Archive for 2016
October 5, 2016
TO BE FAIR, THAT PUTS THEM ONE UP ON THEIR AMERICAN COUNTERPARTS: Russian TV drips with contempt for weakened Obama, mocks Hillary’s age and information carelessness.
SMART DIPLOMACY: How the Nuclear Deal Enriches Iran’s Revolutionary Guard.
In short, whether its internal security, foreign adventures, or large corporate ventures, the IRGC plays an outsized role in Iran’s internal power structure. Established in 1979 to consolidate the Islamic revolution and fight its enemies, the IRGC has evolved over the years into a full-fledged conventional army, conducting and directing terrorist activity abroad. The Guard has also become a political power broker, an economic conglomerate, and an agency in charge of nuclear and ballistic-missile proliferation.
The interaction among military, economic, and political power is critical in understanding the centrality of the IRGC to Iran’s current system. The Guard exploits its influence and capabilities in one realm to increase its presence in another. Its growing economic clout is both an end in itself and a tool to advance its other agendas. Thus, IRGC revenues from economic activities yield the necessary resources and political leverage to place its members in positions of power. Conversely, the Guard’s political power serves the economic enterprises it owns, and both its political and economic weight in turn advance its military projects.
That’s just from the online introduction. The full report is available in PDF format, and is both dry and damning of the Obama Administration.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Nobel Prize in chemistry goes to scientists who made molecular machines.
Three scientists whose independent work led to the development of molecular machines with controllable movement won the 2016 Nobel Prize in chemistry, the organization announced Wednesday.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the prize to Jean-Pierre Sauvage, Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa, who will share a prize of nearly $1 million.
“The development of computing demonstrates how the miniaturization of technology can lead to a revolution,” The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences wrote in a statement. “The 2016 Nobel laureates in chemistry have miniaturized machines and taken chemistry to a new dimension.” . . .
The academy added that this year’s chemistry Nobel laureates took “molecular systems out of equilibrium’s stalemate and into energy-filled states in which their movements can be controlled.”
“In terms of development, the molecular motor is at the same stage as the electric motor was in the 1830s, when scientists displayed various spinning cranks and wheels, unaware that they would lead to electric trains, washing machines, fans and food processors,” the academy wrote. “Molecular machines will most likely be used in the development of things such as new materials, sensors and energy storage systems.”
I’ve been writing about this stuff for a long time. It’s nice to see it becoming reality. Meanwhile, the Foresight Guidelines for responsible nanotechnology development are worth mentioning again.
IT WOULD ONLY BE A CRISIS IF THINGS WERE THE OTHER WAY AROUND: Girls outperforming boys in high school.
Young women are taking more honors classes, getting better grades and have a higher overall GPA than their male peers, according to a report compiling SAT Test data.
The report, released by the College Board, looked at the test scores of college-bound seniors in 2016, and reviewed high school data demographics. Girls, it turns out, are doing much better in high school than boys. In a chart compiled by American Enterprise Scholar Mark Perry, it’s clear that girls are outperforming boys on nearly every level in high school.
A majority (56 percent) of those in the top 10 percent of their class were girls, and most As and A+s were obtained by girls. Just 40 percent of A+s went to boys. Further down the grading scale, boys earned the majority (63 percent) of grades D and below. The overall GPA in 2016 was 3.45 for girls and 3.30 for boys. Girls also took more AP and honors classes, even in math and science.
Don’t expect to hear calls for helping boys perform better in school. Activists have focused so heavily on girls for years now that boys have gotten the message that they no longer matter. It’s what Christina Hoff Sommers wrote about in her book “The War Against Boys” nearly two decades ago.
What Perry noted in the chart above isn’t new for this year, it’s been a trend since before Hoff Sommers’ book. Yet the focus is still on girls.
Funny, that.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Why I had to kill my sister to defend our family’s ‘honor.’
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: Obama administration considering strikes on Assad, again.
Inside the national security agencies, meetings have been going on for weeks to consider new options to recommend to the president to address the ongoing crisis in Aleppo, where Syrian and Russian aircraft continue to perpetrate the deadliest bombing campaign the city has seen since the five-year-old civil war began. A meeting of the Principals Committee, which includes Cabinet-level officials, is scheduled for Wednesday. A meeting of the National Security Council, which could include the president, could come as early as this weekend.
Last Wednesday, at a Deputies Committee meeting at the White House, officials from the State Department, the CIA and the Joint Chiefs of Staff discussed limited military strikes against the regime as a means of forcing Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to pay a cost for his violations of the cease-fire, disrupt his ability to continue committing war crimes against civilians in Aleppo, and raise the pressure on the regime to come back to the negotiating table in a serious way.
It seems Obama isn’t yet done throwing prestige away on Syria.
MSNBC PANEL GOES AFTER DNC-MSM FOR SHOWING BIAS ON TWITTER.
How dare the DNC-MSM show their leftwing bias on Twitter – don’t they know that’s what MSNBC was created for?
THE POLITICS OF DISSOCIATION: Matthew Continetti explains “Why populism, nationalism, and tribalism will outlast Trump and Clinton:”
This is a moment of dissociation—of unbundling, fracture, disaggregation, dispersal. But the disconnectedness is not merely social. It is also political—a separation of the citizenry from the governments founded in their name. They are meant to have representation, to be heard, to exercise control. What they have found instead is that ostensibly democratic governments sometimes treat their populations not as citizens but as irritants.
Read the whole thing. As the late Kenneth Minogue wrote in the New Criterion in the summer of 2010:
My concern with democracy is highly specific. It begins in observing the remarkable fact that, while democracy means a government accountable to the electorate, our rulers now make us accountable to them. Most Western governments hate me smoking, or eating the wrong kind of food, or hunting foxes, or drinking too much, and these are merely the surface disapprovals, the ones that provoke legislation or public campaigns. We also borrow too much money for our personal pleasures, and many of us are very bad parents. Ministers of state have been known to instruct us in elementary matters, such as the importance of reading stories to our children. Again, many of us have unsound views about people of other races, cultures, or religions, and the distribution of our friends does not always correspond, as governments think that it ought, to the cultural diversity of our society. We must face up to the grim fact that the rulers we elect are losing patience with us.
Facing up is fine – but eventually, the anointed shouldn’t be entirely surprised if and when voters discover the advice proffered by a relatively unknown community advisor to his constituents, and begin to get in their faces and punch back twice as hard.
IF TINGLES SAID THIS, IT MUST HAVE BEEN BAD: Chris Matthews: Kaine Looked ‘Desperate’ and Pence Won the Debate.
JUSTICE FOR SALE: Obama DOJ drops charges against alleged broker of Libyan weapons.
Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose lawyers also signed the motion.
The deal averts a trial that threatened to cast additional scrutiny on Hillary Clinton’s private emails as Secretary of State, and to expose reported Central Intelligence Agency attempts to arm rebels fighting Libyan leader Moammar Qadhafi.
Government lawyers were facing a Wednesday deadline to produce documents to Turi’s legal team, and the trial was officially set to begin on Election Day, although it likely would have been delayed by protracted disputes about classified information in the case.
A Turi associate asserted that the government dropped the case because the proceedings could have embarrassed Clinton and President Barack Obama by calling attention to the reported role of their administration in supplying weapons that fell into the hands of Islamic extremist militants.
“They don’t want this stuff to come out because it will look really bad for Obama and Clinton just before the election,” said the associate.
Old news, nothing to it, let’s move on.
VIDEO: BRIAN LAMB OF C-SPAN TALKS MOTION PICTURES AND THEIR IMPACT ON THE POLITICAL LANDSCAPE WITH JOHN PODHORETZ.
THAT’S RICH: Obama Hopes for No More ‘Imperial Presidencies’
From “I won” to “My pen and phone” to “Do as I say, not as I do” in eight short years.
OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: “Do not make yourself a target for the Clintons. This has been a rule for as long as we’ve known them. If you get in their sights, bad things happen to you. The latest case in point is Scott Adams, writer of the Dilbert comic strip who has turned his thoughts to blogging about the Trump phenomenon.”
To paraphrase Tom Wolfe, according to the media-academic complex, fascism is forever descending upon the American right, but it always seems to land rather far left of the target. (Unexpectedly.)
OUR FRIENDS IN ANKARA: Baghdad warns of ‘regional war’ over Turkish military presence.
The tensions between Iraq and Turkey have risen to the surface ahead of a long-expected offensive by Iraqi and U.S.-backed forces to retake the northern city of Mosul from Islamic State.
Turkey has warned the attack would send a wave of refugees over its border and, potentially, on to Europe.
Ankara also worries Baghdad’s Shi’ite Muslim-led forces will destabilize the largely Sunni city close to its territory.
It is uncomfortable with the arrangement of Kurdish forces expected to take part in the Mosul offensive, with the blessing of Baghdad and Washington.
Turkey announced late on Tuesday it was calling in Iraq’s ambassador to complain about the parliamentary vote, and the foreign ministry issued a statement expressing disappointment.
It will be years before we’re done paying the price for treating ISIS like the “jayvee.”
ELDERLY POLITICIAN ACCIDENTALLY TELLS TRUTH: The Hill: Bill Clinton goes way off message on ObamaCare.
Hillary Clinton and the White House struggled on Tuesday to explain Bill Clinton’s blistering critique of ObamaCare, which exposed divisions in the Democratic Party over the healthcare law.
The former president’s surprisingly strong criticism of Obama’s signature achievement also gave Republicans free talking points ahead of the vice presidential debate.
Clinton unloaded on the Affordable Care Act during a campaign rally Monday afternoon in Michigan, a state where premium hikes are expected to be around 17 percent this fall.
“You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have healthcare and then the people that are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half,” Clinton said.
“It’s the craziest thing in the world.”
Nah, who am I kidding, he’s just teeing up things for single-payer while letting Hillary pretend that’s not her policy:
He then called for more a government-driven system in which people could buy into Medicare and Medicaid. Without that option, Clinton said, the law “doesn’t make any sense” and “the insurance model doesn’t work here.”
A spokesman for the former president defended the comments on Tuesday, painting them as being in tune with his wife’s overall healthcare message. The Democratic presidential nominee has called for ObamaCare to be adjusted around the edges but largely kept in place.
“And while he was slightly short-handed, it’s clear to everyone, including President Obama, that improvements are needed,” Bill Clinton spokesman Angel Urena said in an emailed statement.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign also sought to do damage control, underscoring that both she and Obama had acknowledged in the last several weeks that there are “real problems” with the healthcare reform law, particularly on affordability.
But others saw Bill Clinton’s comments as going badly off course at a time when the law is facing one of its roughest stretches in six years.
I’m going with “teeing up.”
IF YOU INSIST: Stop Pining for Joe Biden.
FUNDAMENTALLY TRANSFORMED: Sex Crimes Soar as Oktoberfest Attendance Plummets.
QUESTION ASKED: What’s the world coming to when I can’t hate the BBC?
Flashback: ‘A Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture.’
THIS SORT OF THING DIDN’T USED TO HAPPEN AT TENNESSEE: Tennessee Student Accused of Sexual Harassment Because He Wrote Instructor’s Name Wrong: Student had no idea ‘Sarah Jackson’ was a pornographic model.
A University of Tennessee student committed sexual harassment, according to his professor, because he wrote his lab instructor’s name incorrectly: he inadvertently wrote the name of a pornographic model instead.
As punishment, the student received a grade of zero on an assignment.
But the student, Keaton Wahlbon, says the mistake was just that: a mistake. He had never even heard of the model in question—he had simply chosen a name at random.
Confused? Let me explain. Wahlbon is enrolled in Professor Bill Deane’s earth science class. Recently, Deane gave the class a quiz, and one of the questions was, “What is your lab instructor’s name? (if you don’t remember, make something good up).” The lab instructor is a kind of teaching assistant, and indeed, Wahlbon couldn’t remember her name. So he wrote in “Sarah Jackson.”
“I picked a random generic name,” said Wahlbon in an interview with Reason.
But “Sarah Jackson” is apparently the name of a pornographic model. When Wahlbon got the quiz back, his answer was marked “inappropriate” and he had received a grade of zero.
“I had no idea it was the name of a nude model,” said Wahlbon.
Wahlbon emailed Deane, asking him to reverse the instructor’s decision. In his email, Wahlbon raised some very good points: specifically, that “Sarah Jackson” is a very common name, and the top Google search results for the name weren’t even inappropriate. (As a reminder, the question had even supplied the clearly-misleading instruction: “make something good up.”)
I’m hoping this will turn out to be some sort of mistaken report.
October 4, 2016
FOCUS GROUP WEIGHS IN:
