THIRD GENERATION: 2019 Porsche Cayenne: Here It Is.
Archive for 2017
September 1, 2017
IT MIGHT NOT BE OVER YET: Two new tropical threats are taking shape in the Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic Ocean.
ELI LAKE: Trump Is Right. Nuclear Talks With North Korea Are Pointless.
But the U.S. must prepare for more aggression from Pyongyang. In overlooked congressional testimony from January, Eberstadt recommends a policy of bolstering missile defense systems for South Korea, Japan and the U.S. and encouraging South Korea to bolster its civilian defense capabilities. Eberstadt also recommends doubling down on counter-proliferation, interdicting North Korean ships on the high seas, targeting its illicit procurement network, and other steps past administrations have taken to make it harder for the regime to perfect its missiles and nuclear weapons.
I would add to this list: covert operations aimed at sabotaging these programs similar to the Stuxnet virus deployed against Iran’s centrifuges in 2009 and 2010.
Eberstadt also warns that it’s important to understand that North Korea’s nuclear program is not just an insurance policy for the survival of the regime, as most experts understand it. He says nuclear weapons are also a component of the country’s strategy to break the U.S. alliance with South Korea. He points out that unification of the peninsula has been a consistent aim of the Kim family since the start of the Korean War. They have shown no sign of giving this up. This means the U.S. must plan now for a response to a conventional military attack on South Korea.
If North Korea progresses all the way to having intercontinental-range missiles tipped with nuclear warheads, tucked away in hardened silos, then our range of options will shrink from “bad and worse” all the way down to “nearly unimaginable.”
FOSTERING DIVERSITY IS SO MUCH IMPORTANT THAN SAVING LIVES: Affirmative-action hiring endangers the FDNY. One female recruit failed the entrance exam six times but was hired anyway to satisfy a court-ordered quota system. The goal in hiring firefighters, one judge opined, should not be to identify “those who are strongest or fastest.” Sure, a few victims might not be rescued in time, but think how empowered the new recruits will feel.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Louisiana judge rules Sofia Vergara’s frozen embryos are ‘citizens of California.’
RISE OF THE MACHINES: This Automated Sewing Robot Can Make Shirts Basically By Itself.
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING OF URINE, FECES: “A D.C. bus driver told the woman to have a nice day, and the woman responded by throwing a cup of her own urine at the driver, police said.”
The 21st century isn’t working out the way I had hoped.
(Classical reference in headline. Found via Kate of SDA, as part of her recurring “Riding Mass Transit Is Like Inviting 20 Random Hitchhikers Into Your Car” category.)
THANKS, OBAMA: Nebulous Language Enables Tehran’s Missile Ambitions.
What the Iran nuclear agreement essentially does is impose a time-bound pause of Iran’s nuclear weapons capabilities along with some monitoring provisions to try to prevent cheating. But the worry is that the Iranians may not even need to cheat and instead can just wait the thing out. Meanwhile, they continue to make progress on the missiles.
Remember, Iran was already thought to be pretty much where it presumably wanted to be in terms of nuclear weapons technology. Former U.S. President Barack Obama said that one of the accomplishments of the agreement was to move Iran from just a few months away from being able to produce a nuclear weapon to a year or more. But that means that even now, they are within a year or so of the “breakout” capability to do that.
But Iran has a longer road ahead on the missile front, where they too are working feverishly just like the North Koreans. Put simply, the nuclear agreement has at best paused one aspect of becoming a nuclear weapons power, the weapons themselves, where Iran had already gotten close to the finish line, while allowing the Iranians to continue making progress on developing, producing, and deploying ever longer-range and more accurate missiles. Worse still, because of sanctions relief, including the release of vast frozen assets that had been held by the United States for decades, the nuclear deal has infused Iran with new resources that it can plow into its missile programs. All of this at the same time the nuclear deal gives Tehran a greater sense of international legitimacy for abiding by the agreement.
The agreement Obama signed is so bad in nearly every possible way, that it’s impossible to believe it isn’t exactly what he wanted.
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Eye Scans to Detect Cancer and Alzheimer’s Disease.
TRUMP GIVES $1 MILLION, STILL CAN’T WIN: “Trump pledges $1 million, and for the AP it is just another opportunity to take a partisan shot at him. In other words, it’s business as usual.”
Just think of AP as Democrat operatives with a wire service, and it all makes sense.
THIS IS WHAT A FEMINIST LOOKS LIKE: Feminist Clementine Ford sparks walkout by refusing to answer schoolboys’ questions. “Some schoolgirls staged a walkout on feminist Clementine Ford after she refused to take questions from male students at exclusive Aquinas College in Melbourne. The 35-year-old blogger and controversial, outspoken activist was slammed by parents after she blocked questions from year 10 schoolboys at the private secondary school.”
Good for the girls.
THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Administration Official Is Unsure If Individuals Will Sign Up For Obamacare.
A BEATING IN BERKELEY: “As white supremacists go, Joey Gibson makes for a lousy one. For starters, he’s half Japanese. ‘I don’t feel like I’m Caucasian at all,’ he says. Not to be a stickler for the rules, but this kind of talk could get you sent to Master Race remedial school…Joey believed that a person should be able to attend the political rally of his choice in America, or to wear a MAGA hat in a place like Portland, Ore., without worrying about getting hit in the face.”
Peaceful, easygoing, free speech-oriented Berkeley “unexpectedly” had other plans. Read the whole thing.
PREPAREDNESS: Houston offers a grim vision of Los Angeles after catastrophic earthquake.
In recent years, officials have drawn up detailed scenarios of what would happen if a huge quake struck this region, part of a larger campaign to better prepare.
The last two big earthquakes to hit Los Angeles — the 1971 Sylmar quake and 1994 Northridge quake — caused destruction and loss of life. But the worst damage was concentrated in relatively small areas and did not fundamentally bring daily life across all of Southern California to a halt.
Experts have long warned that a significantly larger quake will eventually strike and that the toll will be far greater.
L.A. also lacks the social capital that Houston possesses. Anyway, if you live on the West Coast, or in the (huge) New Madrid zone, or in other earthquake-prone areas, you may want to work on your earthquake prep.
UPDATE: Good advice:
Here are two pieces of advice: However much water you’ve got, store some more. And get a couple of fire extinguishers and make sure you know how to use them. Extrapolating from the 110 fires that occurred after the Northridge and San Fernando and Loma Prieta earthquakes, we have estimated that a big quake creating a strongly shaken hundreds of thousands of square miles will yield 1,600 fires. And you’ll need to fight those fires yourself. You have to be ready to do that.
Good advice for everyone, really. Though I prepare mostly for tornadoes and not earthquakes, I keep some supplies and gear in a shed in my backyard, so that if things are bad they won’t be buried under the house.
OF COURSE HE DOES: Turkey’s Erdogan slams US indictments as ‘scandal.’
Erdogan’s comment follows the indictments in the United States of 19 people accused of attacking peaceful demonstrators gathered outside the Turkish ambassador’s Washington home during a visit by Erdogan on May 16.
Erdogan said Friday that the security officials were protecting him from members of an outlawed Kurdish militant group after U.S. police failed to do so. One of those indicted is the head of Erdogan’s security operation.
Yesterday’s writeup of the incident included a somewhat different take on what happened:
Nine people were hospitalised and two members of the Turkish leader’s security detail initially arrested in the brutal altercation with Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians protesting Mr Erdogan’s human rights record and Syria policy.
In footage from the incident Turkish bodyguards can be seen suddenly rushing at the protesters.
An elderly man holding a megaphone is kicked in the face, and several women are also hit. Police officers can be seen attempting to hold some of the aggressors back, dragging them to the other side of the street.
Throw the book at them.
JOHN R. MOORE: Antifa Came to Phoenix.
OSCAR-BAIT ‘DOWNSIZING’ FEARS CLIMATE CHANGE, OVERPOPULATION:
Hollywood bitterly clings to some topics more than others.
Consider these recent examples:
- Watergate? We’ve got yet another film on the subject coming soon.
- The Iraq War? The flow of movies stemming from that conflict continued in 2017.
- The Hollywood Blacklist? Bryan Cranston earned an Oscar nomination for 2015’s “Trumbo,” and don’t be surprised if more movies follow.
- Which brings us to climate change. This season already promises one climate change-themed tale – the long-awaited sequel to 1982’s “Blade Runner.”
Turns out “Blade Runner 2049” won’t be alone. Director Alexander Payne’s “Downsizing” follows an ordinary couple (Matt Damon, Kristen Wiig) who undergo a shrinking process to streamline their lives.
As Peter Biskind wrote in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, old Hollywood died by the end of the 1960s, in part because it kept trying to use the same playbook, despite audiences having moved on. The musical had been a staple of Hollywood since sound had been introduced in the late 1920s. And as late as 1965, 20th Century Fox had a huge hit with the Sound of Music. So old Hollywood kept churning out musical after musical after musical into the mid-to-late 1960s, with increasingly diminishing returns, until the old guard collapsed. MGM, the home of the big budget musical in the 1950s and early 1960s, effectively went out of business, and numerous other studios teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. By then, the musical was 30 years old, and hopelessly out of style. Today, the enviro-doomsday film is almost a half century old, and is equally due to be put of pasture:
Old Hollywood never got the message then that its formula was exhausted — no one should expect them to listen today, either.
IN THE MAIL: Proof: The Science of Booze.
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