A — LITERAL — COP-OUT: Chicago police: ‘There are too many illegal guns.’
It’s the gangs who are doing the killing, and Chicago politicians are in bed with the gangs.
Archive for 2016
December 21, 2016
FAKE VIAGRA SELLERS HARDEST HIT: AT&T App Blocks Spam Phone Calls.
The service offers two solutions to stop robocalls. It can automatically block numbers suspected of fraud at the network level, preventing them from reaching your phone entirely, or it can deliver the call from a suspected number with a fraud warning on the display. The latter feature requires the user to be in an area with HD Voice support.
AT&T customers can activate the feature via their MyAT&T account or by downloading the AT&T Call Protect app. The app allows users to look at call details, receive spam warnings, block specific numbers and turn on and off Automatic Fraud Blocking.
The service requires an iOS or Android smartphone eligible for HD Voice. AT&T also warns that automatic blocking may block wanted phone calls, which means users would potentially have to manually whitelist certain numbers to make sure they aren’t blocked.
If you’re an AT&T customer, installing this app is a no-brainer.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Six 2016 Movie Flops Explained.
ANALYST: Twitter is ‘toast’ and the stock is not even worth $10.
The microblogging platform’s chief technology officer, Adam Messinger, tweeted that he would leave the company and “take some time off”, while Josh McFarland, vice president of product at Twitter, also said he was exiting the company. Both executives announced their departure on Tuesday.
Meanwhile, last month, Adam Bain stepped down as chief operating officer last month to be replaced by chief financial officer Anthony Noto, who has yet to be replaced. Twitter has also lost leaders from business development, media and commerce, media partnerships, human resources, and engineering this year.
The departures prompted Trip Chowdhry, the managing director of equity research at Global Equities Research, and a noted “uber-bear” on tech stocks, to issue a note on Tuesday claiming Twitter is “toast” and “not even a $10 stock”.
Twitter was fun in its freewheeling early days, a sort-of 24/7 cocktail party you could visit when it suited you. But it never was useful at driving web traffic, and its signal-to-noise ratio got way out of whack, just as the company was making ham-fisted efforts at monetizing a platform where there wasn’t much money to be made.
The social justice warrior stuff of the last couple of years was really just the stale icing on a badly made cake.
ANALYSIS: ARE YOU KIDDING ME? The electoral college is thwarting our ability to battle global warming.
NINTH AIR FORCE DESTROYS A GERMAN RAILROAD YARD: Another photo in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge series. This one doesn’t feature cold infantrymen, but it’s dramatic. Note the comment about the first day of good flying weather.
TRENDS: The New Swing Voters Are Suburbanites And Populist, And Both Lean Right.
Brad Todd:
Democrats in 2016 now know their coalition, and their platform, has become too urban and elitist. Hillary Clinton carried each of the nation’s 18 largest cities by large margins—and none of those margins was decisive in changing a single electoral vote. For example, even if she’d tied Trump in New York City, she’d still have won the Empire State’s electoral votes due to her 62,845-vote victory in the rest of the state.
Republicans, meanwhile, saw rock-bottom shares of the suburban vote go for Trump, revealing a vulnerability unseen for the GOP since modern suburbs were invented in the middle of the last century.
Both parties shed an important part of their historic bases in 2016 and their task now is to get them back. Smart analysts looking toward the next election should ask whether it will be easier for Trump to placate his educated affluent defectors in suburban cul-de-sacs or for Democrats to heal the party’s estrangement from white voters outside metropolises.
If Trump can deliver on his promise of Rust Belt jobs, then it won’t matter if he wins the South and the Midwest in 2020 by smaller-than-GOP-normal margins — just like it didn’t matter last month.
STEPHEN L. CARTER: ‘Rogue One’ Doesn’t Solve Sci Fi’s Big Problem.
When I left the theater after seeing “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” my first thought was: What about the Bothans? . . .
The good guys have stolen the secret architectural plans to the Death Star and must analyze them swiftly to find a flaw before it arrives and pulverizes their planet. And how exactly were the plans stolen? Rebel leader Mon Mothma tells us: “Many Bothans died to bring us this information.”
And the audience thinks, “I don’t know what a Bothan is, but they sure sound heroic.” But there is no further mention of the species, in that film or any others in the franchise. And, definitely, no sight of one.
OK. Fast-forward to now. “Rogue One” is a prequel to the movie now known as “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.” It tells the story of how the good guys got the plans to destroy the first Death Star. The tale is cleverly set up and quite engaging. There’s only one problem: no Bothans. Except for a single droid, everybody who matters in the heist is human.
Humans find humans more interesting. I suspect that Bothans feel the same way about Bothans. Though Ed Driscoll was unmoved by these particular humans: “About a third of the way through Rogue One, I came to my first conclusion about the movie, and I suspect I’m not alone: I don’t care about these characters.” Plus:
Why does any of this matter? Because the other conceit of the expanded universe is that the galaxy far, far away is full of all manner of intelligent life. But the Empire practices pure speciesism. All the posts of any importance are reserved for humans.
In the expanded universe, we are meant to see this as an obvious injustice. Speciesism is a trope for racism. The Empire practices segregation. That’s one of the reasons we are supposed to root against it. (The Empire would never have hired Yoda.) The Rebellion is integrated, humans and other species working together to throw off the oppression. That’s why we’re supposed to root for it.
But in “Rogue One,” the two sides are, on this point, indistinguishable. We see nonhumans among the good guys, but we never really get to meet them. You don’t have to be a sci-fi fan to see why the omission matters. There’s a symbolism at work here.
Well, Hollywood is basically the Empire in practice, but the Rebel Alliance in terms of self-image.
UPDATE (from Steve). As I posted in the comments section:
Bothans did not steal the original Death Star plans, and Mon Mothma wasn’t even in Star Wars: A New Hope. Also, it’s never made clear if Bothans are a non-human race, or humans from a planet called Botha.
“Many Bothans died” bringing the Rebel Alliance the news that “the Emperor himself” was on board the second Death Star during Return of the Jedi. The Emperor allowed that information to escape, killing some Bothans for plausibility one assumes, in order to set a trap for the Rebels — which would make for a great spy movie set in the Star Wars universe.
MIDSHIPTRANSPERSON NOT REPORTING FOR DUTY: Navy Abandons Plan to Use PC Job Titles After Sailors Complain.
FAKE NEWS: A fake story becomes a scandal in Kazakhstan.
“NEXT GENERATION” AUTOMOBILE HEADLIGHTS: Mercedes-Benz calls it Digital Light. The lights function like “HD quality” projectors. “With more precise light distribution, Mercedes not only wants to improve road visibility even more, but also project additional information onto the road on the fly.”
AMERICA, F*** YEAH! The Electoral College is actually awesome.
Ed Morrissey:
Unlike governors, whose state governments have total sovereignty within their borders, the presidency governs over states with their own sovereignty under the Constitution. The role of the presidency is at least somewhat limited to foreign policy and questions that are at least loosely connected to interstate issues and enforcement of other provisions of the Constitution. For that reason, the framers of the Constitution wanted to ensure that the president would have the greatest consensus among the sovereign states themselves, while still including representation based on population.
That is why each state gets the same number of electors as they have seats in the House and the Senate. It reduces the advantage that larger states have, but hardly eliminates it entirely; California has 55 electors while Wyoming has only three, to use the Times’ comparison. Rather than being an “antiquated system,” as they write, it’s an elegant system that helps balance power between sovereign states with national popular intent, and it forces presidential contenders to appeal to a broader range of populations.
The Founders’ genius endures.
REMINDER:
Here's what the election would look like without the electoral college: pic.twitter.com/KUB0BoTqDS
— MARK SIMONE (@MarkSimoneNY) December 20, 2016
JACOB SULLUM: Obama has not issued more pardons and commutations than any other president or the most in a single day.
The [New York] Times called Obama’s total of 1,324 pardons (which clear people’s records, typically years after they have completed their sentences) and commutations (which let prisoners go free early) “by far the largest use of the presidential power to show mercy in the nation’s history.” As clemency expert P.S. Ruckman Jr. pointed out on his blog, that was clearly wrong. Several presidents have issued more than 1,324 pardons and commuations, including Harry Truman (2,031), FDR (3,307), Calvin Coolidge (1,546), and Woodrow Wilson (2,453).
The Times also falsely suggested that there’s nothing unusual about the dramatic backloading of Obama’s clemency actions, saying “most presidents—including Mr. Obama—have waited until the end of their presidencies before issuing pardons and making grants of commutation.” In fact, Ruckman noted, “most presidents have granted clemency early in their administration and continued to do so every month of the term.” Obama, by contrast, has had many months and two entire years with no clemency grants at all. So far he has issued 94 percent of his pardons and commutations in the last two years of his presidency and 81 percent in his last year. Ruckman notes that the number of clemency actions this year is about 1,300 percent higher than the average for the previous three years, compared to an average fourth-year surge of 73 percent for all other presidential terms.
Why the backlog?
SO IT TURNS OUT THAT DEMOCRATS’ BIG WORRY IS THAT TRUMP WILL bring back the “Muslim registry” that existed under Obama. “The basic regulatory structure for the program still exists today, making it simple to re-list the countries and reinstate the program. Civil-rights organizations have been calling on the Obama administration to dismantle the program for years.”
BERLIN’S MOST WANTED: Police hunt ‘armed and dangerous’ Tunisian asylum seeker, 23, after his ID is found under lorry driver’s seat at scene of Christmas market massacre.
Police today revealed they are hunting Anis Amri, 23, a refugee who came to Germany earlier this year. His paperwork was found in truck’s footwell.
He is probably armed, ‘highly dangerous’ and a member of a ‘large’ Islamic organisation and has weapons training abroad, security sources say.
The suspect was also in contact with a ‘network of leading Islamist ideologists’.
Amri, who was born in the desert town of Tataouine in 1992 – a well-known ISIS stronghold close to the Libyan border – was apparently recently arrested for GBH but vanished before he could be charged.
In August 2016 he was arrested with a fake Italian passport and released but his phone was said to be monitored. He then disappeared in December, according to Die Welt.
A Facebook profile in his name shows ‘likes’ linked to Tunisian terror group Ansar al-Sharia, a Tunisian group with followers linked to extremists who murdered 22 at Tunis’ Bardo Museum in March 2015 and then 39 tourists at a beach resort in Sousse.
Amri has temporary permission to stay in the country but was due to face an asylum hearing.
I’d say it’s difficult to believe he was allowed to stay in the country, but it isn’t difficult at all.
TERRORISTS TARGET THE CHRISTMAS SEASON: It’s an icon target.
The Berlin Christmas market attack exhibits the same despicable calculation as Bastille Day in Nice. German citizens (belonging to the “Crusader coalition”) were the physical targets. However, the Christmas season — the Christian holiday — was the icon.
MY SECOND AMENDMENT PIECE, Permissible Negligence and Campaigns to Suppress Rights, is still #4 on SSRN’s Top Download list. And it’s within striking distance of #3! Thanks to everyone who downloaded it!
WHAT HATH MERKEL WROUGHT? Tunisian national ID’d as new suspect in Berlin terror attack.
The men in the bar aren’t in traditional Muslim dress; they’re dressed in jeans and tracksuits, and wearing their misogyny like a badge of honour. The women are curtly informed this is a cafe for men. One of the women asks a customer what his wife or cousin would do if they came into the cafe in search of a drink. They wouldn’t, he replied. They’re at home. The other woman reminds the men that they’re in France. No, they retort, here it’s the ‘Bled’, a word of North African origin meaning a small village in the sticks.
On leaving the bar the two women explain to the camera that in the last decade Islam in France has become a ‘penal code’ with an increasing list of interdictions, many aimed at subjugating women. As the pair talk a car full of men pulls up. The occupants say nothing; their gaze does the talking. Clearly intimidated, the women stop the interview.
This is what happens when you allow a lot of immigration and stress “multiculturalism” instead of assimilation. Compare.
GOOD: Keith Ellison’s tax cheating, scofflaw history comes back to haunt him. Although personally, I think he’s just the right person to be the face of today’s Democratic Party.
SOCIAL MEDIA: EU accuses Facebook of misleading it in WhatsApp takeover probe.
The issue regards a WhatsApp privacy policy change in August when it said it would share some users’ phone numbers with parent company Facebook, triggering investigations by a number of EU data protection authorities.
The Commission said Facebook had indicated in its notification of the planned acquisition that it would be unable reliably to match the two companies’ user accounts.
“The Commission’s preliminary view is that Facebook gave us incorrect or misleading information during the investigation into its acquisition of WhatsApp,” said Vestager.
Creepy.