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Archive for 2017
July 2, 2017
IT’S STILL THE FRONTIER: Alaska boy, 11, shoots bear charging fishing party.
FORGET IT, JAKE, IT’S JOURNOTOWN:
Well, maybe there. Or maybe here:
UPDATE: From the comments: “The last president used the IRS to target his enemies. Trump chooses comedy and the media sh-t themselves.”
Related: Remember when Obama saying ‘If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun’ was just a metaphor?
FORGET COAL: Asteroid Mining Is Coming Sooner Than You Think.
Conventional wisdom may be that going to space to bring back what is needed on terra firma is economically nuts. Not so, analysts insist.
“While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower,” says a recent report prepared on the subject by Goldman Sachs.
Proponents say that before long, robots could be traveling to asteroids to extract platinum and other valuable minerals to haul back to Earth or even one day to use in space-based manufacturing plants.
A 2012 Caltech study found that it could cost just $2.6 billion to capture an asteroid and bring it into orbit near Earth, making human exploration and robotic mining that much easier. “We expect that systems could be built for less than that given trends in the cost of manufacturing spacecraft and improvements in technology,” the Goldman report says.
It also predicts the eventual result would be far lower costs: “Successful asteroid mining would likely crater the global price of platinum” by dramatically increasing the supply.
“The market is a big unknown because of things like platinum,” says Jay McMahon, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado’s Center for Astrodynamics Research. “You don’t know what’s going to happen if you bring back a big haul of platinum, what that would do to the market on Earth or how much demand there is.”
Well, I’m pretty sure the price would drop dramatically. . . . Of course, everything in Earth orbit costs nearly as much as platinum, just in terms of launch costs from the earth’s surface. So almost any space-based materials industry will make doing things in orbit vastly cheaper.
IN THE MAIL: Tommy Robinson: Enemy of the State.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): UK woman found guilty at retrial for using fake penis, blindfold to trick female friend into sex.
LOSING THE NATION-STATE: The liberal international order cannot survive the unraveling of strong national communities that are the baseline of democratic government.
It is not difficult to recognize that the West is in flux. Eight months after the presidential election in the United States, partisan rancor has reached a fever pitch and continues unabated. Europe seems trapped in a collective leadership paralysis in the face of the greatest mass migration crisis since 1945. Public anger against elites keeps rising. The people seem less and less willing to listen to the explanations and admonishments of their leaders and the media, nor to accept that their nations are merely a transitional phase before the emergence of a multicultural, globalized world.
Beneath the popular resentment and frustration bubbles a longing for a vanishing sense of community, mixed with an often deeply felt democratic impulse to reclaim ownership of the state. Signs of a popular rebellion across the West abound. The Brexit vote in the United Kingdom, the Trump movement in the United States, and the emergence of national and populist parties across Europe (though their support fluctuates) are all symptoms of a deeper yet seldom articulated structural problem that has been straining democratic politics in the West: the progressive fragmentation of the nation-state. . . .
The weakening of the consensus that the nation-state should remain paramount in world politics lies at the base of the deepening political crisis in Western democracies. Since patriotic civic education all but disappeared from American public schools as well as from Europe’s government school curricula, two generations of Western elites have been progressively unmoored from their cultural roots, often all but bereft of even a rudimentary sense of service to and responsibility for the nation as a whole. As fractured group identities and narratives of grievance began to replace a sense of patriotism and national pride, college educated elites across the West became ever-more self-referential in their pursuits, locked in an exercise of inward-looking collective expiation for the centuries of Western racism, discrimination, and “privilege”—all allegedly the hallmarks of the culture they have inherited, which they must redefine, or repudiate altogether.
This decomposition of elite national identities across the West has already had noticeable national security consequences.
No accident. All part of the Gramscian Damage.
HOW MUCH LONGER CAN SHE LAST? Pelosi gives another muddled speech, confusing details and mispronouncing words.
FLOCK OF OSPREYS: USMC MV-22B Osprey tiltrotors in formation off the coast of Sydney, Australia. You can see the opera house, though it’s obscured in engine exhaust from the Osprey on the left-hand side of the photo. The photo was taken June 29 by a USMC lance corporal.
The USAF reported:
…its new Block 5 variant of the MQ-9 Reaper drone has performed its first combat mission against Islamist terrorists.
The recent 16-hour sortie, flown June 23 in support of Operation Inherent Resolve, involved the unmanned aerial vehicle dropping a GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munitions bomb and firing two AGM-114 Hellfire missiles in support of ground forces in the Middle East.
MORE:
All three strikes met the ground force commander’s intent and destroyed two defensive fighting positions, two vehicles and one mortar tube.”
Good report.
BYRON YORK: The Price Of Fighting With Trump.
People who get into fights with Donald Trump often end up diminished by it.
Just ask Marco Rubio, who in February 2016 broke some sort of ground when he introduced the “small hands” attack into presidential politics. “And you know what they say about guys with small hands,” Rubio told crowds during the days he decided to transform himself from GOP contender into anti-Trump insult comic. A few weeks later, Rubio expressed regret about the “small hands” routine. “My kids were embarrassed by it, and if I had it to do again, I wouldn’t,” Rubio said.
Just ask Jeb Bush, who allowed himself to be drawn into brawls with Trump — brawls which there was no chance Bush, no match for Trump’s insults, would win.
Just ask Ted Cruz, who made an informal peace with Trump for much of the campaign, then fought Trump in the final primaries, and finally released a campaign’s worth of anger and bile at Trump just hours before the Indiana primary vote that knocked Cruz out of the race. Now, as a senator, Cruz has to work with, and support the policies of, the man who so got under his skin.
Of course, Rubio, Bush, and Cruz — and Carson, Christie, Fiorina, Paul, Kasich, Jindal, and others — had an excuse; they were running against Trump for the Republican presidential nomination. But others have tangled with Trump and found themselves diminished, too.
Just ask some of the more strident NeverTrumpers who have allowed Trump to live rent-free in their heads. Today, some are serious people doing non-serious things — I bought a pair of socks at Nordstrom! — because of a reflexive opposition to Trump.
Just ask CNN, which, in addition to its news reporting, has taken on what appears to be a network-wide air of snarkiness in its Trump coverage. That oppositional tone has raised the stakes for CNN when its journalists make mistakes, as they have recently. Yes, CNN’s ratings have gone up, but its reputation has taken a hit. “Trump is indeed destroying CNN…by tempting them to destroy themselves,” tweeted writer and former Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro recently.
And now ask Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski, the TV hosts who once sang Trump’s praises and were openly friendly with the presidential candidate but now bash and insult him daily. (“They’ve said he has dementia,” RNC chair Ronna Romney McDaniel noted recently. “They’ve said he’s stupid. They’ve called him a goon. They’ve called him a thug. They’ve said he’s mentally ill.”)
Scarborough and Brzezinski are engaged in a back-and-forth with Trump over…what? A facelift? Hand size? Who said what to whom? The argument, which appears to have started Thursday with Brzezinski’s needling of Trump’s hand size (“They’re teensy!”) took a turn when Scarborough and Brzezinski wrote in a Washington Post op-ed (“Donald Trump is not well”) that, “This year, top White House staff members warned that the National Enquirer was planning to publish a negative article about us unless we begged the president to have the story spiked. We ignored their desperate pleas.” TrumpWorld sources are telling some (decidedly not-in-the-tank) reporters a very different version of events, which suggests Scarborough and Brzezinski will be pulled into a he-said-they-said fight that is far different from the one they wanted.
Does anyone think that, by any measure other than notoriety, this episode will not diminish Scarborough and Brzezinski? . . .
Of course one could say that Trump is at fault, that he regularly engages in spats that are beneath the dignity of the presidency. He should not, for example, respond in kind to “small hands” jabs. But Trump is Trump. He does what he does, which is what he did during the campaign and before. And now, in the White House, he has enlisted his media adversaries, wittingly or not, in a campaign against “fake news” that resonates with his core supporters.
“They like him, they believe in him, they have not to any large degree been shaken from him, and the more the media attacks him, the more it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy on the side of the Trump supporters who fervently believe the media treat him unfairly,” Tony Fabrizio, Trump’s campaign pollster, told the Washington Post.
I wrote a column about this months ago, but they’re still falling for it. Though to be fair, how much room is there for diminution where Scarborough and Brzezinski are concerned?
UPDATE: As usual, IowaHawk nails it:
THE TOOL KIT FOR AN INDEPENDENT CYBER COMMAND: The U.S. Cyber Command is supposed to be a war-fighting outfit.
…Cyber Command’s tools would be meant to be attributed to the Pentagon in a war scenario; obfuscating attribution won’t be a necessary endeavor.
“The tools are different. Tools designed to reside and extract information might be different than tools designed to delay, degrade, disrupt and all that,” Michael Hayden, former director of the NSA and the CIA, told C4ISRNET in a recent interview. Hayden also commanded the first military and offensive cyber-oriented organization — Joint Functional Component Command-Network Warfare, CYBERCOM’s direct predecessor.
MORE:
Most agree that CYBERCOM and the NSA will remain closely aligned even after the inevitable split, considering the NSA is still a combatant command-support organization and provides the requisite intelligence necessary to execute cyber operations.
Worth the read.
THE DEMOGRAPHICS OF HOUSTON, TEXAS: A preview of America’s future?
From VOA:
Hot, hazy Houston, where roaches fly along Texas’ Gulf Coastal Plain — who would choose to transplant and call the city home? The answer is some of the world’s best doctors, scientists, engineers, chefs, artists, and entrepreneurs – highly specialized immigrants from Africa and Asia as well as an influx of laborers from south of the border.
They come for one reason only, a longtime Houstonian told VOA, the opportunity to make money.
It’s a thoughtful report. The video asking Houstonians what it means to be a Texan is a chuckle but also refreshing.
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SURE. IT’S NOT LIKE GAB WOULD TAKE HIM, AND HARVEST MOST OF HIS FOLLOWERS OR ANYTHING. Ellison Says Twitter Should Ban Trump: Congressman compares president to a ‘social media bully.’
SEEKING PAYBACK FOR BILL CLINTON? More Dems sign onto bill to impeach Trump.
I’m old enough to remember when people said that refusing to admit you lost an election was unAmerican.
ANNALS OF SELF-PARODY: France Bastille Day: ‘Complex thinker’ Macron ‘to skip press conference.’
French President Emmanuel Macron will break with tradition and not give a news conference on Bastille Day because his “complex thoughts” may prove too much for journalists, reports say.
A presidential source said Mr Macron’s thinking did not “lend itself” to a question and answer session.
The comments, quoted by Le Monde, are likely to be seized on by Mr Macron’s critics who portray him as arrogant.
Mr Macron had never stood for election before the presidential race.
This will end well.
July 1, 2017
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21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Selfishness as wisdom and virtue.
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Michigan mother pleads guilty to having sex with teenage boys. “Prosecutors said the Lima Township mother started an affair with the 14-year-old boy in the summer of 2016 after he graduated from middle school but before he started high school, FOX 2 Detroit reported. The majority of the incidents were alleged to have happened in the back of Lajiness’ car in a Lima Township driveway, Michigan State Police Trooper Donald Pasternak testified in court.”
SOMETHING MUCH BETTER THAN A BUNCH OF WHITE GUYS GETTING TOGETHER IN BERKELEY: A Bunch of White Guys Got Together in Philadelphia and Guess What Happened?
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