BUT OF COURSE: Google Manipulates Search Results To Conceal Criticism of Islam and Jihad.
What was Glenn just saying about Google’s abuse of monopoly power?
Archive for 2017
August 2, 2017
READER BOOK PLUG: From A.H. Lloyd, Fall of the Commonwealth.
FIGHTING POVERTY IN DALLAS:
Price, a Dallas County commissioner for almost a third of a century, is the city’s most influential black elected politician. But we should also think of him as the most important elected representative of poor people in the city since his district encompasses the city’s poverty-plagued southern hemisphere.
One way Price has won votes and loyalty over the decades has been by promising economic development and opportunity to his constituents. In April, Price and an aide-de-camp were acquitted of multiple charges of bribery and fraud in a long, locally high-profile federal trial.
During that trial, multiple executives from a company owned by a powerful Dallas family gave testimony, unchallenged by the defense, that they had sought Price’s help sabotaging an enormous economic development project in Price’s district. Interests associated with the Perot family of Dallas said under oath they had sought Price’s help slowing down a shipping and warehousing project that promised 65,000 new jobs.
The Perot people told the jury under oath they wanted to hobble the Southern Dallas Logistics Center, sometimes called the Inland Port, because they believed it would hurt their Alliance Global Logistics Hub, near Fort Worth in one of the nation’s fastest growing and most affluent new suburban areas, 35 miles northwest of Price’s district.
Price did what they asked. He opposed the Dallas project’s bid for a free trade zone. He threw a monkey wrench into a key bridge project. He demanded redundant and time-consuming studies. He got the job done. The Inland Port project went into bankruptcy.
When I read the Morning News editorial Friday, I wondered, “Where’s the paragraph about Price and the Perots? Where’s the part where the Morning News calls for rich, white Dallas families and black Dallas politicians to stop sticking big knives in poor people’s backs?”
When newspapers editorialize in favor of fighting poverty, what they really mean is raising taxes and hiring more worthless government employees. Not actual jobs for poor people.
MEMORY LANE: Remember all those left-wing pundits who drooled over Venezuela?
The list of Western leftists who once sang the Venezuelan government’s praises is long, and Naomi Klein figures near the top.
In 2004, she signed a petition headlined, “We would vote for Hugo Chavez.” Three years later, she lauded Venezuela as a place where “citizens had renewed their faith in the power of democracy to improve their lives.” In her 2007 book, “The Shock Doctrine,” she portrayed capitalism as a sort of global conspiracy that instigates financial crises and exploits poor countries in the wake of natural disasters. But Klein declared that Venezuela had been rendered immune to the “shocks” administered by free market fundamentalists thanks to Chavez’s “21st Century Socialism,” which had created “a zone of relative economic calm and predictability.”
Chavez’s untimely death from cancer in 2013 saw an outpouring of grief from the global left. The caudillo “demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity,” wrote British journalist Owen Jones. “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people,” said Oliver Stone, who would go on to replace Chavez with Vladimir Putin as the object of his twisted affection.
On the Venezuelan regime’s international propaganda channel, Telesur, American host Abby Martin — who used to ply her duplicitous trade at Russia Today — takes credulous viewers on Potemkin tours of supermarkets fully stocked with goods. It would be inaccurate to label the thoroughly unconvincing Martin, who combines the journalistic ethics of Walter Duranty with the charm of Ulrike Meinhof, a useful idiot. She’s just an idiot.
Ouch.
Read the whole thing.
MEASURING DEEP ROCK STRESS: This has nothing to do with fretting about music, but it could help improve earthquake prediction. The work on the “anelastic strain recovery method” for analyzing rock stress is being done at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Rock stress — the amount of pressure experienced by underground layers of rock — can only be measured indirectly because you can’t see the forces that cause it,” Hiroki Sone, an assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and geological engineering at Madison, said in a news release. “But instruments for estimating rock stress are difficult to use at great depths, where the temperature and pressure increase tremendously.”
More:
The latest proof-of-concept tests show the anelastic strain recovery method can be used to measure rock stress at extreme depths — as deep as 4.3 miles.
The UPI article is short but informative. It links to this in-depth (so to speak) scientific report.
It’s almost as though it’s difficult to find strong support for Hillary Clinton outside of a few coastal and urban enclaves.
HOLDING LATE STAGE SOCIALISM ACCOUNTABLE: Trump Administration holds Venezuelan dictator Maduro personally responsible for the safety of jailed opposition political leaders.
President Trump delivered the message himself:
“The United States condemns the actions of the Maduro dictatorship,” Trump said in a statement late Tuesday. “Mr. Lopez and Mr. Ledzema are political prisoners being held illegally by the regime… we reiterate our call for the immediate and unconditional release of all political prisoners.”
CHINESE MISSILE TESTS: According to Fox News the Chinese missiles targeted “mock United States missile batteries and jets.” The tests took place on Saturday, July 29.
U.S. spy agencies detected the Chinese military launching a series of 20 missiles at mock targets designed to look like American THAAD missile batteries and advanced U.S. Air Force F-22 stealth fighter jets.
China has long protested the deployment of U.S. THAAD anti-ballistic missiles to South Korea, and doubled down on its condemnation after the government in Seoul said they want four more American launchers over the weekend, following North Korea’s Friday test of a second KN-20 intercontinental ballistic missile…
More:
Days before the China missile tests on Saturday, U.S. military satellites also detected a failed attempt of China’s anti-ballistic missile system — Beijing’s version of the U.S. THAAD system.
America’s THAAD is an impressive weapon. It’s now 15 for 15 in operational tests against IRBM-type targets. China opposes the deployment of U.S. THAADs in South Korea. However, North Korea’s malign behavior has spurred South Korea. South Korea is considering acquiring its own THAAD battery.
IN THE MAIL: From Jeremy Rabkin & John Yoo, Striking Power: How Cyber, Robots, and Space Weapons Change the Rules for War.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
DAVID BYLER: Five Theories on Trump’s Stable Approval Rating.
Here’s the first theory:
Trump’s 40 percent approval rating might represent something close to his floor. On Election Day 2016, 37.5 percent of voters viewed candidate Trump favorably, yet he won 46 percent of the vote. Since then, Trump may have lost some of those general election voters by pushing an unpopular health-care bill (or through some other actions they disapproved of), but this 40 percent approval rating represents party stalwarts sticking with him.
The polarization theory comes with a few predictions about the future. As long as there aren’t any truly out-of-the-ordinary events (e.g. a terrorist attack, a recession, a historic economic boom, impeachment, etc.) Trump’s approval rating will stick within a relatively narrow band. He won’t lose his loyalists but he also won’t convert many outside that group. This theory doesn’t rule out a Democratic midterm wave or a second Trump term, but it does suggest that there are some guardrails that keep either party from scoring the sort of landslide wins we saw in the last century.
Barack Obama enjoyed this very same phenomenon (albeit with a slightly higher floor) during his two terms, although he had the advantage of a much friendlier press — to say the very least.
TO BE FAIR, IT’S NOT MEANT TO HELP EDUCATION, IT’S MEANT TO HELP TEACHERS’ UNIONS MAINTAIN SCHOOLS AS DEMOCRATIC PARTY VOTE FARMS: Megan McArdle: Demonizing School Choice Won’t Help Education: Critics of public schools aren’t the Bible-thumping racists that some liberals make them out to be.
Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.
Nor is it accurate, or useful, to imply that critics of failing “government schools” today are the direct descendants of those groups, who “really mean” that they want shelter for a racist and anti-gay agenda. No doubt there are people out there who want school choice for just this reason, just as some people out there want a national health program because it will be a more efficient way to implement their eugenics program. After 15 years of writing on the internet, I can guarantee you this: In a country of more than 300 million, at any given moment someone will be saying whatever appalling things you can imagine, and quite a few you couldn’t. Many of them will have taken the trouble to write down and publish their musings, at which point their ideological opponents will pounce to declare that this is obviously the secret key to the thinking of anyone who ever agreed with the author about anything.
None of these super-secret keys has ever opened the door to deeper understanding about anything except the mind of the person waving them. And Stewart’s plaint about the school choice movement is no exception. For many critics of failing government schools, myself among them, have drawn their support for school choice from quite a different source: failing government schools. Some of us actually attended those schools, and were fortunate enough to have parents with enough social or financial capital to get them out when the school broke down.
As we see it, members of the middle class in this country already enjoy quite a lot of school choice; if their local school is awful, they either send their kids to private school, or move. This allows nice liberal parents to proclaim their support for the democratic ideal of a common, public education, while sticking their own kids in an exclusive school. That school may be nominally “public,” but it comes bundled with granite countertops. . . . Time after time, more money was poured into schools, but produced little in the way of better results for anyone who didn’t happen to be employed by the school district. Time after time, when deeper institutional change was tried, the bureaucracies beat back the reformers. Failing teachers kept collecting their paychecks, and failing students ended up out on the street with no useful skills.
And, of course, calling their opponents Bible-thumping racists while feathering the nests of the upper classes and hardcore Democrat constituencies is what the progressive project is all about, these days.
NO. WAY. It looks like the official vote total in Venezuela’s controversial election was off by millions.
Only 3.7 million people had voted by 5.30 p.m. in Venezuela’s controversial Constitutional Assembly election on Sunday, according to internal electoral council data reviewed by Reuters, casting doubt on the 8.1 million people authorities said had voted that day.
The election of the legislative super-body has been decried by critics as illegitimate and designed to give the unpopular government of President Nicolas Maduro powers to rewrite the constitution and sideline the opposition-led congress.
In response to the vote, the U.S. government slapped sanctions on Maduro on Monday, calling him a dictator for “seizing absolute power.”
The low turnout would be a major indictment of Maduro, especially after the opposition last month held its own unofficial vote in which it said more than 7.5 million voted against the government’s controversial assembly.
Jospeh Stalin is supposed to have said, “Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything.”
Socialists never change.
JOHN HINDERAKER: The Administrative State Declares Independence. The Administrative State is illegitimate, and should worry about being treated as such.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Female student: USC threatened me because I said my boyfriend didn’t beat me up. Sounds like a hostile educational environment on account of sex to me. I hope the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights will investigate.
CONGRESS DOES NEED TO DO SOMETHING: Pass GOP tax cuts by Thanksgiving or get ready for Speaker Pelosi.
BONE AND KOREAN EAGLES: A B-1B Lancer bomber and two South Korean F-15 Eagles fly over South Korea.
NORTH KOREA’S ICBM: 38North.org evaluates the July 28 test launch.
This should give you confidence:
While Pyongyang may have an ICBM, the threat is currently limited to unsophisticated warheads against targets on the US west coast. North Korea will likely have to turn to an upgraded design to achieve their goal of a robust capability to retaliate against targets on the east coast, including Washington, for any attack on North Korea.
More:
The missile was reported to have reached an altitude of over 3,700 km, remaining airborne for 47 minutes. That’s a substantially higher level of performance than what the missile displayed on its first launch. This means, if the missile had been launched on a maximum-range trajectory, it could have reached Chicago or possibly even New York City.
Have you hugged a U.S. missile defender today? Remember, the Democrats opposed Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative, the program that really put the U.S. on the road to developing anti-missile systems. As for the fat kid, here are some options for dealing with his Pyongyang regime.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Jeff Flake Is Filling In for John McCain as a Liberal Media Darling.
FLASHBACK: Obese patients and smokers banned from routine surgery in ‘most severe ever’ rationing in the NHS.
Single payer, single decider.
TENNESSEE: Rep. Diane Black running for Tennessee governor’s seat. “Rep. Diane Black running for Tennessee governor’s seat. . . . Four other candidates have declared they are running for governor: Tennessee state Sen. Mae Beavers, former commissioner of the Department of Economic and Community Development Randy Boyd, Tennessee House Speaker Beth Harwell, and businessman Bill Lee.”
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS, THEY’D HAVE NO STANDARDS AT ALL: Elizabeth Warren Again Calls for ‘Equal Pay,’ Ignores Pay Gap in Own Office: Warren’s women staffers earned 71 cents for each dollar earned by men in 2016.
AT AMAZON, Fury Tactical Kuba-Kickz, Black.
