THERE ARE TWO AMERICAS. ONE INSIDE THE BELTWAY, THE OTHER OUT: “People are tuning the media out. Credibility is largely gone.”
Archive for 2017
May 15, 2017
TEST-DRIVING THE NEW FORD GT.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: My Delta Flight Wasn’t Newsworthy, And That’s News.
UH-OH: Uber Engineer Barred From Work on Key Self-Driving Technology, Judge Says.
Uber sidestepped a full shutdown of its self-driving car efforts on Monday when a federal judge stopped short of issuing a temporary injunction against the ride-hailing company’s autonomous vehicle program.
But the court mandated that Anthony Levandowski, a star engineer leading Uber’s self-driving car program, must be restricted from working on a critical component of autonomous vehicle technology throughout the duration of the litigation, a setback that could hamper the company’s development efforts.
The decision came in a case that has underlined the increasingly bitter fight between Uber and Waymo, the self-driving car business that operates under Google’s parent company.
As Kissinger quipped about the Iran-Iraq War, “Pity they can’t both lose.”
AND MORNING JOE KNOWS THIS HOW? ‘Morning Joe’ hosts: Conway secretly hates Trump.
“This is a woman, by the way, who came on our show during the campaign and would shill for Trump in extensive fashion and then she would get off the air, the camera would be turned off, the microphone would be taken off and she would say ‘bleeech I need to take a shower,’ because she disliked her candidate so much,” Brzezinski said.
“‘I have to take a shower because it feels so dirty to be saying what I’m saying,’” she continued, mockingly quoting Conway. “I guess she’s just used to it now.”
Scarborough backed her up, adding that Conway began referring to Trump as her “client” after the release of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tapes showing Trump speaking lewdly about kissing and groping women without their consent.
“‘I’m just doing this for the money, I’ll be off this soon,’” he said, imitating Conway. “I don’t know that she ever said, ‘I’m doing this for the money,’ but this is just my summer vacation, my summer in Europe. And basically, I’m gonna get through this.”
It’s a shame Conway can’t go on the show to defend herself, but Mika & Joe banned her two months ago.
UPDATE: Link was missing — sorry. All fixed.
I GOT BACTRIM TO KNOCK OUT A SINUS INFECTION THAT A NEWER ANTIBIOTIC DIDN’T FIX, AND IT WORKED: Learning the rules of antibiotics to make old drugs work on new bugs. My doctor says that’s a common experience these days, with the older, less-prescribed drugs often working better.
BEN SASSE: ‘Shared Civic Understanding of America’ Needed Before Arguing Party, Policy Differences.
“We need to have a shared civic understanding of America before we get to partisan and policy differences. There are important fights to be had in policy. But we first need a civic sense of what America is. And here’s what comes next in things like Russian interference in America and in other countries in the age of cyber-war over the next decade. I’m obviously concerned about 2016, but I’m far more concerned about 2018 and 2020, because here is what comes next,” Sasse continued, giving the example of cyberhacking that releases mostly true information with some false info intended to take down a candidate: “Your phone records are dumped, and they’re 99 percent accurate, but 1 percent, you’re calling a brothel in Chattanooga on Tuesday nights, when your wife is at bridge club.”
“That is what is coming next in the era of cyber-war. And we’re going to need to have some institutions that we can rely on and believe are apolitical, when the public has more and more doubt.”
It’s a nice sentiment, but our public institutions have never been so politicized.
NO MATTER HOW BADLY THE DNC-MSM WISHES IT TO BE SO: Why Trump-Russia is still not Watergate redux.
THE PHARMA INDUSTRY’S HOLY GRAIL: ‘Female Viagra’ May Lift a Younger Woman’s Libido. But they’re still not really there yet.
LEAD, FOLLOW, OR GET BACK TO YOUR SAFE SPACE: Leading Millennials in the Military.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: These Lowe’s employees are now wearing exoskeletons to work.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Jeff Kirk, The Prometheus Option.
THE GREAT DEBATE: Vitamin D vs. Skin Cancer.
ENDGAME? Evacuation deal completed as Syrian rebels leave Damascus district.
State TV quoted the Damascus provincial governor as saying that Qaboun “is empty of militants”. It said army engineering teams had entered the district, on the city’s northeastern edge, to begin clearing it of mines and unexploded ordnance.
The British-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 1,300 rebel fighters and their families had left on Monday, headed for areas further east of Damascus or to the northwestern province of Idlib.
On Sunday, more than 2,000 rebels and their family members left Qaboun, state media said.
State TV said several hundred fighters had decided to stay in the district under the agreement as government forces took control.
The Damascus government has concluded a number of similar evacuation deals in recent months with the Syrian opposition, supported in some cases by Syria ally Iran and rebel backer Qatar.
That Iran is willing to back some of these deals helps show just how much supporting the Assad regime has cost Tehran.
AND STAY DOWN: U.S. Supreme Court Won’t Revive North Carolina Voter-ID Law.
Turning away the appeal pressed by state Republican leaders, the justices left intact a ruling that said the provisions were racially discriminatory in violation of federal voting-rights law. In addition to requiring people to show a photo ID, the North Carolina law reduced the number of early voting days and eliminated same-day registration and out-of-precinct voting.
The rebuff was a surprise because four conservative justices previously tried to revive the measure before the 2016 election. That effort failed because it was an emergency request that required five votes, but the court could have accepted the latest appeal with only four votes.
In a statement that accompanied the court’s order Monday, Chief Justice John Roberts pointed to uncertainty over who was authorized to file an appeal on behalf of the state. He said the court had received a “blizzard of filings” on that issue.
Roberts, however, also stressed that the justices weren’t deciding that the lower court was right to strike down the North Carolina requirements. The rejection of an appeal “imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case,” he wrote, quoting from a 1923 Supreme Court opinion.
I’d like to get Glenn to weigh in on this, but the story reads like the N.C. law might be kosher, but that the appeal was a mess.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: My Delta Flight Wasn’t Newsworthy, And That’s News.
PATRICK POOLE EXCLUSIVE: Former Egyptian Terrorism Official Exposes the Muslim Brotherhood’s Terror Networks.
Big story, and Poole promises more to follow.
THE POWER OF HAND SANITIZERS.
RIP: Powers Boothe, star of Tombstone, Guyana Tragedy, MacGruber, dies at 68.
He and the late J.T. Walsh conveyed intelligent menace better than any other actors I can remember.
JUDD GREGG: How the GOP can win on healthcare.
I’m not sure how solid Gregg’s plan is, but he’s correctly diagnosed the root of the problem:
The purpose of ObamaCare was to gather all these [groups of uninsured] people into some type of healthcare coverage and have that coverage be highly subsidized by the rest of the population.
This was to be accomplished either directly, through subsidies that depended on taxes; or indirectly, through increasing the premiums of those who had insurance.
The outcome would be that most of these 40 to 45 million would have new benefits that they themselves paid little for.
This effort was to be undertaken by creating exchanges, which were actuarially unsound; and by expanding by fifty percent the Medicaid enrollment, which was grossly underfunded.
The creators of ObamaCare knew of the structural failures of the proposed approach. It was their expectation that the financial stress on the insurance industry and the huge tax subsidies needed to pay for the migration from private insurance into exchanges would lead to some sort of reordering of the system.
They knew that states, and especially doctors, could not handle the underfunded addition of millions of patients.
They also understood political reality, in which it is extremely difficult to take back a subsidized benefit once it has been given. This is especially true when it involves millions of people.
Thus, as ObamaCare crumbled, a single-payer system would be the default position to which the country would turn.
ObamaCare is crumbling, all right. What remains to be seen is if the GOP has the courage of its oft-stated convictions.
“RIGHTS,” YOU KEEP USING THAT WORD: Vietnam police arrest dissident for ‘abusing democracy rights’
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Netflix is no longer available for your rooted Android phone.
Have you noticed that you suddenly can’t (officially) download the Netflix app to your rooted Android phone? You’re not alone. Netflix has confirmed that its app is no longer visible on Google Play to anyone with a device that is “not Google-certified or [has] been altered.” A spokesperson tells Android Police that it’s all about a shift in copy protection. Version 5.0 of the Netflix app now leans entirely on Google’s Widevine digital rights management to prevent piracy, so it has to treat those modified devices as incompatible. The crackdown isn’t completely shocking, but it does create some issues.
There’s certainly an incentive for the shift in strategy: now that you can download shows, piracy is more of a concern than ever. In theory, it’s a bit easier to strip the copy protection from the downloaded copy of a Netflix series than it is to rip the stream. And when you root a device to gain more control over the operating system, you potentially have a better chance of circumventing that DRM than you would otherwise.
This measure might not stop many people, however, and it could hurt otherwise well-meaning viewers. While Netflix says its app “will no longer work” with modified Android devices, Android Police has verified that it still runs properly if you manage to install the app (such as by sideloading the APK), at least for now.
This may be a losing fight for Netflix.