January 24, 2025

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Fearing US ‘hostility,’ Russia could ‘escalate early’ in a space conflict.

The key problem, the study finds, is that Moscow’s hyper-suspicious view of US military intentions in space are driving Russia’s military to a more aggressive and hair-trigger stance, but also raising barriers to bilateral communications aimed at ratcheting down conflict risks and/or finding ways to de-escalate once a crisis is underway.

“Russia’s fears about U.S. incentives for early escalation in the space domain and perceptions of U.S. hostility heighten the potential for misperceptions of U.S. actions in space. Russia’s emerging approach to escalation management—a cost-imposition strategy based on the belief that escalation can be controlled—might further reinforce perceived incentives to escalate early,” the study states.

Indeed, there is a school of thought among Russian analysts that is highly concerned about US threats to the space-based elements of Moscow’s nuclear deterrent and the possibility that Washington plans to use space to conduct a disarming attack to deprive Russia of its retaliatory capability, the study adds.

Given the atrophied condition of Russia’s launch capabilities, any space offensive would likely be a short one.

Posted at 4:54 pm by Stephen Green

CHANGE: South Korea’s birthrate set to rise for the first time in nine years. “The Asian country has recorded the world’s lowest fertility rates, but the number of newborns between January 2024 and November 2024 rose 3% from a year earlier to 220,094, monthly government data showed on Wednesday. . . . Last year, South Korea rolled out various measures to encourage young people to get married and have children, after now impeached President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a ‘national demographic crisis’ and a plan to create a new ministry devoted to tackling low birth rates.”

I hope it’s a real change, and not a dead-cat bounce.

Posted at 4:00 pm by Glenn Reynolds

MAYBE IT’S TIME TO PUT VEGGIES BACK ON THE MENU: Florida man eats diet of butter, cheese, beef; cholesterol oozes from his body.

The man, said to be in his 40s, told doctors that he had adopted a “carnivore diet” eight months prior. His diet included between 6 lbs and 9 lbs of cheese, sticks of butter, and daily hamburgers that had additional fat incorporated into them. Since taking on this brow-raising food plan, he claimed his weight dropped, his energy levels increased, and his “mental clarity” improved.

Meanwhile, his total cholesterol level exceeded 1,000 mg/dL. For context, an optimal total cholesterol level is under 200 mg/dL, while 240 mg/dL is considered the threshold for ‘high.’ Cardiologists noted that prior to going on his fatty diet, his cholesterol had been between 210 mg/dL to 300 mg/dL.

The cardiologists diagnosed the man with xanthelasma, a condition in which excess blood lipids ooze from blood vessels and form localized lipid deposits. The escaped lipids would normally be taken up by roaming white blood cells called macrophages. But, in cases with xanthelasma, the amount of lipids is too large for the macrophages, which turn into foam cells with the excess cholesterol, leading to visible deposits.

Balance is good.

Posted at 3:52 pm by Stephen Green

FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: There Were Drugs in Her Not a Bag Full of Drugs. “It’s time for your much-needed break from the serious news, and this week we have a bag full of lies (and drugs), the guy you don’t cut in front of at the buffet, and Colorado Man’s ill-fated visit to Mar-a-Lago.”

Posted at 3:21 pm by Stephen Green

PETER HITCHENS: God forgive me, I was one of the millions of young men who wanted to be Bob Dylan. Here’s what the new film doesn’t tell you.

Much of the action of the clever and enjoyable new film about Dylan, A Complete Unknown, starring Timothee Chalamet, takes place in the years before most people in Britain had even heard of him.

It cleverly evokes the Bohemian, faintly squalid, deeply political and pretentious world from which Dylan rose to fame as a singer of ‘protest’ anthems such as the ghastly, cliched and mindless The Times They Are A-Changin’ and the flaccid, sentimental Blowin’ in the Wind (Dylan himself got sick of singing it, and who can blame him?).

But the film misses the true importance of the folk superstar Pete Seeger and of Suze Rotolo, though it spends a lot of time on the way they helped the young Dylan to fame.

Seeger, later famous for his liberal ‘peace’ songs, had at one time belonged to the tiny, ultra-Stalinist US Communist Party.

He wasn’t quite as keen on peace in those days. When most sensible people were very much in favour of fighting the Nazis, in from 1939 to early 1941, Seeger had been a sort of pacifist.

Worse, he and his folk-group ‘The Almanac Singers’ made a record of songs opposing American intervention in the war against Hitler. Whoops!

After Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in June that year, Seeger and his musical comrades literally changed their tune.

They pulled the record from the shops and went round those who had bought it (fortunately not very many people) asking them to give it back. By 1942 they were banging their drums and twanging their banjos for war.

At UnHerd, David Samuels adds: How Bob Dylan fought the proto-woke –he refused to be a Leftist prophet.  “In other words, as [James] Mangold does a good job of showing, the American Left, centred around the Communist Party, used folk music as a cultural banner, and as a political instrument — and they were right to feel that Bob Dylan had used them, and scorned them. Or to put it in a way more partial to Dylan, the young singer-songwriter took the folk tradition that they had co-opted in the service of their version of Cold War politics and put it back into the place it belonged, which was music. Dylan’s sin was never simply going electric. It was in putting art above politics.”

Posted at 2:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

VDH: The Addicted, Petty, and Hysterical Left. “Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.”

Posted at 2:19 pm by Stephen Green

FINALLY, TRUMP IS FORCING THE DNC-MSM TO COVER NORTH CAROLINA: Trump looks to North Carolina as he tries to contrast his leadership with Democrats.’

President Donald Trump on Friday is visiting North Carolina — a state he said “has been abandoned by the Democrats” as it rebuilds from Hurricane Helene’s flooding — with questions about disaster relief taking center stage in his first days back in office.

Trump will then travel to California, where wildfires have ravaged the Los Angeles area, as Republicans on Capitol Hill begin to navigate between conservatives’ desire for spending cuts and Trump’s pledges to help both places rebuild.

The trip is Trump’s first outside Washington since his inauguration on Monday.

By visiting North Carolina, a swing state he’s won three times, the president is seeking to draw clear contrasts with former President Joe Biden, whose administration’s management of the flooding he called “so bad,” and Democratic leaders in California, whose handling of the wildfires he has repeatedly lambasted.

In a Wednesday interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Trump said the Federal Emergency Management Agency is “getting in the way of everything” in North Carolina, and — without explaining how — claimed that Democrats used the agency “not to help.”

Here you go, CNN: FEMA apologizes after failing to deliver promised trailers to Helene survivors in North Carolina.

And: FEMA worker Marn’i Washington breaks silence on not helping Trump-voting hurricane victims. “The FEMA boss who was fired after ordering volunteers not to approach homes displaying Trump signs in Florida after Hurricane Milton has insisted her edict ‘was not isolated’ and also happened in North Carolina.”

Meanwhile, Trump is letting hurricane victims speak at the podium during his press conference, something that would have been inconceivable with Biden and his phalanx of handlers:

Related:

Posted at 2:14 pm by Ed Driscoll

FASTER? PLEASE! Trump’s Border Control Blitzkrieg. “Trump is carrying out an executive order blitzkrieg, issuing so many executive orders so quickly to undo the damage of the Biden (and Obama) years. Today I want to highlight just a few related to border security and deporting the millions of unvetted illegal aliens the Biden Administration deliberately let into the country.”

Posted at 1:48 pm by Stephen Green

CNN IS CUTTING HUNDREDS OF TV JOBS IN A DIGITAL PIVOT. Read the memo CEO Mark Thompson sent to staff.

  • CNN said it would cut about 200 roles focused on its TV operations.

  • The news organization also plans to hire about the same number in digital-focused positions.

  • CEO Mark Thompson said last year that he wanted to “future-proof” CNN.

CNN, the cable-news giant owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said it would cut about 200 TV-focused roles as part of a digital pivot.

The company also said it would hire about the same number of staffers in digital-focused roles and aim to fill 100 of them in the coming months.

The cuts would affect about 6% of CNN’s workforce, though the new roles mean total head count is unlikely to be significantly affected.

WBD is providing $70 million in funding as part of a drive to reach $1 billion in digital revenue by 2030.

Mark Thompson, the CEO of CNN, told staff in a memo on Thursday that he aimed to “shift CNN’s gravity towards the platforms and products where the audience themselves are shifting and, by doing that, to secure CNN’s future as one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”

CNN also said it planned to introduce a streaming-news product accessible on devices in the US and elsewhere.

In October, CNN brought in a paywall, charging some of its most loyal readers $4 a month for access to digital content.

I think the Daily Wire is getting a bit over its skis with this headline, but even asking this question would have been unthinkable a decade ago: Is This The End Of CNN? An Interview With Puck News’ Dylan Byers.

John [Bickley]: There are some questions about whether their existing staff is even willing to go in these new directions. I think you commented in your piece about Trump’s second inauguration, the coverage from CNN lost a fifth of its viewership from the Biden inauguration, but also just the way that the anchors and hosts appeared in it – their demeanor, their mood. Are they going to have to completely just revamp all of their key staff?

Dylan: Yeah, well, first of all, the damage on the ratings front was far worse. They didn’t lose a fifth. They had a fifth of what they had four years ago. So they went from 10 million to less than 2 million, in terms of viewers, which is drastic and reflects not only a sort of partisan divide, which I think a lot of people who might’ve voted for Trump might’ve watched on Fox News anyway. It’s not just about that. It’s that they have completely alienated the audience of people who usually came to television for big news events. They have lost that audience. And that is an existential challenge for them.

In terms of the staff, yeah – again, you can have different theories of the case for what a news organization like CNN should do. You can believe, as Jeff Zucker did, that CNN should stand up to Trump and should hold him accountable and be the truthtellers and build their business by being sort of the righteous truthtellers. Or you can believe that there should be a more neutral and dispassionate approach that feels a little bit more akin to, say, the BBC. Whatever your thesis, pivoting from one to the other under the same president, Trump 1.0 in 2016, and then Trump 2.0 in 2024, is going to be awkward. It is inevitably going to be awkward because you are going to have top talent like the Jake Tappers and the Dana Bashes, who once railed against the president, spoke out against him, who – after everything that they have reported on, everything that they have railed against, all of the warnings and the red flags and the alarm bells that they spent years and years setting off – are now welcoming this guy back to power and acting as though he could be Mitt Romney or George W. Bush.

And that is, again — whatever you think, whatever your politics are, pro-Trump, anti-Trump, whoever you are – that is a very, very awkward pivot. And it suggests one of two things: Either all of that hair-on-fire grandstanding of the first term was performative, and you should, as a CNN anchor, you should be auditioning for an Oscar for best actor, rather than a news Emmy. Or it suggests that you can be bought off and that in order to keep your business and to continue to go on TV and have the relative stardom and reputation that you do, you are willing to forego whatever concerns you had the last time around. And that does not reflect well, I think, on anyone at the network.

Related: Coal miners become computer coders.

—CNN Business, April 22nd, 2016.

Posted at 1:35 pm by Ed Driscoll

KICK THE TIRES AND LIGHT THE FIRES: Air Force planes will fly deportation flights under Trump order. “The aircrews and maintainers involved in the deportation flights will be in addition to 1,500 active-duty troops that the Pentagon will deploy to the southern border by the end of the week, the senior defense official said.”

Posted at 12:46 pm by Stephen Green