JOE PAPPALARDO: Gunboat Diplomacy, But With Warthogs. “You don’t always need warships to conduct gunboat diplomacy. In Europe, detachments of U.S. warplanes are operating throughout the Baltic region, sending a reassuring message to American allies—and a warning to Russia. In recent weeks there have been some new arrivals: combat planes that are part of what defense wonks call a theatre security package, or TSP. Their arrival is the first TSP in Europe. All previous ones were deployed to Asia.”
Archive for 2015
May 14, 2015
FLIGHT ATTENDANTS LOSE THEIR “TANTRUM SUIT” ON AIRBORNE ELECTRONICS: “Notably, the AFA’s filing made essentially zero claims having anything to do with the safety of electronic devices on the flights. Instead, their argument centered on whether the power to decide whether flight attendants could treat passengers like children who hadn’t finished their vegetables resided with the FAA, or if the AFA should have some input.”
SO WITH ALL THE TALK ABOUT JEB BUSH AND THE IRAQ QUESTION, HERE’S MINE FOR HILLARY: Given that before the troop pullout in 2011, even the Obama Administration was touting Iraq as a big success — if you had it to do over again, would you yank the troops out and leave Iraq to ISIS?
Think anyone will ask her? Of course, first they’d have to ask her anything.
ON THE OTHER HAND, THE TRIP WASN’T EXACTLY TO TAHITI: Ethics office: Lawmakers took trip secretly paid for by foreign government. Still, unlike the NYT’s pseudo-scandal of some years ago — Walmart allegedly bribing bloggers with (unpaid) trips to Bentonville, Arkansas — this did involve gifts of crystal, oriental rugs, etc.
WELL, OF COURSE: Bob Zubrin: Germany’s Green-Power Program Crushes the Poor.
According to EU data, Germany’s average residential electricity rate is 29.8 cents per kilowatt hour. This is approximately double the 14.2 cents and 15.9 cents per kWh paid by residents of Germany’s neighbors Poland and France, respectively, and almost two and a half times the U.S. average of 12 cents per kWh. Germany’s industrial electricity rate of 16 cents per kWh is also much higher than France’s 9.6 cents or Poland’s 8.3 cents. The average German per capita electricity consumption is 0.8 kilowatts. At a composite rate of 24 cents per kWh, this works out to a yearly bill of $1,700 per person, experienced either directly in utility bills or indirectly through increased costs of goods and services. The median household income in Germany is $33,000, so if we assume an average of two people per household, the electricity cost would amount to more than 10 percent of available income. And that is for the median-income household. The amount of electricity that people need does not scale in proportion to their paychecks. For the rich, $1,700 per year in electric bills might be a pittance, or at most a nuisance. But for the poor who are just scraping by, such a burden is simply brutal.
“Green” programs are merely another way for the rich and near-rich to wage war on the poor and the middle class.
May 13, 2015
GOVERNMENT IS JUST ANOTHER WORD FOR THE THINGS WE CHOOSE TO DO TOGETHER: Two Baltimore City Jail Correctional Officers Caught On Video Looting A 7-11.
SUPPORT THE TROOPS: Operation Baen Bulk 2015.
TO BE FAIR, THERE WAS A SCARY ARTICLE IN A NEWSPAPER THAT A LOT OF UPPER-CLASS WOMEN READ: The EPA: Protecting Us from . . . Nail Salons.
I DON’T KNOW, BUT I THINK YOU CAN BUY THAT STUFF AT WILLIAMS-SONOMA: Why is there irradiated sea salt on the surface of Jupiter’s moon?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How Your Tax Dollars Fund Childhood Obesity.
AT A GUESS, ALL OF THEM: Professor Bainbridge: What Part Of the First Amendment Does The University of Colorado Not Understand? The proliferation of these functionally-illiterate “campus administrators” devoted to micromanaging student lives is one of the main reasons college has become so expensive, and so Orwellian. Fire them all, and the place will only improve.
A DOWNSIDE OF POT-SMOKING: “Cotton Vagina.”
VATICAN TO RECOGNIZE PALESTINE: The Vatican has brokered at “treaty” with the “State of Palestine.” The treaty reportedly deals with the activities of the Catholic Church in Palestine. Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas is expected meet with Pope Francis over the weekend to finalize details.
The Vatican has referred to Palestine as a “state” since November 2012, when the UN voted to upgrade the Palestinian Authority’s status from “entity” to “non-member state.” Just last week, Pope Francis said the Vatican would canonize two nuns who lived in Israel under Ottomon rule as “Palestinian saints.”
It hasn’t been very long since the Palestinian Authority/PLO was widely considered to be a terrorist organization.
Well, it’s all part of a global progressive movement. Pope Francis has been dogged by accusations that he is sympathetic to communism. The Pope doesn’t help allay these concerns when he meets with Raul Castro, reinstates a Marxist “liberation theology,” vocally anti-Israel Nicaraguan priest who won the Lenin Peace Prize, invites a Peruvian liberation theology priest to speak, and hosts the World Meeting of Popular Movements, where he said attendees must unite “against the structural causes of poverty, inequality, the lack of work, land and shelter, the denial of social and labor rights,” and confront the “empire of money.”
At a minimum, it seems Pope Francis is becoming very cozy with liberation theology, which is essentially a progressive/Marxist vision of Catholicism. A top Soviet bloc defector recently claimed that liberation theology was created by the KGB.
SEE, I THOUGHT ABOUT PUTTING A WET BAR AND COFFEEMAKER DOWNSTAIRS, WHERE I DO MOST OF MY WORK. But I decided it was good for me to have to get up and go upstairs to the kitchen. And maybe I was right: A 2-Minute Walk May Counter the Harms of Sitting.
FINALLY! The Romney-Holyfield Fight Promo Video. “Romney’s more likable here in two minutes than he was in 15 months of stage-managed stumping during Campaign 2012. . . . This fight can’t possibly be duller than Mayweather/Pacquiao, can it?” Nope.
WHY LEFTIES HATE THOMAS THE TANK ENGINE. Well, Thomas is cheerful and he works for a living, so of course lefties won’t like him. (via Mike Mollenhour.)
IT’S BASICALLY ETHANOL FOR THE BOS-WASH CORRIDOR: Amtrak Doesn’t Need More Taxpayer Cash, It Needs To Be Given Away. “While first responders were still trying to get crash victims off the smoking trains, partisans took to Twitter to explain why all this had happened: those awful Republicans were starving Amtrak of cash. . . . Amtrak lost nearly $1.3 billion in 2013. Since its creation, Amtrak has racked up over $31 billion in accumulated losses. And every penny of those losses has been covered by federal taxpayers. Amtrak has a lot of problems. A lack of taxpayer generosity is not one of them, not even close. . . . Given that the bulk of its rail traffic occurs in the well-heeled Northeast corridor, the company primarily serves as a means of transferring wealth from middle America to D.C., New York, and Boston. In its current form, Amtrak is less a for-profit passenger rail corporation and more a union jobs program (its ridiculous labor contracts are a major reason why the company is perpetually swimming in red ink). Despite all the disingenuous chatter about a lack of infrastructure funding for Amtrak, the company’s salary costs absolutely dwarf its infrastructure depreciation expenses. In 2013, for example, Amtrak spent $2.1 billion on salaries, while it recorded $687 million in annual depreciation costs. Amtrak’s pension losses alone in 2013 totaled $425 million.”
“They’re getting the taste of the same medicine that we’ve been getting for many years”
— Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI), on CNBC, saying that Democrats opposed to President Obama’s free trade agreement are finding out how difficult it is to compromise with him.
It’s hard to compromise with the God King.
ANSWER: YES, IF YOU ARE A PROGRESSIVE: Question: Are you “oversensitive”? According to the delicate snowflake who wrote the piece, one knows one suffers from this syndrome as follows:
I’ll bet that at least once in your life, you’ve been called “too dramatic” or “oversensitive.” I imagine that afterward you felt pretty ashamed, and maybe felt like you had no choice but to drop whatever issue you were upset about. That was a manipulative move on the part of the person who called you that. It was unfair. For the most part, I’ve viewed my sensitivity as a positive thing, because of the empathy and emotional awareness that comes with it. At worst, it’s been a heavy frustration or annoyance, because life would be so much easier and productive if my heart could recover from disappointments faster. The only time I saw it as negative is when others told me to see it that way. Growing up, I started to notice that a select few of the men in my family regularly found ways to misconstrue my sensitivity as a flaw, and conveniently enough, this tended to happen whenever I said something a bit too honest or uncomfortable about a situation they had a hand in.
Notice that it is the “unfair,” hard-hearted men who didn’t appreciate her “empathy and emotional awareness.” And of course the male aggression of calling her “sensitivity” a “flaw,” was triggered whenever our little snowflake was “a bit too honest” or made the men “uncomfortable about a situation they had a hand in.”
I’m sure that’s it, dear– it’s them, not you! When will these women grow up? They are non compos mentis, and thus should be unable to date, much less marry or procreate. These days, there are so many of these snowflakes that men would be well advised to administer this oversensitivity test prior to the first date.