I’M NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS, BUT IT’S ALIENS: What’s Responsible for Dwarf Planet’s Giant Ice Blades.
Archive for 2017
September 27, 2017
1967: IN 50 YEARS WE’LL HAVE FLYING CARS!
2017: New cases of U.S. STDs at a record high, ‘outpacing our ability to respond.’
FINALLY: Feds Spend $429,220 Tracking Eye Movements of Latinos at Grocery Stores to Fight Obesity.
Would you pay enough in federal income tax in 25 years to pay for this single study? Thirty years? Longer?
AT AMAZON, bestsellers in Military History.
21ST CENTURY PROBLEMS: The Overmonitored Nursery. “No parent is going to say ‘No’ to a product that positions itself as standing between your child and death.”
AN EASY DISASTER-RELIEF LAYUP FOR TRUMP: The law allows FEMA to help rebuild destroyed houses of worship, but the agency would rather not. Trump should fix this now.
HOUSE CONSERVATIVE CAUCUS CHAIRMAN: Senate Should End Legislative Filibuster to Help Trump.
What, and risk taking ownership of their longstanding campaign promises?
MARTIN RODIL: It’s Time to Cut Off Venezuela’s Black Gold. “Tough sanctions on Venezuela’s national oil company will hit the Maduro regime hard, and may save the Venezuelan people.”
State socialism has once again proven to be a colossal failure. Private businesses have been looted by the criminal Maduro regime. Once profitable businesses lie in ruins, as the ruling party’s cronies are given jobs in state-run enterprises. Mismanagement is therefore a core principal of this regime, trickling down throughout the heavily centralized crooked system. When graft is ubiquitous, the people suffer. And the Venezuelan people are suffering.
The medical system has now completely collapsed with every public hospital in the country suffering from woeful shortages of medicine, anesthetic, and any semblance of hygienic equipment. Women are forced to give birth in the streets or in stairwells of hospitals. HIV drugs are almost non-existent. Diarrhea has once again become a serious killer of children across Venezuela.
In the meantime, the economy has completely imploded. Inflation is out of control. There is no food on the shelves, and basics like toilet paper are almost non-existent.
But would an oil embargo give Maduro a plausible scapegoat?
INSTITUTIONAL ROT: Communist West Point Graduate Called Mattis An ‘Evil, Vile F***.’
PERHAPS SARAH HOYT WILL LET ME BORROW HER SHOCKED FACE: Climate Change Overreported by Media.
The way the media operates today does not help increase the public’s trust. Day after day, the media publishes biased news to push a one-sided agenda. Recently, The New York Times printed a front-page, headline-grabbing story alleging that a draft climate change report had been leaked supposedly to prevent the administration from hiding it. Further investigation revealed that this draft of the report had been public for months. In an interview, multiple authors of the report said they had not heard or seen any sign of suppression or censorship by the White House.
So what exactly was The New York Times reporting? It appears the only purpose of this false story was to push the alarmist view that the world is doomed unless Obama-era regulations are enforced. The media is spewing alarmist rhetoric and scare tactics to intimidate Americans into believing their bias. Americans deserve better than to be misled about important issues such as climate change. Instead of painting a dire future, media outlets should accurately report all the varying climate scenarios, not just the worst-case, catastrophic ones.
Perhaps no one is better at reciting false claims about climate change impacts than former Vice President Al Gore. In his 2006 movie, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Mr. Gore made many predictions about the impact of climate change that have failed to materialize.
Deceitful alarmism has hardly been inconvenient for Gore’s net worth.
IT’S A BAD YEAR FOR SPORTS LEAGUES: FBI brings Armageddon to college basketball, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg.
NARRATIVES: Buried news: Tennessee church shooter in court today. “I’ve noticed a decided lack of coverage in the case of Emanuel Kidega Samson, the Tennessee church shooter who murdered one woman and injured a half dozen more last weekend. What I’m trying to place my finger on is why, and there’s not as obvious of an answer as you might suppose.” Well, his story doesn’t really fit anyone’s narrative.
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURING OUT HOW I’D HOPED: Attorneys discuss rights to pooping in public after “Mad Pooper” video release.
And the right to poop in public is a penumbra emanating from what, exactly?
MICKEY KAUS: 5 Reasons Why Moore’s Win Matters. Including this:
Two weeks before the Alabama election, some polls apparently showed a very tight race. About this time, Trump held his infamous dinner with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi at which he seemed to cut a Dem-friendly deal to give amnesty to the “Dreamers” — in exchange for a grab-bag of feel-good border security measures that did not include his promised Wall. Candidate Moore denounced the deal. Strange wouldn’t commit. Moore soon opened up a lead that doesn’t seem to have been cut even by Trump’s appearance in Huntsville on Strange’s behalf. I’m not saying there weren’t other big factors in the race, like anger at the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. I’m saying the seemingly impending Trump-endorsed Dreamer cave-in was another big factor. The difference between the two factors is that the mainstream press, which instinctively avoids crediting restrictionist concerns, will tell you about the former but not the latter.
And the Alabama revolt will make a difference in the eventual legislative outcome. Remember when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s defeat by an anti-amnesty outsider in 2014 sealed the doom of the massive, heavily hyped “Gang of 8” amnesty? The bill had already passed the Senate, but when Cantor went down House Republicans who valued their job security didn’t want to go anywhere near it.
Luther Strange is Cantor II. Which House Republicans want to try out for the role of Cantor III by backing the Pelosi/Trump amnesty? Not many, I suspect. The pundits may tell them the Alabama race was all about vague anti-Establishment anger, or the failure to repeal Obamacare, or about “local dynamics.” Elected Republican legislators, with their careers on the line, know better.
We’ll see how bright they turn out to be.
IN THE MAIL: From Robert K. Tanenbaum, Without Fear or Favor: A Novel.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals
ROGER SIMON: Kneeling for a Self-Deceiving Lie.
Read the whole thing.
STEPHEN KRUISER: Football Fans Voice Displeasure But NFL Isn’t Listening.
AND FASTER, TOO, PLEASE: The U.S. Navy Needs to Build More Attack Submarines.
There is an absolute requirement to modernize both the SSBN and SSN fleets. The Los Angeles-class boats are reaching the end of their nominal 33-year service life although life extension of 5 – 10 years is possible. The oldest of the Los Angeles-class SSNs, the USS Bremerton, was commissioned in 1981 and the youngest, the USS Cheyenne, was commissioned in 1996. So even with the most optimistic predictions about the Los Angeles class’ service life, the remaining 36 boats will have to be decommissioned over the next two decades.
The problem for the submarine force is that the need for attack boats is rising precisely as the Los Angeles class is being retired. According to recent Congressional testimony, U.S. Pacific Command operates about half the number of SSNs it requires and this is in peacetime. At the same time, both China and Russia are building large numbers of advanced conventional and nuclear-powered attack and cruise missile submarines.
The Navy once believed that 48 SSNs as part of an overall force level of 308 ships would be enough into the middle of the century. The Navy’s new goal is to maintain a 355-ship fleet, of which 66 would be SSNs. Unfortunately, the Navy’s 30-year shipbuilding plan does not build enough Virginias even to meet the prior, lower goal for the SSN force.
The oceans aren’t getting any smaller, and the Virginia-class attack boats have been a rare procurement success story for the US Navy — now coming in ahead of schedule and under budget.
THE KNEEPAD IS OBVIOUSLY IN SOLIDARITY WITH BILL CLINTON. OR MONICA LEWINSKY, WHATEVER. Woke Faculty Member Takes a Knee in Protest of Trump. What He’s Wearing to Do It Is Hilarious.
PERHAPS EVERYTHING IN THE GARDEN WASN’T ROSY: We kept hearing from the usual suspects during the last years of the Obama presidency that recovery was strong, the economy was near full employment, and all those people who were complaining of hardship were delusional. Two new data points have just emerged to provide further evidence that that picture was itself a delusion. The first, from the CFPB of all places, is a survey conducted last year that finds that over 40 percent of Americans can’t make ends meet. The second is a new research paper that finds that after the financial crisis, banks – especially the big banks – stopped lending to small firms, which we know is at least partly due to crushing regulation from the likes of the CFPB. The result?
In counties where the largest banks had a high market share, the aggregate flow of small business credit fell, interest rates rose, fewer businesses expanded, unemployment rose, and wages fell from 2006 to 2010. While the flow of credit recovered after 2010 as other lenders slowly filled the void, interest rates remain elevated. Although unemployment returns to normal by 2014, the effect on wages persists in these areas.
If new businesses aren’t forming, opportunity decreases, and wealth cannot grow. This is pretty basic stuff. The Obama “recovery” simply wasn’t one for vast numbers of Americans.
GIVE US THE HOUSE, THEY SAID… GIVE US THE SENATE, GIVE US THE WHITE HOUSE, TOO: The Republican Fight to Repeal Obamacare Is ‘Dead as a Doornail.’
“We don’t have the votes,” said Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, who along with Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina drafted the latest attempt at scrapping the seven-year-old law. “Am I disappointed? Absolutely.”
Senate leaders said the issue wasn’t the content of the Graham-Cassidy bill, which would have dismantled Medicaid expansion and other Obamacare provisions and hand the funds from those programs over to states via block grants. Graham and Cassidy were insistent that they will eventually get the votes needed to pass the legislation. Leaders said the process through which they were trying to pick the bill through, however, had given a handful of senators pause, including Arizona Sen. John McCain.
“There are 50 votes for the substance,” said Graham. “There are not 50 votes for the process.”
There were no warnings about “process” during the election campaigns of 2010, 2012, 2014, or 2016 — which makes “process” sound and awful lot like “dodge.”
DATA – THE MODELER’S BURDEN: Ross McKitrick takes a hard look at all the arguments over whether climate models are overestimating warming at Climate Etc. His conclusion: “The model-observational discrepancy is real, and needs to be taken into account especially when using models for policy guidance.” Exactly what we’ve been warning about for two decades.