HMM: China launches world’s first quantum communications satellite. “China has just launched the world’s first quantum communications satellite. The 600 kg spacecraft blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Center in the Gobi Desert at 0140 local time. The satellite is both an extreme test of the weird properties of quantum mechanics, and a technology testbed for what could be the start of a global, unhackable communications network.”
Archive for 2016
August 16, 2016
COMING SOON, PROBABLY: Trump caused Sabra and Shatila.
THIS IS KNOWN AS LEVEL-FIVE AUTONOMOUS DRIVING: Ford Promises Cars With No Steering Wheel or Pedals by 2021. I prefer level four, where the car drives itself, but can still be driven manually.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Legions of nanorobots target cancerous tumours with precision. Faster, please.
BARACK OBAMA DOESN’T CARE ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE. Shot: First Family spending afternoon with friends at private beach. 81° & partly cloudy. 3rd beach outing of their vacation.
Chaser: Worse than Katrina, official says; tens of thousands rescued in Louisiana floods.
CHANGE: Sweden’s first Muslim minister quits over drink-driving scandal.
Funny, but this story didn’t mention she was Muslim, but it did tell us this:
She is not the only politician to have to drop out since Sweden’s political left returned to power two years ago.
Deputy premier and environment minister Asa Romson from the Green party resigned in May after a series of gaffes, the last being to describe the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States as “the accidents of September 11”.
Housing minister Mehmet Kaplan, of Turkish origin, had to step down in April after comparing Israelis to the Nazis, and Mona Sahlin, the national coordinator for protecting democracy against violent extremism, was forced to resign in May after media revealed that she had made false income declarations for her bodyguard to help him obtain bank loans.
Hmm.
STATE DEPARTMENT EXPLORED A NIGERIAN LAND DEAL CONNECTED TO A CLINTON FOUNDATION DONOR: It’s complicated, so read the whole thing. But once again the smoke of corruption. Will the FBI look for the fire?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As somebody said on Twitter, the difference between Hillary and normal people is that when she gets an email from a rich Nigerian proposing a deal, it’s actually from a rich Nigerian, proposing a deal.
AT AMAZON, savings in Industrial and Scientific. I find this category kind of fun to browse.
WHEN OBAMA-ERA LEFTWING MEMES COLLIDE:
Shot: Juries have no place at rape trials – victims deserve unprejudiced justice.
—Headline, the Guardian, Friday.
Double Shot: Well ain’t SHE Ms. Suzy Sunshine? Angry feminist Julie Bindel: All men are rapists and should be shot.
—Headline, Twitchy, Friday.
Chaser: Nate Parker’s College Rape Trial Raises Questions for ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Release.
—Headline, Variety, yesterday.
Hangover: Nate Parker’s Rape Accuser Committed Suicide in 2012, Her Brother Speaks Out (Exclusive).
—Headline, Variety, today.
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon warned yesterday on Twitter, “The fights over BIRTH OF A NATION are going to be a.) amazing and b.) wholly removed from the film as a work of art. They’re gonna be epic.”
ANSWERING THE STUPID QUESTIONS: Would racism exist if there had been no US slavery?
The answer, of course, is yes. When Gunnar Myrdal wrote about racism in his An American Dilemma, it wasn’t the racism that made Jim Crow an American dilemma — it was the racism set against a founding document that declared that all men are created equal.
Racism is everywhere, and anyone who has traveled abroad and paid attention knows that it’s worse most other places than it is here in the United States. (And that includes Africa itself, of course, where ethnic differences that untutored Americans can’t even see — it’s like some ancient Star Trek episode — are of burning importance).
But the reason why so many commentators have to pretend that America is uniquely bad — and even teach college students that slavery was a uniquely American institution, invented by the Founders — is that otherwise they’d lose out on a lucrative hustle.
IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WHEN THE TARGET IS A REPUBLICAN RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT: The Psychiatric Question: Is It Fair to Analyze Donald Trump From Afar?
In the midst of a deeply divisive presidential campaign, more than 1,000 psychiatrists declared the Republican candidate unfit for the office, citing severe personality defects, including paranoia, a grandiose manner and a Godlike self-image. One doctor called him “a dangerous lunatic.”
The year was 1964, and after losing in a landslide, the candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, sued the publisher of Fact magazine, which had published the survey, winning $75,000 in damages.
But doctors attacked the survey, too, for its unsupported clinical language and obvious partisanship. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted what became known as the Goldwater Rule, declaring it unethical for any psychiatrist to diagnose a public figure’s condition “unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
Enter Donald J. Trump.
The 2016 Republican nominee’s incendiary, stream-of-consciousness pronouncements have strained that agreement to the breaking point, exposing divisions in the field over whether such restraint is appropriate today.
Restraint is never appropriate, if it might lead to the wrong party winning. Duh.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens.
CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR. “How Jon Stewart’s Culture of Ridicule Left America Unprepared for Donald Trump,” as explained by Jesse Bernstein of the left-leaning Jewish-themed Tablet magazine:
The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.
As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them.
But having won WWII, the aging New Dealers of 1948 could at least look to a world-changing accomplishment with pride. (The New Deal itself, on the other hand…) In contrast, as Richard Fernandez writes, the only thing that today’s left can offer middle America is smug itself:
But to anyone outside the echo chamber the joke was on Stewart and his cronies. The average person could see the invidious contrast; how easily the email accounts of 100 Democratic bigwigs could be hacked, with what contemptuous ease someone could make off with the DNC’s emails, steal all the OPM records. They watched as time after time suspects “well known to the police” executed successful terror attacks in Western cities despite the assurances of the laughing men.
They saw ISIS run off with billions of dollars of foreign military aid; saw the “smartest people” in history rolled. They were regaled by the spectacle of Putin booting Obama out of the Middle East with a midget air force and a rustbucket navy. They witnessed a bunch of armed thugs torch a US consulate in Benghazi without the dying ambassador even able to make that 3 am call to Hillary Clinton. They watched Turkey wobble and Europe overrun by migrant tides.
It hit them: it was these ineffably superior people who were the jokers, the clowns whose only tangible skill was to make fun of everybody so nobody would notice that’s all they were good for. In fact the only person they could stop with any probability of success and only if they ganged up on him was Donald Trump. That was it. They can’t see the audience in darkness beyond the footlights heading for the exits.
And with Stewart and Colbert having departed their spawning grounds, “Donald Trump Is Jon Stewart’s True Successor,” Robert Tracinski adds at the Federalist:
The real giveaway is Trump’s employment of a classic Jon Stewart trope: Clown Nose On, Clown Nose Off.
This approach dates back to Stewart’s famous, or infamous, appearance on “Crossfire” in 2004, when “The Daily Show” was still fairly new and “Crossfire” was very, very old. In a fit of insufferable self-righteousness, Stewart denounced the hosts for “hurting America,” I guess because of the way they promoted bitter partisan bickering as a form of entertainment. Because Stewart is all about Democrats being nice to Republicans, don’t you know.
Yes, there was something to this. I did my first TV appearances about this time, and the big revelation to me was that it’s no accident that people always shout each other down on today’s cable news shows. Producers deliberately induce this style because they think it makes the show more exciting than if everybody just waited his turn to engage in some kind of Dullsville substantive discussion.
But in retrospect, I think we can tell which show “hurt America” more. One was just another fairly forgettable cable TV shoutfest. The other had a transformative effect, convincing a whole generation of millennials to get their news and political opinions from one-sided fake news shows run by blatantly partisan comedians. There are now about a dozen of these, all imitating Stewart. If the sin of “Crossfire” was its attempt to turn political debate into entertainment, it had nothing on “The Daily Show,” which replaced political debate with entertainment.
But for a rather limited audience — the Northeast Corridor ruling class, and those who aspired to be, as Thomas Sowell would say, their mascots.
WELL, IF YOU’RE GOING TO STEAL SOMEONE’S CAR, YOU SHOULD LEAVE THEM A GIFT: Knoxville Couple Find Guns, Condoms In Recovered Vehicle.
AT AMAZON, Collectible Coins.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF HOMOPHOBIA? Protesters Yell Gay Slurs at Cops in Milwaukee. (Video at link.)
ON ELVIS PRESLEY’S DEATHDAY, here’s something I wrote a while back.
THE SUBWAY POLE-DANCING MAKES ME A BIT SUSPICIOUS: This Insanely Fit Grandpa Is Taking the Internet by Storm.
NICK GILLESPIE IS UNHAPPY, but the truth is that Gary Johnson and William Weld look more like moderate Republicans than Libertarians.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Milwaukee Congresswoman: Black Incarceration Rates Created ‘Powder Keg’ in City.
Reminder: Milwaukee hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1908.
DEM CANDIDATE CAN’T SAY HILLARY IS HONEST: “Democratic New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan declined three separate times to answer whether she believes Hillary Clinton is “honest” during an interview Monday on CNN.” Hillary is a presidential candidate. When Trump shoots his mouth and angers Repubs it’s big time mainstream news.
THEIR PREDICTIONS ON THIS TOPIC HAVEN’T BEEN EXACTLY STELLAR OF LATE, BUT OKAY: Scientists say the US is facing the strongest hurricane season since Sandy hit the East Coast.
The one thing I’m sure of is that whenever our “hurricane drought” ends, it will be the result of “climate change.”
DEALS ON fabrics at Amazon.
HMM. AFTER THE BREXIT VOTE. “The public can [now] be told of [Choudary’s] conviction for encouraging support for Isis.”
For years Anjem Choudary deflected claims that his words and actions were designed to push his followers into terrorism by claiming he believed in a “covenant of security”; that meant because Britain gave a home to Muslims, it should not be the target of violent jihad.
But the fact is that again and again, people connected to him and his Islamist groups became involved in terrorism. The sheer weight of that pattern, involving 100 people in Britain alone, points to this being not a coincidence but a deliberate aim.
The lifting of legal restrictions on Tuesday means the public can be told of his conviction for encouraging support for Islamic State. Choudary and his co-defendant, Mohammed Rahman, 33, were convicted in July but details of the trial, including the verdict, could not be reported until now. It comes after years of widespread bafflement as to how he avoided going to jail for terrorism offences.
The view that Choudary played a pernicious role in funneling people towards terrorism has remarkable levels of agreement across the political and religious spectrum. . . .
By 2005 at the latest, the authorities in the UK had information showing al-Muhajiroun’s willingness to support jihad, according to documents seen by the Guardian.
Sounds like someone protected him for quite a while, for some reason or another.