spenders have adhered to something called Modern Monetary Theory that said the government could spend as much as it wants and run up national debt without consequence. That theory has been put to the test since the 2020 government shutdown of the economy. Since then, the federal government has spent about $7 trillion more than it would have under its previous bloated budget plan and permanently enshrined annual budget deficits in excess of $1 trillion.
The Federal Reserve funded most of that growth by doubling its holdings of debt instruments from just over $4 trillion in early 2020 to just under $9 trillion today—primarily by creating dollars out of thin air to buy up newly issued government debt. Economic growth ended as soon as unsustainable spending was curtailed and inflation has raged.
Recall that the geniuses of Washington and Wall Street assured us there would not be inflation. Then they said it wouldn’t be bad nor would it last long. But it is bad and it is persistent.
We received the same clueless or mendacious predictions about the overall economy. In June, Joe Biden said of the possibility of recession: “First of all, it’s not inevitable.” The same month, Democrat House Speaker Nancy Pelosi falsely stated that the economy had improved. This month, Treasury Secretary Janet “from another planet” Yellen pushed the envelope from spin to outright lying when she said, “This is not an economy that is in recession”—something the statisticians of her own administration were undoubtedly already telling her was not true.
Yesterday, clueless Fed Chairman Jerome Powell—one of many establishment poodles first given his job by Donald Trump because he “looked the part”—denied there is a recession. The “independent” Chairman Powell, who acts like he is a deputy assistant secretary at the Treasury Department taking orders from Joe Biden and Yellen, echoed laughable White House propaganda about the job market somehow negating the recession, even though he knows employment is a lagging indicator.
It wasn’t just the government elite who were wrong or lying. The other people you indirectly pay to be right, economic analysts at big Wall Street firms, were mostly wrong. Overall, the big banks forecasted economic growth despite access to all of the information the rest of us have and confirmation of a slowdown from their own business activities. (Luckily readers of this page knew recession was coming due to numerous warnings. Examples: March 14, May 26, June 16, July 1.)
The recession announcement isn’t just news because of the economic pain it reflects. It also foretells political turmoil and possibly a government spending crisis.
The economy is routinely the issue that voters care about the most. Recessions during the first terms of presidencies doomed Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. To hold the White House, Democrats must now hope to pull a Ronald Reagan, who won a landslide reelection in 1984 after a steep recession in his first term.
The problem for Democrats is that Reagan had laid the groundwork for a return to rapid and sustained economic growth. He cut taxes and regulation while giving Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker the political cover to tighten monetary policy dramatically. Volcker’s tightening, which brought the prime interest rate to as high as 20% (it is 2.5% today), deepened the recession but controlled inflation. Then, from that reset, Reagan’s tax cuts and unabashed support for free market capitalism created a booming economy—Seven Fat Years of growth that changed America and the world.
Have Democrats created the political and economic circumstances for such a recovery? Reagan cut taxes and regulations. Democrats have tried repeatedly to increase them and succeeded through creating inflation—a tax on all Americans’ wages and savings. Democrats also want to use their religion of climate change alarmism as a justification to regulate every facet of the economy, starting with raising energy prices further.
This reality should call into question claims by Washington and Wall Street that any recession will be short and shallow. A Republican Congress can put a limit on some of the Democrats’ biggest schemes for transforming the economy, but Beltway Republicans seldom even call for balancing the budget or controlling federal spending—a likely prerequisite along with tighter monetary policy to taming inflation. Sustained economic prosperity will probably require a Republican president who is better than his party’s congressional luminaries. Until then, the safest bet is for “stagflation”—low or no economic growth and persistent inflation.
Furthermore, higher interest rates, out-of-control federal spending, and threats to the dollar’s global dominance because of dumb sanctions on Russia have an outside chance of sparking a fiscal crisis for the government—spending cuts made out of necessity rather than prudent choice. (Expect defense spending to decline no matter who is president.)
Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats sure know how to go out with a bang.
Christian Whiton was a senior advisor in the Bush and Trump administrations. He is a senior fellow at the Center for the National Interest and a principal at DC International Advisory.
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The National Tragedy of Hunter Biden’s Laptop - Tablet Magazine
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/the-national-tragedy-of-hunter-bidens-laptop
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Much hope has been placed in an eventual normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia. On July 15th, President Biden travelled to Saudi Arabia in an attempt to help cement relations between the two countries and to find another source to lower the cost of gas for Americans before the November midterm elections. The Saudis were gracious enough to invite a group of Israeli journalists to cover the story.
One particular journalist, Gil Tamari, took it upon himself to enter Mecca, film what he saw there and then broadcast it to the world. This one incident by one individual might potentially have soured the flowering of relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Why is it so difficult for those of us from Western democracies to understand the cultural, societal and theological contexts of other cultures? What is it about Islam that we fail to understand?
Here to discuss this with us was Harold Rhode.
About our Speaker: Harold Rhode is a Distinguished Senior Fellow at the Gatestone Institute. He received a Ph.D. in Ottoman History from Columbia University and later served as the Turkish Desk Officer at the US Department of Defense.
Harold Rhode taught Islamic history at the University of Delaware as an adjunct professor from 1979 until 1981. In May 1982, he joined the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy at the Pentagon as an adviser on the Islamic world with a special emphasis on Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. He retired from this position in 2010. During his tenure he wrote papers on how to understand, negotiate, and deal with Turkey, Iran, Central Asia, and other Arab countries.
Raising interest rates in combination with increases in taxes is a sure bet those in the lower socio level will suffer the most while driving us deeper into a recession. Thank you Manchin. I am sure
the miners in West Virginia are delighted.
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