KURT SCHLICHTER: Trollmaster Trump Is Driving Liberals to New Heights of Fussy Fury. “Trump has to be rolling with laughter to seeing liberals maneuvered into awkwardly defending free speech, since they despise the concept.”
Archive for 2016
December 1, 2016
IT’S NOT WHAT TREVOR NOAH WANTS YOU TO THINK SHE MEANT: Here’s What Tomi Lahren Meant by Asking, ‘What Did the KKK Do?’
TRAVEL: Astronaut Buzz Aldrin Medically Evacuated From South Pole.
Aldrin, 86, was visiting Antarctica when “his condition deteriorated,” according to White Desert, which organizes luxury tourism trips to the icy continent. The group said Aldrin was evacuated on the first available flight out of the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station to the McMurdo Station on the Antarctic coast under the care of a doctor with the U.S. Antarctic Program.
He is in stable condition, White Desert said.
The National Science Foundation provided the flight for Aldrin, who it described as an “ailing visitor.” Aldrin will be flown to New Zealand next, the NSF said.
Godspeed, Buzz.
VOX POPULI, SHUT UP: The Remainers aim to beat Brexit by playing a long game.
Britain’s elites had better tread carefully, or they’ll end up with their own destructor.
IN THE MAIL: From Harry Turtledove, The Center Cannot Hold.
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TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING: The Surest Measure of How China’s Economy Is Losing.
There are data, grounded in real-world calculations, that show China’s economic importance falling — not rising slowly, nor staying stable, but falling. The most important indicator is net private wealth, which is the single best measure of a country’s economic size and of the pool of resources available to its public sector for military or social spending.
In work dating back to 2000 and carried out with no geo-economic agenda, Credit Suisse has estimated private wealth. The new estimates, through the middle of 2016, show American private wealth at $84.8 trillion and Chinese private wealth at $23.4 trillion. Moreover, the gap is widening. With $60 trillion less in private wealth than the United States, China’s global economic leadership is a fable.
There are of course more facts to bring to the argument at hand than the Credit Suisse data, but the latter are an excellent place to start. The data series is well behaved statistically, which means it has credibility. It is measured globally, so shares can be calculated. The result: the People’s Republic of China’s level of private wealth actually fell from mid-2015, both in amount and in share.
Export-driven economies can grow only so large before the rest of the world becomes saturated with their exports. At that point, the challenge is to generate enough domestic demand for continued growth, or stagnation results. Japan, with one of the world’s highest per capita GDPs in the world, failed that challenge a quarter century ago and has stagnated ever since. China, with a much smaller per capita GDP — and just as significant, a much more corrupt government — seems unlikely to do any better than Japan did.
FASTER, PLEASE: The Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency Will Test-Fire its New Larger SM-3IIA Interceptor Missile in Space.
The new missile, called the SM-3IIA, is slated to fire from a land-based missile defense site planned by the Pentagon for Poland by 2018, a Missile Defense Agency spokesman, told Scout Warrior in a statement.
SM-3 missiles, first deployed on Navy ships, are exo-atmospheric interceptor missiles designed to destroy short and intermediate range incoming enemy ballistic missiles in above the earth’s atmosphere. With the weapon, threats are destroyed in space during what’s described as the mid-course phase of flight.
“The SM-3 Block IIA missile is beingThe SM-3 IIA guided missile is a larger version of the SM-3 IB in terms of boosters and the kinetic warhead, which allows for increased operating time. The second and third stage boosters on the SM-IIA are 21″ in diameter,allowing for longer flight times and engagements of threats higher in the exo-atmosphere,” Missile Defense Agency spokesman Christopher Szkrybalo told Scout Warrior in a statement.
I’m old enough to remember to “Star Wars” detractors insisted it was impossible to “hit a bullet with a bullet.”
BLUE ON BLUE: UCLA students compare feminism to white supremacy.
University of California, Los Angeles students were treated to a dinner dialogue this month on the topic of “white feminism” and its relation to white supremacy.
The “White Feminism” dinner dialogue was hosted by the campus Intergroup Relations Program, an administrative center that seeks to educate the UCLA community on issues of “social identity, interpersonal, and intergroup relations/conflict, prejudice reduction, and social justice.”
Celia Cody-Carrese, an Intergroup Relations Center intern who helped put on the event, told The Daily Bruin that organizers chose white feminism as their topic because they think feminism has traditional ties with white supremacy, noting that the term “feminism” is most frequently applied to white women, while the concerns of black women are generally treated as a separate, racial issue.
Mitali Gupta, a UCLA Senior who attended the event, told Campus Reform that feminism’s link to white supremacy was indeed discussed during the meeting, adding that she agrees that such a connection exists.
You can’t make this up. Sadly, you don’t have to.
OIL WARS: Here’s Why the OPEC Oil Rally Is Likely to Be Short-Lived.
The oil price rally sparked by an OPEC-Russia deal to cut output is likely to be short-lived, say traders in Asia, because the agreement may only draw more supplies from storage tanks and more crude shipments from the United States.
And even without increased supplies from elsewhere, if the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and Russia do reduce production by 1.5 million barrels per day (bpd) as pledged, the cuts would not be deep enough to shrink a glut that began to build in mid-2014, traders said.
“The cut by OPEC will be largely offset by increases in U.S. production where the rig count has already increased,” said India Oil Corp’s Director of Finance A K Sharma.
This isn’t news to Instapundit readers, although I should ask you again: Have you hugged a fracker today?
CHANGE? Trump’s Treasury Choice Says ‘No Absolute Tax Cut’ for the Wealthy.
High-income households won’t receive an “absolute tax cut” under a Trump tax plan, the president-elect’s new pick for Treasury secretary said on Wednesday, a promise that is at odds with tax proposals from Donald Trump and House Republicans.
Steven Mnuchin said that “Any reductions we have in upper-income taxes will be offset by less deductions, so that there will be no absolute tax cut for the upper class.” The big tax cut, he told CNBC, will go the middle class.
I’m less concerned with tax cuts than I am with eliminating regulations which stifle business formation and product/service innovation. Wealthy Americans need something productive to do with their dollars, rather than just speculating on equities markets.
MARK RIPPETOE: Back Pain and Back Strength.
THE BENEFITS OF PALEO: New evidence that Lucy, our most famous ancestor, had superstrong arms.
JUST THINK HOW MANY MORE WOULD HAVE SOLD IF HILLARY HAD BEEN ELECTED! Americans Bought Enough Guns on Black Friday to Arm the Marine Corps.
BUZZFEED TARGETS HGTV HOSTS FOR ATTENDING CHRISTIAN CHURCH: “At the end of all this, [BuzzFeed’s Kate Aurthur] has harmed [HGTV hosts] the Gaineses, harmed her own cause, harmed her colleagues, and harmed her own reputation. And we still don’t know the Gaines’ view on marriage or why it is important to know the religious beliefs of reality television hosts. Given the month-long outcry over ‘fake news’ swaying a presidential election, one would hope Buzzfeed takes more care in the future not to publish more fake news of its own.”
But one should hold his or breath waiting for BuzzFeed to improve its deplorable standards.
What time does BuzzFeed land?
WELL, SHE WAS A CAMPUS LEFTY, SO. . . . Rory Gilmore Is A Monster. “The old Rory had flaws, but she remained a revelation — a shy, smart teen girl who gets the guys is still a rarity on TV. But in the same way that the jump from small screen to big killed the wit and heart of ‘Sex and the City,’ the new ‘Gilmore Girls’ episodes only highlight the worst of Rory’s qualities: her impulsiveness, her selfishness, her inflated sense of her own worth, her tendency to quit at the first sign of trouble — and now she’s a grown woman, one who doesn’t seem to have learned from any of her mistakes. The revival also introduces us to a terrible new quality in her: amorality. Turns out there’s nothing revelatory about an adult who moves through the world so thoughtlessly.”
ART OF THE DEAL: How Donald Trump Sealed the Deal to Keep Carrier Jobs in the U.S.
MIRTA OJITO: I Forgot Fidel a Long Time Ago.
Growing up, Fidel loomed large in my life and in the life of most Cubans of the generation born shortly after he assumed power in 1959. Because we knew nothing else, because we were taught only one reality, Fidel came to embody not only the ideas of the revolution but also the nation itself. He was the mambí (those who fought for independence against Spain) and the bearded revolutionary; he was the national anthem and the flag, the mountains and the sea.
All powerful, all seeing, he came to replace God at a time when the government declared the country atheist. Who needs God in the face of such powerful force?
To reject him, to stand against everything he stood for was to be disloyal not only to him but to la patria – the motherland.
It is no coincidence that the government adopted words to demean those who wanted a different life. In revolutionary Cuba, people didn’t just leave the island, they “abandoned the motherland.” At first and for a long time they were called gusanos, or worms. Later, when my time came to leave, we were called escoria, or scum.
I left in a boatlift that brought more than 125,000 Cubans from the port of Mariel, in northern Cuba, to South Florida 36 years ago. On a wall in my home office I keep the departure order the government issued to the Mañana, the boat that carried me and my family to the US. Under the category of shipment, someone at the port wrote the word “lastre” or ballast.
Read — and share — the whole thing.
BOB DYLAN SNUBS OBAMA.
From the comments: “I’ll bet he would meet him out on Highway 61.”
AT AMAZON, Sale on Levi’s Men’s 505 Regular Fit Jeans.