I’M OLD ENOUGH TO REMEMBER WHEN DEMOCRATS LECTURED US ABOUT VIOLENT IMAGERY FOR ABOUT 30 SECONDS: Puzzlingly violent illustration on NYT op-ed criticizing Trump’s judicial nominees.. “I haven’t read the column yet. What I see in the the illustration (which is by Chris Kindred) is a large hammer — a judge’s gavel — slamming into a man’s face and cracking it up.”
Archive for 2017
December 27, 2017
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Everything you know about toxic shock syndrome is probably wrong.
CHANGE: China halts oil product exports to North Korea in November as sanctions bite.
Beijing also imported no iron ore, coal or lead from North Korea in November, the second full month of the latest trade sanctions imposed by U.N. China, the main source of North Korea’s fuel, did not export any gasoline, jet fuel, diesel or fuel oil to its isolated neighbor last month, data from the General Administration of Customs showed on Tuesday.
November was the second straight month China exported no diesel or gasoline to North Korea. The last time China’s jet fuel shipments to Pyongyang were at zero was in February 2015.
“This is a natural outcome of the tightening of the various sanctions against North Korea,” said Cai Jian, an expert on North Korea at Fudan University in Shanghai. The tightening “reflects China’s stance,” he said.
OR IS IT? Chinese ships accused of breaking sanctions on North Korea.
Chinese vessels are secretly trading oil products with North Korea in violation of UN sanctions, diplomats have confirmed.
The news is likely to embarrass China and raise questions about its record of enforcing sanctions against Pyongyang over its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes.
Diplomats from an Asian country confirmed information published this week in the South Korean press that such trade persists despite sanctions.
Last month the US Treasury published satellite photos of ships linked to each other at sea, apparently trading oil. Chosun, the prominent South Korean newspaper, on Tuesday cited people within South Korea’s government saying 30 such hookups had been spotted by spy satellites since October.
The clandestine oil trade apparently started soon after new sanctions capped the amount of oil products North Korea was allowed to import.
It’s complicated.
OBESITY CAN BE CONTAGIOUS, BUT SO CAN WEIGHT LOSS: Sister loses 53 pounds – inspires brother to drop 89 pounds. They both look a lot better.
THE INSUFFERABLE NOSTALGIA OF A LYING PRESS:
From Hollywood comes a steady stream of movies casting powerful liberals as embattled and marginalized conservatives as menacing. Hollywood’s latest tribute to a hopelessly entitled press, The Post, is in that vein. Meryl Streep plays an astonishingly brave and nervy Katharine Graham, willing to risk her fortune and even her freedom to publish the Pentagon Papers in the Washington Post. It is a feel-good film for the kind of press liberals who consider Trump’s mere tweets a singular and monstrous threat to their freedom.
And as I mentioned yesterday, it received a glowing review at the Weekly Standard last week, curiously enough.
TRADE IN YOUR OLD KINDLE, Get up to $35 off a new one.
WHAT IF THE SWAMP IS TOO HUGE TO BE DRAINED? That’s something lots of readers may ask after reviewing Open The Books’ “Mapping The Swamp” report on the true size and cost of the “administrative state” that is the federal Leviathan. As always, Adam Andrzejewski, Open The Books indefatigable chief, drew the report from data required to be made public by the Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006, co-sponsored by senators Tom Coburn, R-Ok., and Barack Obama, D-Ilin.
JOSH MEYER GETS AN ECHO CHAMBER BEAT-DOWN: Politico reporter is punished for raising the curtain on Obama’s Hezbollah policy.
Twitter mob attacks by a name-calling scrum of mid-level bureaucrats, “security correspondents” for instant news outfits like Buzzfeed, interns at various NGOs and their self-credentialed “expert” bosses, partisan bot herders, and their Lord of the Flies puppet-masters are part of the price of doing journalism these days. Write something negative, and you’ll get dirtied up—and maybe some of the dirt will stick, who knows. These attacks are intended to be punitive. Brave or foolhardy reporters who deviate from the party line—the party in question being the Democrats, of course, since the representation of conservatives in newsrooms is generally reported to be somewhere in the single digits—and especially their colleagues watching from the sidelines, are meant to absorb a simple but all-important lesson: Get on the team, or else shut up. Watching even seasoned pros succumb to this kind of adolescent pressure game and publicly suck up to bullying flacks while throwing shade on members of their own profession is a depressingly normal occurrence, which shows that the two once-separate professions—partisan flackery, and reporting the news—have merged into a single, mindless borg.
As Ben Rhodes, the failed novelist who stumbled into posing as Mr. Obama’s Middle East “advisor” sniffed last-year when discussing his DNC-MSM groupies with the New York Times:
Rhodes singled out a key example to me one day, laced with the brutal contempt that is a hallmark of his private utterances. “All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,” he said. “Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.”
But they still know how to answer the Bat-Signal, apparently.
OH: North Korean defector had anthrax antibodies in system, report says.
The soldier’s name and exact date of defection were not disclosed. But the defector is said to have been exposed to or vaccinated for anthrax, a serious bacterial disease, UPI reported, citing Channel A. They reportedly became immune to the disease before defection.
“Anthrax antibodies have been found in the North Korean soldier who defected this year,” according an unnamed South Korean official speaking to Channel A.
The news comes amid earlier reports that North Korea was beginning tests to mount anthrax onto intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the U.S.
Pyongyang is quite literally a toxic regime.
WELL, GOOD: Study: Ebola survivors appear to be protected from virus.. “The immune systems of people who survived the first Ebola outbreak 40 years ago appear to be protecting them against future infection with the deadly virus, a new study finds. The discovery could help in efforts to develop vaccines and drugs to treat Ebola, according to the researchers.”
THAT’S RICH: Russia is accusing the US of ‘direct interference’ in its elections.
Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova on Tuesday accused the US of a “direct interference in our electoral process and internal affairs” following the State Department’s criticism of Russia’s decision to bar opposition leader Alexey Navalny from running in the upcoming presidential election against Vladimir Putin.
“This State Department statement, which I’m sure will be repeated, is a direct interference in our electoral process and internal affairs,” Zakharova wrote Tuesday on Facebook.
In a statement shared with Business Insider on Tuesday night, a State Department spokesperson expressed concern over the Russian government’s “ongoing crackdown against independent voices, from journalists to civil society activists and opposition politicians.”
“These actions indicate the Russian government has failed to protect space in Russia for the exercise of human rights and fundamental freedoms,” the statement said. “More broadly, we urge the government of Russia to hold genuine elections that are transparent, fair, and free and that guarantee the free expression of the will of the people, consistent with its international human rights obligations.”
Zakharova pushed back. “And these people expressed outrage over alleged Russian ‘interference’ in their electoral process for an entire year?!” she said.
Pointing out that the Kremlin is interfering in its own election is not interference.
“THAT’S BARACK OBAMA, sounding like he’s been reading Scott Adams’ book.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Stopping a Student-Loan Scam: Betsy DeVos shuts down an Obama-era invitation to fraud.
After nationalizing student lending, the Obama Administration sought to reduce the government’s $1.3 trillion loan portfolio by allowing disgruntled borrowers to discharge their debt. Last week Education Secretary Betsy DeVos ended this fraud against taxpayers.
After driving Corinthian Colleges out of business in 2014, the Education Department implemented a haphazard process to forgive loans of students who claimed to have been ripped off by the defunct for-profit. Tens of thousands of claims poured in, overwhelming department staff.
The backlog of claims ballooned after predatory regulators forced the closure of ITT Technical Institute in 2016. Liberal groups urged the Obama Administration to forgive loans of borrowers who had attended other for-profits, spurring the department to initiate a “borrower defense” rule-making to allow students who purported misrepresentations by their colleges to discharge their loans. The midnight rule, finalized last November, authorized the Education Department to discharge debts on a class-wide basis—for instance, all borrowers who had attended a certain college within the last five years.
The Obama Administration approved roughly 15,000 claims between June 25, 2015 and January 1, 2017. During President Obama’s final three weeks in office, the department hurried out 16,000 approvals. No claims were denied. The total taxpayer tab for discharges: $450 million.
If you’re going to discharge student debt, the educational institutions that received the money should pay a price. Skin in the game.
YES. Tesla’s make-or-break year? 2018 will test Elon Musk.
After years of bragging about its advanced manufacturing techniques, the Silicon Valley automaker faces a reality check when it comes to making its first mass-market car, the Model 3 electric sedan.
With output failing by a wide margin to meet Musk’s promise of 5,000 vehicles per week by the end of December, Tesla could be facing a make-or-break 2018 The new year may determine whether the company will need to again go hunting for cash and whether it maintains its leadership position in electric vehicles.
Speeding the rollout of the mass-market Model 3 is essential to Tesla’s financial health after the company lost several million dollars per day in the third quarter in its rush to begin manufacturing.
“Is this the year investors will say, ‘Enough’s enough,’ or will they continue to fund Tesla?” Autotrader.com analyst Michelle Krebs said. “That’s the big question. I suspect investors would continue funding them if they see progress on the Model 3.”
Customers, too. Tesla has taken $1,000 deposits from hundreds of thousands of Model 3 buyers, and eventually those customers will expect to take delivery of their cars — or of refund checks.
30 minutes left!
TYLER O’NEIL: In Attacking Trump Tax Cuts as ‘Theft,’ Democrats Prove They Don’t Believe in Private Property.
Sure they do. But just theirs, not yours.