OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: VA chief took in Wimbledon, river cruise on European work trip; wife’s expenses covered.
Archive for 2017
September 29, 2017
JOSH BLACKMAN & SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: The emoluments clauses litigation, part 4 — an emolument is the “profit derived from a discharge of the duties of the office.”
PIZZA AND FAIRY TALES: Nicholas Kristof in North Korea shares photos of ‘fun’ and pizza.
Liberal New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof is reporting from North Korea and sharing photos on social media of school children, food and the “fun” he is witnessing in the rogue country.
Kristof began tweeting and posting photos to Instagram on Tuesday and he said he has interviewed government officials and toured “a side of the country that doesn’t always come through.”
One photo showed what appeared to be an amusement park. “North Koreans like to have fun, too,” Kristof wrote in the caption of one photo that showed a park ride. “People were shouting happily on this ride on an amusement park.”
In another photo from North Korea, a country that has long faced food shortages resulting in a largely starved population, Kristof showed a meal he was having.
“Lunch in Pyongyang, North Korea, at a pizza restaurant with live music,” the caption said.
As spotted at Twitchy, Nicholas Kristof, “please collect your Walter Duranty prize now.”
(Classical reference in headline.)
SORRY, THIS JUST SOUNDS LIKE A PARADISE FOR ENEMY HACKERS: Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein wants all military fighters, bombers, planes, ships, tanks and other military assets to be as connected as Tesla cars.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Trump Court Nominee Upheld Rights of Police Against Holder DOJ Misconduct.
Trump nominated Engelhardt to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a district that covers the area from Alabama to the Rio Grande. Engelhardt already serves as a United States District Court judge in New Orleans.
Engelhardt will be familiar to PJ Media readers.
He is the judge who wrote a scathing 129-page order blistering the misconduct of lawyers at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the local New Orleans U.S. Attorney’s Office in a prosecution of New Orleans police officers. His order offers a look behind the curtain of some of the worst ideological misconduct that occurred at the Obama DOJ.
Misconduct may be an inadequate word to describe the behavior of DOJ lawyers, and Engelhardt saw it all up close.
Read the whole thing.
OOPS: China’s booming electric vehicle market is about to run into a mountain of battery waste.
The average lifespan of a lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery, the dominant type in China’s electric vehicles, is around five years, according to Li Changdong, chairman of the Hunan-based Brunp group, China’s top electric car battery recycler in 2016 (link in Chinese). Most batteries installed on electric vehicles during the 2012 to 2014 period will be retired on a large scale (link in Chinese) around 2018, Li told the Beijing-based newspaper Economic Information Daily.
In 2020, nearly 250,000 metric tons (276,000 tons) of batteries, or 35 gigawatt-hours of batteries, are set to be retired—nearly 20 times those depleted in 2016, GaoGong Industry Institute, a Shenzhen-based electric car industry research firm, told Quartz.
The battery is the heart of the electric vehicle industry, and the country needs a well-established battery recycling system, Xin Guobin, a top industry and tech official, told a national forum for the battery-powered engine industry Tuesday (link in Chinese) (Sept. 26). But recycling these batteries isn’t easy, due to the sophisticated chemical procedures involved. If it’s not done properly the heavy metal contained in the battery can lead to contamination of soil and water.
Unexpectedly.
WELL, THERE GOES THEIR INCENTIVE TO MAKE IT EASIER: Ikea’s stuff is tough to assemble, so it bought a startup to do it for you.
PAGING WILLARD STILES: A Giant Coconut-Eating Giant Rat Was Discovered in the Solomon Islands.
It’s four times the size of a typical North American rat and can chew through coconut shells.
SEEMS LIKE JUST YESTERDAY CNN WAS SCANDALIZED BY THE WORD “BOOBS:” 45-foot-tall statue of nude woman to stand on National Mall. But somewhere, Hugh Hefner is smiling.
OH NO: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, star of “Veep,” reveals she has breast cancer.
Not only is Louis-Dreyfus a tremendous comedic talent who has earned continuing success long past what Hollywood considers most actresses’ sell-by date, but Veep is belly-laugh funny, take-no-prisoners, and anti-PC.
Thoughts and prayers for a full and speedy recovery.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The First Primary in the Party of Trump.
The argument between Moore and Strange was over who would best serve Trump. The fact that both contestants highlighted their allegiance to the president underscores the true significance of the result: This was not a primary over who would represent Alabama in the United States Senate as a member of the Grand Old Party. It was the first primary in the Party of Trump.
The election of Moore was not an aberration but part of a long-running trend. Moore’s voters are Trump’s voters: rural, working class religious conservatives furious at Beltway insiders more interested in lowering the corporate tax rate and upholding standard legislative procedure than in building a wall along the southern border and protecting religious liberty. Moore’s method is also similar to Trump’s. Both men are inflammatory, both are unpredictable, both are conspiracy-prone, and both are the self-appointed defenders of powerful cultural symbols such as the Ten Commandments and the National Anthem against subversion from the left. Their constituencies not only do not watch CNN, they loathe the network and its peers for trying to impose on audiences a set of non-traditional and politically correct values. As Trump said of National Enquirer readers in 1999: “Those are the real people.”
That Strange lost despite Trump’s support shows that Trumpism is bigger than Trump himself — and Continetti’s column is a nice reminder that Trumpism even predates Trump as a political force.
Both parties have been shaken to the core by this ongoing realignment, but it remains to be seen whether the swamp can actually be drained.
FASTER, PLEASE: Sarah Hoyt on the Twilight of the Liberal Gods.
BRUCE BAWER: Meet Lorraine Ali, Mendacious Muslim ‘Media Critic.’
JENNY? THINGS GOT A LITTLE OUT OF HAND. IT’S JUST THIS WAR AND THAT LYING SON OF A BITCH HANNITY! Accused NSA Leaker Reality Winner Says Stress From Watching Fox News Made Her Steal Classified Docs.
THE RED TOURIST PLANET: Elon Musk Projects First Private Trips to Mars by Middle of Next Decade.
Mr. Musk sketched out his aggressive vision of private space exploration by his company SpaceX—complete with technical details of capsules larger than superjumbo airliners and the basis of a business plan to pay for it—at an international astronautics conference in Australia on Friday.
The presentation, delivered in a folksy manner, was the serial entrepreneur’s most dramatic effort yet to provide specifics demonstrating the viability of his long-standing goal of colonizing the red planet.
To begin with, he downsized the proposed rocket from earlier ideas and made it more versatile, so it could be suitable for less-demanding missions closer to the earth as well as the moon.
Projecting the first trips to Mars by 2022 or 2024—more than a decade before the U.S. or any other government anticipate coming close—Mr. Musk’s latest plans are built around a business principle he had never publicly broached before.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk’s dreams of deep space exploration.
By leveraging technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk—who is also the co-founder of Tesla—aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and relatively quickly replaced by the multi-purpose systems.
And: “Mr. Musk acknowledged that the 2022 deadline was largely ‘aspirational,’ but added that by 2024 he was fairly confident about flying as many as half-a-dozen spacecraft to the Martian surface and starting to build a fuel depot there.”
Cue the wailing that Musk’s fuel depot will despoil the pristine Martian environment…
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Megan Mcardle: It Shouldn’t Be So Easy to Go to Grad School: Universities are milking the huge loan sums from grad students to subsidize the cost of undergraduate degrees. This system is broken.
There is a limit, of course, to how sorry we should feel for people who borrowed lots of money for a graduate degree, and found that it wasn’t a surefire ticket to easy prosperity. I am sympathetic to those people; indeed, I am one of those people. But people with graduate degrees, even not-very-useful-ones, are more affluent, more educated and more skilled than the general population. We should not exaggerate the tragedy of their fate simply because they are more like most of the readers of this article than is an unemployed welder in Flint.
We should, however, be concerned because the cost is spreading. Having finally reached the limits of American parents to bear ever-increasing bills for undergraduate tuition, struggling colleges are now turning to graduate programs to fund their operations. Indeed, schools often encourage graduate students’ naïve faith, painting a rosy picture of future employment prospects that is, to say the very least, highly selective.
It’s bad enough that schools do this; it’s worse still that the American taxpayer is helping them. For it is hard not to suspect that the proliferation of master’s degrees programs has less to do with exploding employer demand for advanced degrees in Jewish studies or public history, and more to do with the availability of student loans to fund those degrees. The government caps the amount that undergraduates can borrow, but offers graduate students considerably more rope with which to hang themselves.
We should either abolish student loans, or put universities on the hook when graduates can’t pay them. Skin in the game.
YAHOO SPORTSWRITER SHAMES BLACK NHL STAR WHO REFUSES TO PROTEST NATIONAL ANTHEM.
Just think of the media as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
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IN CASE YOU MISSED IT. My latest New York Observer essay: Rattled ‘Rocket Man’ Claims Right to Intercept U.S. Aircraft — Which Would Mean War.
SMITHSONIAN FINALLY GIVES CLARENCE THOMAS A SPOT IN YEAR-OLD AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY MUSEUM.
Flashback to Kevin D. Williamson last year on Clarence Thomas: Disappeared by the Smithsonian.