Archive for 2016

NOBODY COVERS POLITICS AS INTIMATELY AS THE GRAY LADY!

[Michael] Barbaro* sees and hears with the eyes and ears of love. He is downright rapturous about what he witnessed. He sees an uninhibited Hillary Clinton breaking away from cautious stagecraft. He focuses on her being “pelted by a driving rain” and “overcome by exhaustion, exhilaration and a swirling wind.” She “lets loose with her hands.”

Her arms thrust skyward, one after the other, in what starts to feel like a dance.

There’s an unfamiliar sense of abandon and joy.

The rain grows heavier. Her wet clothes turn a shade darker. She cracks a wide smile. She takes in the scene around her and laughs before she finishes her sentence.

She’s drenched now, her voice hoarse. The storm is mussing her hair. It’s time to leave the stage. But just before doing so, she turns and raises both arms, giving herself up to the storm and the moment — and the looming end of this adventure.

Listen, we all have our weird sexual kinks, even if we choose not to broadcast them in national newspapers. But wow.

This New York Times Reporter Is Pretty Turned On By Hillary Clinton.

Lest you think this is the first time the Gray Lady descended into Pyongyang-level idolatry over a Democrat, here’s a couple flashbacks to 2009 when the Times was equally repulsive:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

* * * * *  * *

“This is the first president I’ve known who looks, talks and acts like a peer,” is how one Washington man explained it to me. “Notwithstanding his somewhat exotic life story, I feel like I understand what he’s like and where he’s coming from. And despite his incredible achievements, he still seems like a lot of people I know. If you stopped the clock in 2004, in fact, or maybe a couple of years earlier, he’d feel roughly like a peer in terms of accomplishments, too.

—Judith Warner, the author of a book titled Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, in a February 2009 New York Times article titled “Sometimes a President Is Just a President.” (Sigmund Freud to the emergency room, stat.)

But the Times wasn’t done yet:

“During these first 100 days, what has surprised you the most about this office? Enchanted you the most from serving in this office? Humbled you the most? And troubled you the most?”

Jeff Zeleney of the New York Times, May of 2009, asking the above questions to Mr. Obama during the press conference commemorating his administration’s first 100 days in power.

* Barbaro, despite covering national politics for one of America’s largest newspapers, didn’t know until a year ago that C-SPAN has separate phone lines for Republicans and Democrats: “New York Times Reporter Tweets Embarrassing Observation About C-SPAN During Benghazi Testimony.”

As Peggy Noonan recently noted, “It’s the big fact of American life now, isn’t it? That we are patronized by our inferiors.”

NEW YOU CAN USE: The Science Behind “Earworms,” aka Songs That Get Stuck In Your Head.

Pacing, the team found, is crucial. Many commonly cited earworms have upbeat, danceable tempos, but are still slow enough to easily track. Most earworms follow the melodic preferences of Western pop music, which in turn follows many of the melodic contour patterns in nursery rhymes. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” for instance, has a rising pitch in the first phrase that falls in the second, a common trait of earworms. (Maroon 5’s “Moves Like Jagger” was specifically called out by the study for this.)

But childlike simplicity and a peppy tempo aren’t enough to make an earworm. A true earworm changes its game up with at least one unusual interval structure, defined by the study as “unexpected leaps,” repeated notes, or any other idiosyncratic tick in the song’s composition that makes it memorable, in addition to catchy. The opening riffs of Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” and the Doobie Brothers’ “China Grove” are good examples of this.

Now how about we research for a cure?

GREAT MOMENTS IN PROJECTION:

Shot:  Obama: Only Working People Trump Knows are His Maids and Mowers.

—Bridget Johnson, PJ Media.com, today.

Chaser:

“[Obama] always talked about the New Rochelle train, the trains that took commuters to and from New York City, and he didn’t want to be on one of those trains every day,” said Jerry Kellman, the community organizer who enticed Obama to Chicago from his Manhattan office job. “The image of a life, not a dynamic life, of going through the motions… that was scary to him.”

Obama biographer David Mendell in 2007.

“When the president visits suburban backyards, it sometimes seems like a visit from a ‘president from another planet.’ After all, as a young man, Obama told The Associated Press: ‘I’m not interested in the suburbs. The suburbs bore me.’”

—Joel Kotkin, as quoted in an October 2010 Insta-post headlined “Obama’s Mistake: Suburban Nation, but Urban Political Strategy.”

‘I said something everybody knows is true, which is there are a whole bunch of folks in small towns in Pennsylvania, in towns right here in Indiana, in my home town in Illinois, who are bitter,’ he said on a visit to Muncie, Indiana. ‘So I said when you’re bitter, you turn to what you can count on. So people vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community,’ he said. ‘Now, I didn’t say it as well as I should have. If I worded things in a way that made people offended, I deeply regret that.’

“Obama ‘sorry’ for God and guns jibe,” the London Guardian, April 12, 2008. Note the big dog-eating grin on Obama’s face in the photo the Guardian chose to accompany their headline.

A NEW SOLARIUM WARGAME?: Steve Metz says a 2017 edition of Ike’s 1953 analytic game would help “re-set” US global strategy. I wonder if Metz’ Solarium 2017 will be classified or could be kept classified — fair question given Hillary’s record. Ike’s “seminar-type game” was top secret and remained top secret until the mid-1980s. Ike’s Project Solarium analysis produced a Top Secret document, NSC 162/2, which articulated the strategic concepts that guided US Cold War security policy. Note I said guided, not dictated. To use a phrase Metz uses, it provided “conceptual clarity.” As Metz notes, during the Cold War the US could focus on one primary opponent, the USSR. After 1991 the bi-polar world faded and multi-polar conflicts returned. Since then there have scores (if not hundreds) of serious attempts to do what Metz advises, “reassess the fundamental organizing concepts of American security” in a multi-polar world. Some of these attempts have used Solarium-like methods.

Did these assessments have the president’s focused attention? I doubt they did. It was different in 1953. Ike possessed one of the country’s finest strategic minds. He was a highly experienced Army officer who understood the benefits conducting “structured, participatory thinking exercises” — that’s a phrase I’ve used to describe seminar-type war games. Ike initiated Solarium and made the final assessment of the team reports. We don’t have an Ike in the White House now, and we won’t in 2017.

Which is actually a good reason to conduct a Solarium 2017. Solarium 2017 would be a valuable training exercise for our new president.

FUNDAMENTAL TRANSFORMATION: Leaked Bill Clinton Speech: Obama Years Left No Hope For White Working Class.

The economic stagnancy of the Obama years is to blame for plummeting life expectancy rates among white, working-class Americans, according to former president Bill Clinton, who privately told Democratic donors that lower-income whites “don’t have anything to look forward to when they get up in the morning.”

Clinton made the remarks while speaking to at a November 2015 closed-door fundraiser for Hillary Clinton in Canton, Ohio.

Echoing a theme of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s campaign, the former president expressed his concern that white, working-class Americans have been left behind over the last eight years.

It would have been interesting to see Hillary make an issue of this in her campaign.

SKYNET SMILES: Google’s DeepMind turns to StarCraft II after conquering Go.

“DeepMind is on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be told how,” DeepMind said.

“Games are the perfect environment in which to do this, allowing us to develop and test smarter, more flexible AI algorithms quickly and efficiently, and also providing instant feedback on how we’re doing through scores.”

DeepMind added that it has also used 2D games on Atari and complex games such as Go to test its AI system.

“The skills required for an agent to progress through the environment and play StarCraft well could ultimately transfer to real-world tasks,” it claimed.

That’s what I’m afraid of.

RUSSIA BUILDS VICTORY ONE LIE AT A TIME: Jim Dunnigan looks at the Kremlin’s arms build-up, the Russian economy, and Russian operations in Syria and Ukraine.

ISLAMIC STATE MASS EXECUTION SITE DISCOVERED NEAR MOSUL: It appears the victims were detainees who were tortured and beheaded.

A mass grave of 100 headless bodies has been found south of Mosul in a town that was recently recaptured from Islamic State, the Iraqi Army said on Monday. The grave was found in the grounds of the agricultural college in Hammam al-Alil, 15 kilometres south of Mosul, according to a statement from the army’s military information office. State television said the victims appeared to have been killed recently and were likely to have been detainees who had been held and tortured by Islamic State.

CNBC SHOULD SEND JOHN HARWOOD PACKING.

But why would they? CNBC is owned by the conglomerate that keeps Al Sharpton, Chris Matthews, Chuck Todd, and Andrea Mitchell on its payroll – presumably they’re thrilled when their Democrat activists with bylines act like precisely like Democrat activists with bylines.

UPDATE:

Shot: Andrea Mitchell Loses It Over ‘Extraordinary,’ ‘Magical’ Hillary Rally in New Hampshire.

NewsBusters today.

Chaser: MSNBC Runs Promo of Hillary Telling Andrea Mitchell She’s ‘My Kind of Woman’; ‘Love You!’

NewsBusters, September 15th.