NBC NEWS REPORTS U.S. PREPARED TO STRIKE NORTH KOREA IF NORTH KOREA TESTS NUCLEAR DEVICE: NBC said “multiple senior U.S. intelligence officials” provided the information. That description usually means the reporter received an official, coordinated leak. U.S. officials also said South Korea must agree to the preemptive attack. In any case, strategic patience is over. For context, here’s the relevant history and background.
Archive for 2017
April 14, 2017
April 13, 2017
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WHAT HAS BEEN SEEN CANNOT BE UNSEEN: Furless Tickle Me Elmo Will Haunt Your Dreams [VIDEO].
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: Detroit emergency room doctor charged with child genital mutilation.
MALE RAPE SURVIVORS: “I hear the stories and experiences of others all the time and the story is the same: people just don’t see men or boys as victims. Society only mentions them as perpetrators.”
AN ELECTED FEDERAL JUDICIARY WOULD NEVER DO THIS: “Third Circuit: neighbors who criticized condo residents over emotional support dogs must face civil rights suit.”
PROBABLY BECAUSE YOU’RE NOT PUTTING OUT ENOUGH. NEXT QUESTION? Help! Why does my boyfriend have so many wet dreams?
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HEH: “What did we blow up? Leading from behind.”
Meanwhile in Syria, we also “blowed up a bunch of shit and it ‘blowed up real good.’ It was a checkmate move on five different chessboards that took out the following opponents.”
#HUMBLEBRAG: Dan Rochkind used to date swimsuit models, but he’s happier now that he’s engaged to a merely beautiful woman.
Actually, in his rock-star days my youngest brother dated a number of Maxim/Playboy model types, and they were universally very nice and surprisingly smart.
FASTER, PLEASE: Goldman Sachs Is Interested in Space Mining.
The global investment bank Goldman Sachs has claimed mining asteroids for precious metals is a “realistic” goal.
It has released a report exploring the possibility of using an “asteroid-grabbing spacecraft” to extract platinum from space rocks.
“While the psychological barrier to mining asteroids is high, the actual financial and technological barriers are far lower,” the report said, according to Business Insider.
“Prospecting probes can likely be built for tens of millions of dollars each and Caltech has suggested an asteroid-grabbing spacecraft could cost $2.6 billion.”
The bank added: “Space mining could be more realistic than perceived.”
I’ve been saying this for decades. It’s nice that people with money are catching on.
THE GREAT RETAIL APOCALYPSE OF 2017:
From rural strip-malls to Manhattan’s avenues, it has been a disastrous two years for retail.
There have been nine retail bankruptcies in 2017—as many as all of 2016. J.C. Penney, RadioShack, Macy’s, and Sears have each announced more than 100 store closures. Sports Authority has liquidated, and Payless has filed for bankruptcy. Last week, several apparel companies’ stocks hit new multi-year lows, including Lululemon, Urban Outfitters, and American Eagle, and Ralph Lauren announced that it is closing its flagship Polo store on Fifth Avenue, one of several brands to abandon that iconic thoroughfare.
Well, this has actually been going on since at least 2009, as the iconic photo below from Barack Obama’s early days illustrates. But now it’s okay to notice it.
“It Can’t Happen Here” was always meant in tragic irony.
FASTER, PLEASE: Synthetic Blood Is About To Go Through Human Trials. This may have anti-aging relevance, too. Since there’s some evidence that young blood’s anti-aging qualities are really just based on the absence of toxic stuff in old blood, presumably synthetic blood would be just as good if that’s the case. Swap out real blood for synthetic, purge all the old built-up crud, then replace with new. I hope it’s that easy!
ANYBODY BUT HER: Clinton Campaign Left Frustrated, Angry After Bill and Hillary Continuously Blamed Them For Sucking.
“Neither Clinton could accept the simple fact that Hillary had hamstrung her own campaign and dealt the most serious blow to her own presidential aspirations,” the authors wrote.
“The underlying truth — the one that many didn’t want to admit to themselves — was the person ultimately responsible for these decisions, the one whose name was on the ticket, hadn’t corrected these problems, all of which had been brought to her attention before primary day. She’d stuck with the plan, and it had cost her,” Allen and Parnes concluded.
Clinton continues to blame FBI director James Comey’s decision to re-open the investigation into Clinton days before the election as well as Russia for hacking into the campaign’s email server.
And don’t forget men. Men did this to Madam not-President.
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HEALTH: Why calorie counting is almost useless and often misleading.
A calorie is the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of a gram of water by one degree Celsius. The “calories” we talk about in food are the amount of energy released when that food is burned. Of course the first law of thermodynamics applies to humans, so if you take in less energy than you use, it’s impossible to store that energy (as body fat). But the factors that go into energy balance are many. The body burns and stores energy from different foods in different forms at different times in different people in different ways.
That crudity leads to mistakes, like the idea that 200 calories of Skittles are in any way equivalent to 200 calories of salad. In that way, calories have been weaponized by marketers to claim their ingestible products are innocuous. As Coca-Cola has advertised, for one, drinking soda is fine as long as you exercise enough to burn off those calories. That’s reasonable if it weren’t also true that constant exposure to high-sugar foods changes the way our bodies store energy. It’s like saying it’s fine to insult someone as long as you follow it with a compliment.
Worse still are the loudly advertised “100-calorie” packs of sugar-based edible products. They cause insulin levels to surge, affecting nutrient absorption and subsequent hunger in ways fundamentally different from eating 100 calories of almonds or spinach. That’s so much spinach. It would fill your stomach and please the microbes of your bowel.
Eat more good stuff than bad stuff and don’t worry so much.
TYPICAL: “White boys” with problems should grow up, because black women have it worse. I dunno, I’m seeing a lot of unconscious privilege in this piece. . . .
FORMATION FLYING: B-25s on the prowl. StrategyPage’s WW2 bomber photo series continues. (The bombers are in formation over water, preparing to strike railroad targets in northern Italy.)
JAMES COMEY: FBI ‘Confused’ People Last Year, ‘We’re Not on Anybody’s Side’
It hardly seems possible that anyone paying attention wasn’t confused by Comey’s performance last year.
HOSTILE ENVIRONMENT: The ‘Toxic Masculinity’ Trend Blames Boys For Being Born Male: Healthy masculinity is exactly what our young boys need to be taught right now, not embarrassment at the way they are made. Hatred and disdain for men and masculinity is practically a religion in some sectors of our society, and naturally some of that spills over onto boys.
MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS: Astronomers piece together first image of black hole.
It will take months to develop the image, but if scientists succeed the results may help peel back mysteries about what the universe is made of and how it came into being.
“Instead of building a telescope so big that it would probably collapse under its own weight, we combined eight observatories like the pieces of a giant mirror,” said Michael Bremer, an astronomer at the International Research Institute for Radio Astronomy (IRAM) and a project manager for the Event Horizon Telescope.
“This gave us a virtual telescope as big as Earth — about 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) is diameter,” he told AFP.
The bigger the telescope, the finer the resolution and level of detail.
The targeted supermassive black hole is hidden in plain sight, lurking in the centre of the Milky Way in a region called the Sagittarius constellation, some 26,000 light years from Earth.
I’v waited for this since I was about eight years old, so a few more months won’t hurt.