IN A VENEZUELA RAVAGED BY INFLATION, ‘A RACE FOR SURVIVAL:’
The economic turmoil has put families — poor and affluent alike — at the intersection of some very tough choices, bred a stressful uncertainty about the course of any given day and turned the most basic tasks into feats of endurance.
Oh sure – but the sex there is awesome, the Times assures me.
On a more serious note, typing ctrl-F “socialism” on the Times’ article on Venezuela brings back zero results, unexpectedly.
LIFE IN THE WORKERS, SOLDIERS’, AND PEASANTS’ PARADISE: North Korean nuclear tests sickening residents with ‘ghost disease,’ defectors say.
“So many people died we began calling it ‘ghost disease,'” Lee Jeong Hwa, who in 2010 escaped her home in Kilju County where the nuclear testing site Punggye-ri is located, told NBC News. “We thought we were dying because we were poor and we ate badly. Now we know it was the radiation.”
Lee isn’t the only defector who believes the radiation is taking its toll on people who lived there.
South Korean newspaper Chosun Ilbo reported in November that close to two dozen defectors said the area surrounding Punggye-ri is turning into a “wasteland” where vegetation is dying and babies are born with deformities.
The defectors said drinking water in the area came from Mount Mantap, where nuclear tests reportedly were conducted underground.
The longer China waits to do what it should have done years ago with its maniac ally, the more people will die.
ANN ALTHOUSE: What Comedians Miss About Trump Is That He’s One Of Them:
Those who want to do anti-Trump humor need to understand that Trump himself is a comedian. I’m not saying Trump is just a clown, and it’s crazy that we made a clown President. I’m saying, whatever his worth as human being carrying out the duties of the presidency, he is also a comic talent, with many humorous insights, great timing, and — like the greatest comedians — he’s challenging us to see what’s funny and what’s serious as he mixes it up and causes anxiety that we can [relieve] if we climb out of the ocean of confusion and onto the island of laughter.
You don’t have to like any given comedian, and a comedian who wields tremendous political power is going to fail to amuse most people. In fact, whatever your politics, you’re not going to be a very funny comedian if you just think of the President as a wonderful humorist and laugh at his jokes. But you should understand the way in which he means to be funny and project yourself into the minds of the many people do respond to his humor. . . .
If you’ve been finding it easy to make fun of Trump, you are not working hard enough. It’s like trying to write a brief in a hard legal case and believing your adversary’s arguments are just stupid. You’d better understand the way they make sense and the thinking of the people who might hear these arguments as cogent or you’re not doing it right.
Indeed.
SAVE BRIDGET: PJ Media Editor, a Veteran Journalist and Terror Expert, Removed from Twitter.
No warning, no explanation, and so far no redress.
AND YOU THOUGHT COMEY WAS BAD: The FBI translator who went rogue and married an ISIS terrorist.
The man Greene married was no ordinary terrorist.
He was Denis Cuspert, a German rapper turned ISIS pitchman, whose growing influence as an online recruiter for violent jihadists had put him on the radar of counter-terrorism authorities on two continents.
In Germany, Cuspert went by the rap name Deso Dogg. In Syria, he was known as Abu Talha al-Almani. He praised Osama bin Laden in a song, threatened former President Barack Obama with a throat-cutting gesture and appeared in propaganda videos, including one in which he was holding a freshly severed human head.
Within weeks of marrying Cuspert, Greene, 38, seemed to realize she had made a terrible mistake.
Tom Wolfe didn’t intend for Radical Chic to be a dating how-to guide.
THEY’LL NEVER SEE ‘EM COMING: The F-35 Can Now Fight a Ground War.
“Fielding the GBU-49 for use on the F-35A is a key milestone in delivering combat capability to the warfighter,” Brig. Gen. Todd Canterbury, director of the Air Force F-35 Integration Office, said in a statement.
“The F-35 is operational and combat ready, and integrating the GBU-49 with the aircraft makes the F-35 even more lethal than it already is.”
As originally envisioned, the single-engine stealth fighter did not include the ability hit moving targets with a laser-guided weapon in its Block 3F software load. Even though F-35s equipped with the final Block 3F configuration have the ability to identify and track multiple moving ground targets, when the Pentagon originally set the requirements for what became the Joint Strike Fighter program, the idea was that pilots would use cluster munitions to engage those enemies. However, since the Convention on Cluster Munitions (CCM) was adopted in 2008, such weapons have fallen out of vogue. The United States is not a signatory to the treaty, but Washington abides by the provisions of the document for the most part.
The correct choice between cluster munitions or laster-guided bombs is: Yes.
JOEL KOTKIN: Eric Garcetti for president? Really?
Someone may be putting something in the Los Angeles water supply. In the past months, two unlikely L.A.-based presidential contenders — Mayor Eric Garcetti and Disney Chief Robert Iger — have been floated in the media, including in the New York Times.
But before we start worrying about how an L.A.-based president might affect traffic (after all this is the big issue in Southern California), we might want to confront political reality. In both cases, the case for our local heroes’ candidacies is weak at best, and delusional at worst.
The Iger case is, if anything easier to dismiss. Iger can sell himself, like Trump, as a business success story, and with probably far-fewer questionable business transactions. Yet Iger, trying to run as a progressive in an increasingly left-wing Democratic Party, will face numerous challenges that dwarfs those faced by Trump.
Iger, for example, will have to run against the sad record of his company’s self-serving interference in Anaheim. Disney is generally a low-wage employer, and, in Orange County, this can be seen as contributing to the enormous disparity between cost of living and low salaries. I don’t suggest that companies should be primarily social justice warriors, but when a corporate executive runs, he’s going to be subject to their scrutiny. . . .
If Iger suffers from Mouse made illusions, Garcetti gets his from urbanist circles, who increasingly maintain that mayors should run the world. This may seem strange given that core cities account for barely a quarter of our major metropolitan population. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, most of regional growth takes place well outside the urban core. The slow growing city, which was first claimed to have reached four million people in 2008, has still not achieved that number according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Unfortunately for Garcetti, L.A. makes a hard sell as an exemplar for the economic future. Some cities like New York and San Francisco, have enjoyed robust expansions of employment in the past decade, but not Los Angeles. Overall, notes a recent survey in Wallet Hub of 150 cities in the country in terms of job prospects, ranked Los Angeles 115th well below less hyped places as Irvine, Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario and even Fontana.
Garcetti’s has tried to sell L.A.’s “silicon beach” as a hot tech location but, despite the success around the now faltering Snapchat, overall STEM growth over the past decade has been slightly negative. Remarkably for a one-time tech behemoth, the county now has less STEM employment per capita than the national average. At the same time, rankings of inequality and poverty, as measured by urban theorist Richard Florida, place the L.A. area, which includes the surrounding communities, dead last among the 20 largest metros. Overall the poverty rate in both the city proper and in the riot zone is higher now than before the 1992 riots.
Has Garcetti’s density agenda paid off elsewhere? One in four Angelinos, according to a recent UCLA study, spend half their income on rent, the highest again of any major metro.
There’s always that “rent is too damn high” guy.
DOWN PERISCOPE: The San Juan’s Final Hours.
In recent days, Argentine authorities have gathered crucial evidence to piece together a theory of what happened after the San Juan left Ushuaia on Nov. 8, bound for its home base of Mar del Plata about 260 miles south of Buenos Aires. They believe the sub took on water that caused a short circuit and a subsequent fire in a key battery compartment. The crew got the fire under control, but hours later there was a loud noise consistent with an explosion near the sub’s last reported location.
Top Argentine officials now believe a blast instantly killed the sailors and sent the vessel to the seafloor. While no one knows for sure what caused the explosion, the batteries are the likeliest culprit, Argentine naval officials and outside experts say.
“It looks like a very possible cause,” said Mike Fabey, a naval expert at Jane’s by IHS Markit, a defense consulting firm. “Battery issues of all types with submersibles are something people have been trying to deal with since submarines first went into the water. Water plus electricity equals fire.”
…
A diesel-electric sub’s batteries only hold a charge for about a week while submerged, so it must surface and “snorkel,” running its engines to recharge the batteries and ventilate stale air.In this case, the sub surfaced amid rough seas, with 23-foot-high waves that may have caused the sub to take on too much water through its snorkel, Argentine Navy spokesman Capt. Enrique Balbi said. The snorkel is equipped with a flap to keep water out, but water can sometimes get in anyway, navy officials said.
Sloppy maintenance or sloppy seamanship would seem the likeliest culprits.
HIGH-SPEED TRAIN TO NOWHERE: Could California be seeing the onset of a recession?
Brown attaches his admonishments to the budgets he proposes to the Legislature – the initial one in January and a revised version four months later.
Brown’s latest, issued last May, cited uncertainty about turmoil in the national government, urged legislators to “plan for and save for tougher budget times ahead,” and added:
“By the time the budget is enacted in June, the economy will have finished its eighth year of expansion – only two years shorter than the longest recovery since World War II. A recession at some point is inevitable.”
It’s certain that Brown will renew his warning next month. Implicitly, he may hope that the inevitable recession he envisions will occur once his final term as governor ends in January, 2019, because it would, his own financial advisers believe, have a devastating effect on the state budget.
Everybody sees it coming, but when it does, those in charge of the state budget will find it all quite unexpected.
SALENA ZITO: In a political world gone topsy-turvy, Mike Pence is the party leader.
NEW YORK — When President Trump shook the political world, the epicenter was Pennsylvania, the one swing state Republicans had tried and failed to carry in each of the last six presidential elections. The flamboyant businessman targeted Pennsylvania from the start and addressed the Pennsylvania Republican Party’s signature fundraising event in Manhattan exactly two years ago this week.
Last Friday, the Pennsylvania Society reconvened in New York City, but this time, it was Vice President Mike Pence who drew the keynote speaking slot, a role Pence has accepted with vigor across the country since taking office.
And as he spoke eloquently of the White House’s accomplishments over the past 10 months, it was also estimated he raised nearly a half a million dollars, a number essential for a state party apparatus who not only helped place both him and the president in the White House but is also bracing for big in-state midterm elections next year for both governor and U.S. Senate, as well as holding all 13 of their GOP House congressional seats.
Pence’s appearance is notable for several reasons but not because this is a sign he is preening his own political ambitions or is creating a shadow campaign as other news organizations have reported but because he has unofficially taken on the role as the leader of the Republican Party.
“Without question, Pence has absolutely taken on the traditional role as leader of the Republican Party. The mistake is made when people reference his out-front fundraising activity as a lurch for personal gain, or some shadow campaign for himself; they could not be more wrong,” said Rob Gleason, former chair of the Pennsylvania state GOP who took a lot of personal heat when he invited Trump to headline the party’s fundraiser in New York in 2015.
“Pence came up in the Republican Party the traditional way, first getting elected … congressman, and ultimately as the state’s governor,” he said.
“And along the way, he knows the way to build the party from the ground up is to pay attention to the small races that can turn a majority in the House or a presidential election,” Gleason said recalling Pence, then chair of the House Republican Conference, campaigning at the Richland Township Fire Department near Johnstown, Penn., for a special election 2010.
“I know it is said all of the time, but Trump is Trump, and part of his uniqueness in American politics is that is that he is a completely different kind of president in terms of his relationship with party building,” Gleason explained.
Yep. Trump’s not really a Republican, he’s a Trumpian. Pence is more traditional.
THERE WAS COLLUSION, ALL RIGHT, BUT NOT FROM TRUMP: Claudia Rossett on Obama’s Russia “collusion”.
I THINK I’M ON TO SOMETHING HERE. THE LEFT HAS TO COME FROM A DIFFERENT WORLD. ONE IN WHICH THIS MAKES SENSE: Philly Lawmakers Seek to Ban Bulletproof Glass in Liquor Stores.
WAIT… CUTTING TAXES IS THE END OF AMERICA? WHAT CONSTITUTION DO THE DEMOCRATS READ? WHAT COLOR IS THE SKY IN THEIR WORLD? 5 Absurd Overreactions to the Senate Passing Tax Reform.
THE DEEP WISDOM OF MR. EMPTY CHAIR: Sunday Funnies: Barack Obama Said WHAT Regarding American Leadership?!
THE FRUITS OF THE CORRUPT OBAMA ADMINISTRATION: Trump’s Right — the FBI Is in Tatters.
I HEAR MUELLER’S INVESTIGATION IS THE GREAT HIT ON THE FISHING CHANNEL THIS SEASON: Liberals: Trump Tweet Proves Obstruction of Justice in Flynn Case. There’s One Problem.
I’M STILL AGAINST EUTHANASIA, EVEN IF THEY ASK FOR IT: It’s possible for men to be allergic to sex.
I THOUGHT THERE COULDN’T BE A STUPIDER FASHION STATEMENT THAN PUSSY HATS. I WAS WRONG: Women are decorating their boobs to look like reindeer.
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