DON SURBER: A paragraph that explains Why Trump.
Archive for 2017
August 1, 2017
WE FLOODED AFGHANISTAN WITH HIPPIES IN THE 1970S, and then we got the Taliban. Makes sense.
EVERYBODY’S GREAT GRANDMOTHER NODS, KNOWINGLY: Kids need structure more than warmth from their parents, according to a top child psychologist.
CRIMESTOPPERS: Texas woman shoots, kills home intruder.
A 60-year-old Texas woman wasn’t taking any chances Monday morning when she heard two intruders enter her home, grabbing her pistol and shooting one of the would-be thieves dead, police said.
The woman, who was not immediately identified, confronted the two armed men after they entered her Harris County home through an open garage door around 11:30 a.m., WTSP reported.
Cathy Hanks, a neighbor, said it’s not surprising the woman fired her pistol when she saw a threat in her home, explaining: “That’s really how we are. That’s just Texas.”
“It’s the state of Texas. If you’re going to go into someone’s home, you’re going to get shot,” Hanks said.
Noted.
ALLIES: DOD concerned by Turkey purchase of Russian air defense system.
The Pentagon is concerned by Turkey’s decision to buy a Russian air defense system, Defense Department spokesman Jeff Davis said Monday.
Davis said that Defense officials “certainly are aware of the reports” that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan is currently in talks with Russia to buy the S-400 surface-to-air missile system.
“Our only concern about it is one of interoperability,” Davis told reporters at the Pentagon. “Turkey is a NATO ally. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea for allies to buy interoperable equipment.”
Interoperability depends on with whom one wishes to interoperate.
CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN: Marine veteran whistleblower hired at VA, years after attempts to silence him.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Oregon district to drop ‘Lynch’ from school names due to ‘racial implications:’
According to The Oregonian, the schools were named for the family which originally had donated land for the schools over a century ago, but Superintendent Paul Coakley says “many newer families coming into the district associate the name with America’s violent racial history.”
“There were an increasing amount of questions and some complaints from families of color around the name,” Coakley said. Although “there is no connection between the Lynch family and the practice associated with the term,” he said the name has still “been a disruption for some students.”
“Disruption?” Huh – Superintendent Coakley spelled “opportunity for students to learn about the past and put away false assumptions” incorrectly.
SOCIALISM ISN’T CHRISTIANITY, IT’S A MOCKERY OF CHRISTIANITY, AS THE ORCS WERE MADE IN MOCKERY OF THE ELVES: How Christian Conservatives Are Breeding Bolsheviks.
STEALTH SINGLE-PAYER: We Need To Break The Law To Make Obamacare Too Big To Fail.
On Monday, a bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus in the House released their list of “solutions” regarding Obamacare. Developed over the past several months, the list can easily be summed up in a single phrase: Single payer.
The lawmakers didn’t come out and say as much, of course, but that would be the net result. In funding more bailout spending for insurers, the proposal clearly states that Obamacare is “too big to fail”—that no amount of taxpayer funding is too great to keep insurers offering coverage on the health exchanges. Enacting that government backstop would create a de facto single-payer health-care system—only with many more well-priced insurer lobbyists around to demand more crony capitalist payments from government to their industry.
Read the whole thing, but the short version is that the Democrats thoroughly screwed us in 2010, and the Republicans are too cowardly to unscrew us is 2017.
WE SEEM TO HAVE A LOT OF HISTORIANS MAKING STUFF UP IN ORDER TO CALL LIBERTARIANS RACIST LATELY: Sloppy History in The New York Times: Who was against “government schools”?
Katherine Stewart has an op-ed in today’s New York Times that purports to expose the sordid history of the phrase “government schools.” The “attacks on ‘government schools,'” she claims, “have a much older, darker heritage. They have their roots in American slavery, Jim Crow-era segregation, anti-Catholic sentiment and a particular form of Christian fundamentalism.”
How reliable a historian is Stewart? Not very.
Since evidence-free smears are all the rage nowadays, I’m going to blame Vladimir Putin’s global crusade against libertarianism.
GOP BORDER LAWMAKER: ‘Can’t Double Down’ on 3rd-Century Wall to Solve 21st-Century Problems.
Rep. Will Hurd (R-Texas), who has voiced support for a technology-driven solution over President Trump’s border wall, has introduced legislation in support of building a “Smart Wall” that would entail high-tech detection and tracking systems.
“Violent drug cartels are using more modern technology to breach our border than what we are using to secure it,” Hurd said in a statement last week introducing the Secure Miles with All Resources and Technology (SMART) Act. “We can’t double down on a Third Century approach to solve 21st Century problems if we want a viable long-term solution.”
Hurd, whose district includes 800 miles of U.S.-Mexico border, said during a congressional hearing last week that he favors the U.S. investing in a “smart wall” rather than spending billions to build the 700- to 900-mile border wall that Trump has envisioned.
I’m all in favor of modern solutions to old problems, but we are talking the U.S. government here. You have to wonder if a smart wall might end up as the world’s biggest — and hackable — Internet of Things device.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why Many Ice Cream Sandwiches Don’t Melt In The Sun.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: Republicans and the Lost Art of Deterrence.
In a perfect and disinterested world, when Washington, D.C. is deluged in scandal, a nonpartisan investigator or prosecutor should survey the contemporary rotten landscape. He would then distinguish the likely guilty from the probably falsely accused—regardless of the political consequences at stake.
In the real cosmos of Washington, however, the majority party—the group that controls the House, Senate, presidency, and U.S. Supreme Court—if it were necessary, would de facto appoint the government’s own special investigatory team, and then allow it to follow where leads dictate. Its majority status would assure that there were no political opponents in control of the investigations, keen on turning an inquiry into a political circus. That cynical reality is known as normal D.C. politics.
But in contemporary Republican La-La Land, the party in power with control over all three branches of government allows its minority-status opponents to dictate the rules of special investigations and inquiry—a Jeff Sessions recused, a Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) excused from his investigations of unmasking and leaking, a Robert Mueller appointed as special counsel, friend of to-be-investigated James Comey, and employer of partisan attorneys.
Is naiveté the cause of such laxity? Do Republicans unilaterally follow Munich rules because they hope such protocols will create a new “civility” and “bipartisan cooperation” in Washington?
If so, they are certain to be disappointed. Plus:
The salvation of both the Trump Administration and the Republican congressional fate in the 2018 elections is to reestablish political deterrence—accomplished by going on a full-fledged offensive against real, not merely perceived or alleged, political scandals. Only that way will the accusers feel the predicament of the accused, especially as there is real merit to Democratic liability in a way that charges of Trump collusion have largely proved a political fraud. Only when deterrence is achieved, will the Democrats be forced to concentrate on agendas, issues, laws, and messages, not on ambushing the president.
The Republicans should announce far more forcefully to the media that Vladimir Putin may have been funneling via shady third-parties millions of dollars to anti-fracking groups. Such collusion, if proven through investigation, really is treasonous—given that the crashing price of oil, brought about solely due to North American frackers, is about the only check on Putin’s ambitions that the West enjoys. So, to take one example, did the San Francisco-based, family-controlled, and hedge-funded Sea Change Foundation receive laundered Russian money to help enhance its anti-fracking messaging? If so, when, how, and who?
Secondly, Republicans should go full bore on the most explosive scandal of the age, the House Intelligence Committee’s investigations into the surveilling, unmasking, and leaking of American citizens by key members of the Obama Administration, likely done for perceived political advantages.
Rather than envisioning the ethical Devin Nunes as a liability to be controlled, the House leadership should see him as an asset to be encouraged to uncover inconvenient truths—especially given that progressives see the unprincipled Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) as a resource in hiding a scandal. After all, what in the world was the self-righteous and self-described civil libertarian and humanitarian Samantha Power doing, as the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, in allegedly reading, unmasking, and leaking intelligence reports on conservative private citizens during a national campaign?
What, indeed?
KYLE SMITH: A FEMINIST REVIEWS DUNKIRK, AND SAYS EXACTLY WHAT YOU’D EXPECT. What good is a beach movie without girls? Marie Claire wants to know.
Perhaps it’s time for the Batley Townswomens’ Guild to add Dunkirk to their list of historical reenactments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6ccuWFidUYI
FINGERS CROSSED: North Korean missiles may reach US, but lack effective re-entry.
U.S. and South Korean experts said Tuesday that Japanese video footage capturing the Hwasong-14’s re-entry vehicle shortly before it crashed into the sea suggests it failed to survive the extreme heat and pressure after re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere following its launch from northern North Korea last week.
The apparent failure likely means the rogue regime will conduct more flight tests of the Hwasong-14 missile to ensure the warhead could survive the re-entry from space and hit its intended target.
After analyzing video from a rooftop camera operated by Japan’s NHK television on the northern island of Hokkaido, U.S. missile expert Michael Elleman concluded that Hwasong-14’s re-entry vehicle “disintegrated” before it landed at sea.
Denying Pyongyang the ability to improve its reentry vehicle might be the best reason to impose a “missile quarantine,” already proposed as one possible option by our own Austin Bay.
SCIENCE: Why Kids and Adults Taste Blueberries — and Sweets — Differently.
“Kids live in a different sensory world than adults,” said Julie Mennella of the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia, an author of the study. “When it comes to sweet taste, children are really vulnerable. They use sweet in deciding what they like — and it can be used for good.”
In the new report, researchers from Monell and the University of Florida offered two harvests of blueberries to 49 children and their mothers. They tested three different varieties of blueberries. When asked to pick their favorites, adults and children chose the sweetest berries picked during the first harvest fairly equally, but in the second harvest, the children — aged 6 to 16 — picked the sweeter fruit, while the adults like each variety equally. The study was published last month in The Journal of Food Science.
Mennella says that science can help parents channel the sweet preference to a food humans evolved to like – healthy fruits. Young children are more tolerant of both sweetness and saltiness. Somewhere in mid-adolescence, those windows narrow.
“It’s a really smart biologic response,” said Mennella. “Sweet taste is a signal for calories, and salt is a signal for minerals.”
Although I’m unsure of any evolutionary advantage, I lost my sweet tooth at age 25 when I discovered scotch.
IT’S A REAL MYSTERY: Angry Feminists Can’t Figure Out Why Nobody Likes Feminists Anymore.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How much will the new iPhone cost?
IN THE MAIL: From Benjamin Barton & Stephanos Bibas, Rebooting Justice: More Technology, Fewer Lawyers, and the Future of Law.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
CLAUDIA ROSETT: Nikki Haley Nails It on the UN and North Korea.
Read the whole thing.