WHATEVER WE’RE PAYING JILL STEIN, WE SHOULD DOUBLE IT: Day One of Wisconsin Recount as Farcical as Expected. “So this recount, the first presidential recount in Wisconsin history, is being conducted with no practical political goal. Ironically, Jill Stein raised $7M purportedly to be spent on these recount efforts — approximately twice as much as she raised during her actual presidential campaign. Pennsylvania’s secretary of State announced that Stein missed the deadline for filing in that much larger state, which hasn’t stopped Stein from filing a suit attempting to force a recount. And there now appear to be irregularities in the recount petition filed in Michigan, which are likely to prevent a recount from happening.”
Archive for 2016
December 2, 2016
APPETITE FOR DESTRUCTION: Guns N’ Roses Called Audience Members Up on Stage to Beat Up a Trump Piñata.
Video at the link.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
“Mayor de Blasio Commits to 80 Percent Reduction of Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2050,” said the Sunday news release, outlining what would be a truly impressive feat if he actually were able to make good on that promise. But there is not going to be any 89-year-old, 10-term mayor named de Blasio declaring a local victory in the battle to save the planet. This is a long march to a distant goal. The commitment Mr. de Blasio made over the weekend — an excellent and necessary one — was to do his part now to keep the city moving in the right direction: Promised Land, that way.
—“Mayor de Blasio Takes On Climate Change,” the New York Times, September 22, 2014
The de Blasio administration is trying to limit the number of food trucks in the city by claiming that each hot-dog and kabob cart causes more pollution than a truck ride to Los Angeles.
Deputy Health Commissioner Corinne Schiff made the claim at a City Council hearing Wednesday, in an apparent effort to sink a bill that would nearly double the number of food-vendor permits in the city by 2023.
“Meat grilling is a significant source of air pollution in the city,” Schiff said. “One additional vendor grilling meat emits an amount of particle pollution in one day equivalent to what a diesel truck emits driving 3,500 miles.”
—“De Blasio administration finds a way to ruin food trucks,” the New York Post, October 27.
As CBS2 Political Reporter Marcia Kramer reported exclusively, documents obtained by CBS2 show the mayor has dramatically increased helicopter travel around the city.
On Oct. 14 near dinnertime, an NYPD helicopter landed near the baseball field in Prospect Park. At the time, police were coy, saying they were transporting “a dignitary.”
That dignitary turned out to be Mayor de Blasio, who after hanging around his old Park Slope neighborhood, wanted to avoid traffic on a seven-mile trip to Queens.
Suddenly, there were questions. What was the man who bragged that riding helicopters was “not my thing” doing? And he had apparently suddenly decided that avoiding the city’s epic traffic jams was the way to go.
CBS2 filed a Freedom of Information of Act request, discovering that yes, Mayor de Blasio is now subscribing to the joys of flying.
—“CBS2 Exclusive: Documents Show Mayor De Blasio’s Helicopter Flights Have Dramatically Increased,” Wednesday.
I don’t want to hear another goddamn word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint ever again.
SCIENCE: Pooping in deep space has NASA stumped. The ‘Space Poop Challenge’ is your way to help.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration wants to boldly go beyond the adult diaper. The agency is seeking a system to manage fecal, menstrual and urine waste for six days — “a continuous duration of up to 144 hours,” as NASA wrote on its website. The technology, integrated into a spacesuit, would be needed for extended tasks in space as well as “contingency scenarios.” Even during space emergencies, after all, you’ve still gotta go.
How NASA solves this problem in part depends upon you. The agency tapped crowdfunding platform HeroX to source a system that can collect up to 75 grams of fecal matter and 1 liter of urine per day, for six days. It must be hands-free, operate in microgravity and prevent leaking precious oxygen. The reward is up to a $30,000 bounty, plus the knowledge that the fruits of your mind may one day gird an astronaut’s loins.
Space travel appears much more glamorous in the movies.
WE’RE FROM THE U.N. AND WE’RE HERE TO HELP: U.N. Apologizes for Role in Haiti’s 2010 Cholera Outbreak. “The mea culpa, which Secretary General Ban Ki-moon delivered before the General Assembly, avoided any mention of who brought cholera to Haiti, even though the disease was not present in the country until United Nations peacekeepers arrived from Nepal, where an outbreak was underway. The peacekeepers lived on a base that often leaked waste into a river, and the first cholera cases in the country appeared in Haitians who lived nearby. Numerous scientists have long argued that the base was the source of the outbreak, but for years United Nations officials refused to accept responsibility.”
POST-ELECTION VANDALISM, INTIMIDATION, PROTESTS AND RECOUNT: Seems a competent FBI would ask if there are connections…
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: “Kristin Davis rocked a ‘Love Trumps Hate’ button on Election Day. The ‘Sex and the City’ star hasn’t exactly lived up to that sentiment since then:”
The star shared another side of her post-election grief recently. And the whole “Love Trumps Hate” meme didn’t quite describe it. Here’s part of her conversation with WNYC’s Rebecca Carroll about her reaction to Donald Trump’s Election Day victor.
“Right now I want to be in the bubble. I don’t want to talk to any Trump people…My initial thoughts [after the election] was that I wanted to move to the woods and learn to shoot a gun. The fear of what is happening and how am I going to make sure that no one hurts my child, even in a subtle way, which was already a fear I had honestly, but it just became so, so heightened.”
You went full Pauline Kael, Kristin. Never go full Pauline Kael.
CNN CREW JOKES ABOUT TRUMP PLANE CRASHING BEFORE CARRIER SPEECH.
Having worked a millennia ago just out of college on a few live remote video crews for local TV stations, I know firsthand they can be a black-humored bunch. Snaking cables and setting up cameras, tripods, and mic feeds is a tough job, and I’m not losing much sleep over their joke, the Trump-era equivalent of President Reagan’s “the bombing begins in five minutes” quip when he thought his mic wasn’t live. But it is a reminder that CNN’s on-air crew – on a network that made its bones with a long-running shouting match of a series called Crossfire — attempted to lecture all of us back in January in 2011 to eat our veggies, be better people, and not use evil nasty words words like “crosshairs,” back when Sarah Palin’s clip art was being held responsible by the magical-thinking left for an attack on a Democratic senator and other victims in Tucson:
On Tuesday’s John King USA, CNN’s John King issued a prompt on-air apology minutes after a guest on his program used the term “crosshairs” during a segment: “We’re trying to get away from using that kind of language.”
Huh — curiously, CNN’s management evidently never sent that memo to their crews.
EVEN AIDS VICTIMS SUFFER FROM WHITE PRIVILEGE: “A healthcare stereotype threat is when individuals with stigmatized identities – be it about race, socioeconomic status, gender, age, sexual orientation and even weight or maternal age – worry about being judged by, or confirming, a widely believed stereotype in healthcare settings, causing even greater anxiety than is commonly experienced in medical settings, affecting their experiences with healthcare providers.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: December shaping up to be a busy month for rocket flights.
RELATED? United Launch Alliance’s Rocket Builder lets you configure your own Atlas V launch to any available orbit. Prices start at just $109 million.
IN “LITERARY REPRESSION IN A LIBERAL CULTURE,” DAVID SOLWAY PENS THE OBITUARY FOR HIGH CULTURE AT THE DAWN OF THE MILLENNIUM:*
True poets will have to find other means of advancing their work in a decadent milieu, perhaps circulating their manuscripts privately as did the 17th Century Metaphysicals, or even self-publishing. All in all, we seem to have fallen on samizdat times.
Read the whole thing.
* If you’ll pardon such hate speech.
THAT’S NICE: Full House Creator Buys Full House House.
A MARINE OF VISION: I Served With James Mattis. Here’s What I Learned From Him.
I checked into Third Battalion, Seventh Marines in Twentynine Palms, California in 1994. It was 125 degrees in July in the high desert; everyone was in the field. This was a hard place, for hard men training for the hardest of jobs.
Then-Colonel Mattis, the Seventh Marines regimental commander, called for me to come see him. I was not only just a brand-new captain, but an aviator in an infantry regiment. I was a minor light in the Seventh Marines firmament: I was not in any measure a key player.
I arrived early, as a captain does when reporting to a colonel, and waited in his anteroom. There, I convinced myself what this would be: a quick handshake, a stern few sentences on what I was to do while there, and then a slap on the back with a “Go get ‘em, Tiger!” as he turned to the next task at hand. This was a busy guy. Five minutes, tops.
Colonel Mattis called for me. He stood to greet me, and offered to get coffee for me. He put a hand on my shoulder; gave me, over my protestations, his own seat behind his desk; and pulled up a chair to the side. He actually took his phone off the hook—something I had thought was just a figure of speech—closed his office door, and spent more than an hour knee-to-knee with me.
Mattis laid out his warfighting philosophy, vision, goals, and expectations. He told me how he saw us fighting and where, and how he was getting us ready to do just that. He laid out history, culture, religion, and politics, and he saw very clearly not only where we would fight, but how Seventh Marines, a desert battalion, fit into that fight.
Many years later, when Seventh Marines got into that fight, he was proven precisely right. It would not be the last time.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON, Handmade Stocking Stuffers.
MORE GREAT MAD DOG QUOTES: General Mattis has a way with words.
HMM: This Is Why Your Balance Gets Worse After 40. “The researchers found that the vestibular threshold in the people studied was increasingly higher after the age of 40. These thresholds increased up to 83 percent per decade after that age, the researchers said.”
Maybe so, but I think it also has to do with practice. When you’re a kid, you do a lot of things that keep your balance system trained up. As an adult, not so much — and as you get older and more worried about falling, you give it steadily less training. My own experience is that if you work on balance, you get better fast, and you can practically feel those neural networks warming up after just a few times.
Trump's margin/Jill Stein's tally in the three decisive states, latest count:
MI: 10,704/51,463
PA: 46,765/ 49,678
WI: 22,177/31,006— Alec MacGillis (@AlecMacGillis) December 1, 2016
Have you considered giving a couple of bucks to Jill Stein and the Green Party?
They’re stunningly effective.
MICHAEL TOTTEN: Almost Everyone Got The Arab Spring Wrong. “How did so many journalists, diplomats, academics, and analysts get Egypt so wrong? It was partly the result of hope and naiveté. But the Muslim Brotherhood also waged a brilliantly effective campaign of deception at home and abroad, hoping to convince as many people as possible that it was a politically moderate organization with a broad and diverse base of support. It wanted to earn the trust of Egyptians who weren’t yearning for an Islamist theocracy, and it feared a hostile reaction from the West, so it mounted a full-court press in the Egyptian, European, and American media. The Washington Post even published an op-ed from one of its leaders, Abdel Moneim Abouel, who wrote that the Brotherhood ’embraced diversity and democratic values.'”
Plus: “Washington gave the Brotherhood one pass after another, and a bewildered Morsi eventually felt that he was free to do and say whatever he wanted without being challenged. The Obama administration, for its part, seemed blissfully unaware that its well-meaning diplomatic outreach looked to Egyptians like an alliance with the Islamists against secularists.”
I think that’s what they call “smart diplomacy” in this Administration. Related: Former Nobel committee secretary regrets awarding the peace prize to Obama.
MICHAEL MCCONNELL: Brexit: A Question of Prerogative.
DECLASSIFIED: Tons of OSS/CIA maps through the decades, now free to view on Flickr.
This is a treasure trove for cartography buffs.
ROBERT SHIBLEY IS FEATURED IN THIS. IF I HAD MY WAY ON OCR HE’D BE IN CHARGE OF IT: What Is the Future of the Office for Civil Rights? Experts with varying opinions weigh in on what the arm of the Department of Education could look like under Donald Trump and Betsy DeVos. Just compare Shibley’s measured and sensible take with the alarmist shrieks from Dan Losen, the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA’s Civil Rights Project.
MR. MAUNDER, CALL YOUR OFFICE: The Sun is eerily quiet right now. “NASA has released images showing a strangely spotless Sun this month, with hardly a mark on its surface. It’s the lowest level of solar activity we’ve seen since 2011, even though the Sun is only halfway through its 11-year cycle, and five years off its solar minimum. But for some reason, it seems to have gone quiet a lot earlier than usual.”
Fallen Angels
STATEHOOD: The Kurds Are Nearly There.
The situation in Syria, at least on the surface, offers more grounds for hope. The outbreak of the civil war in 2011 led to the weakening of government control over the Kurdish regions in the country’s northeast corner, and the Kurds there were quick to seize their chance. Over the past five years the Syrian Kurds have steadily built up formidable institutions of self-rule. In contrast to Iraq’s Kurdish region, however, the regions currently controlled by their Syrian counterparts contain large populations of Arabs and other minority groups, and their presence might well complicate an aggressive push for independence.
Even so, it is hard to overestimate the degree of international goodwill that the Syrian Kurdish forces have managed to acquire thanks to their muscular prosecution of the war against the Islamic State. Since the Assad government doesn’t seem especially keen on confronting the caliphate, the Kurdish-dominated forces have been supplying most of the fighters on the Syrian front of the war against ISIS. It is precisely for this reason that the Obama administration has recently begun directly supplying the Syrian Kurds with weapons. This would amount to an extraordinary departure from past practice, since providing arms would implicitly bolster the Kurds’ control over their part of Syria, and potentially bring them closer to independence—a prospect of which Washington policymakers have long been leery, since it would entail a fundamental redrawing of the borders of the Middle East.
Such caution is understandable. Yet US policy toward the Kurds will face a crucial test in the next few years—and it will almost certainly come from the Kurds of Iraq, who believe that their twenty-five-year experiment in self-government is approaching its logical culmination. The leaders of the Kurdistan Regional Government, based in Erbil, have explicitly declared that they have independence in their sights. Masoud Barzani, president of the Kurdish Region of Iraq, has announced plans to conduct a referendum on statehood once the threat from ISIS has abated. Washington, meanwhile, doggedly maintains that nothing can be allowed to compromise Iraq’s territorial integrity, periodically warning its Kurdish allies not to test its resolve. In view of the long history of thwarted Kurdish aspirations, one has to wonder: When the day finally comes, will the Kurds really be willing to wait for permission?
Our Founders didn’t ask for independence; they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor — and declared our independence.
You get the feeling the Kurds are at least as gutsy.
I’LL HAVE A HALF DOUBLE DECAFFEINATED HALF-CAF WITH A TWIST OF LEMON: Howard Schultz Stepping Down as Starbucks CEO to Focus on Higher-End Shops.
Howard Schultz is stepping down as chief executive of Starbucks Corp. to lead an effort at the company to build high-end coffee shops that will charge as much as $12 a cup, his next attempt to revolutionize the way Americans consume coffee.
Mr. Schultz, 63 years old, is handing over the CEO role to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Johnson, who served as a director of the company for seven years before joining its executive team two years ago. Mr. Schultz, who is credited with taking the company from small beginnings to an international behemoth, began handing over daily oversight of the company to Mr. Johnson a few months ago.
Starbucks’s move toward high-end coffee, a project referred to internally as “Siren Works”—after the mythological creature in the coffee chain’s logo—is aimed at refreshing its brand, which has been facing increasing competition from specialty roasters such as Stumptown and Intelligentsia, as well as from mass coffee purveyors like Dunkin’ Donuts, which has been introducing more drinks such as cold-brewed coffee.
While it’s not for me, it is wonderful living in a country where $12 coffee is an option.