I DOUBT IT’S ABOUT NOT BEING EVIL: Google is super secretive about its anti-aging research. No one knows why.
Archive for 2017
April 27, 2017
THE HILL: 12 GOP no votes on new ObamaCare bill.
Senate support looks wobbly as well.
NEW YORK TIMES TO ANN COULTER: What did you think would happen if you wore that mini-skirt to Berkeley?
HMM: On His 97th Day As President, Donald Trump Made Tax Reform Less Likely.
Make no mistake: Thorndike and other veteran tax watchers figure the Republican Congress will ultimately pass a tax cut of some size this year and call whatever they pass tax reform.
“They have to have a tax cut, right? There’s a Republican president and a Republican Congress,’’ says Leonard Burman, a Syracuse University professor and co-founder of the Tax Policy Center. “But I’m not optimistic it will be reform. It’s too bad, because there were a lot of interesting ideas that were bandied about, particularly on the Republican side.”
Reform is arguably even more important than rate cuts, given how Congress and the past three administrations have larded up the tax code with bewildering complexities.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: How The Obama Precedent Empowered Trump.
TAILGATERS: Russian navy intelligence ship sinks after collision with freighter off Turkish coast.
A Russian naval intelligence ship sank Thursday after colliding with a merchant freighter in foggy conditions on the Black Sea near Istanbul, the Turkish coast guard said. All 78 crew members on the Russian vessel were rescued.
The crew of the freighter Youzarsif H, a Togo-flagged ship traveling from Romania to Jordan and carrying 8,800 sheep, was unharmed and the ship suffered slight damage to its bow, according to local media reports.
In Moscow, Russia’s Defense Ministry issued a statement confirming that the vessel, the Liman, went down after the collision tore a hole in the hull below the waterline.
And:
The collision occurred about 20 miles northwest of the Bosporus Strait, one of the world’s busiest waterways connecting the Black Sea to the shipping lanes leading to the Mediterranean.
At the time of the accident, the Bosporus was closed because of poor visibility, the Reuters news agency reported, citing the shipping agency GAC.
Maybe not the best time and place for spying.
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THIS IS NOT NEWS TO INSTAPUNDIT READERS: Shale Crushes Solar.
NO ACT IS TOO UNSPEAKABLE FOR THEM, SO LONG AS THE HAND THAT PERFORMS IT IS SUITABLY BROWN AND WEATHERED: Activist finds left’s silence on genital mutilation case dismaying.
No, that line isn’t original with me — it was in a review of Germaine Greer I read back in the 1980s. But it stuck.
UPDATE: Siloam Health Chooses Not to Help Stop Female Genital Mutilation in Tennessee. “The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) report, estimates that the Nashville-Davidson-Murfreesboro-Franklin Metropolitan Statistical Area is ranked 20th in the country for the potential risk of FGM being performed on women and girls and that Tennessee is number 18 in overall state rankings for risk to women and girls from FGM.”
PROCUREMENT: Lockheed Sees More F-35, Missile Defense Orders From Abroad.
You read a lot of complaints about the F-35 from people who have never flown one, but the foreign orders keep stacking up.
GOOD: Russia’s Oil Cuts Are About To Get Harder.
No petrostate is excited about voluntarily constraining their production, but those limits can often be useful if they help push oil prices up. OPEC and a collection of eleven other oil producing nations agreed last November to collectively reduce their output through the first six months of this year, and Russia played a big role by agreeing to join those cuts. However, as the end of that first cut looms large and its participants begin to discuss extending that strategy through the end of the year, Moscow’s ability—or maybe more accurately its willingness—to play ball is going to be tested. That’s because, as Bloomberg reports, the seasonal vagaries of Russian oil production make it easier to cut supplies in the first half of the year than in the second. . . .
In other words, Russian output is going to surge in the second half of this year, which means any supply limitations it agrees to will bite harder.
The Saudis remain the lynchpin of this agreement, but Riyadh knows how important Moscow is to the plan, whose intent is to reduce the global glut of crude. Saudi energy minister Khalid Al-Falih told Bloomberg that petrostates are working towards a consensus, but acknowledged that “we still need to talk to all countries…a very important country to talk to, of course, is Russia, the biggest non-OPEC exporter.”
The stakes are high for these producers—if they don’t agree to continue their production cuts, analysts believe the price of oil could drop back down to $40 or below.
That would be terrible. Remember when Barack Obama said we couldn’t drill our way out of our energy problems?
THIS IS THE GUY WHO’S BEEN TELLING US FOR MONTHS THAT TRUMP IS A CON MAN: WTF?! Check out what Evan McMullin told the FEC about his outstanding vendor invoices. I’m beginning to believe that his candidacy was largely a scam to enrich consultants. Though judging by his unpaid invoices, maybe even that was a failure.
GOOD TIMES: Here’s What Ronald Reagan Did When College Kids Went Ape At UC-Berkeley.
In an extremely controversial move, for which he never apologized, Reagan declared a state of emergency and sent in 2,200 National Guard troops. He enacted a curfew and banned public assembly for two weeks. The National Guard patrolled the streets of Berkeley, dispersing any crowd of four or more. It wasn’t pretty, but they restored order.
There is a classic, should-be-in-the-Smithsonian clip of Reagan at a press conference after the fact with university administrators. He says: “Those people told you for days in advance that if the university sought to go ahead with that construction, they were going to physically destroy the university.”
Someone in the crowd shouts that Reagan should have negotiated with the students. Reagan, with the incredulity of someone who understands that youth don’t run the world for a reason, says: “Negotiate? What is to negotiate? All of it began the first time some of you who know better and are old enough to know better let young people think that they have the right to choose the laws they would obey as long as they were doing it in the name of social protest.”
To underscore the point, Reagan got up and walked out of the room. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.
Nope.
LEFTISM IS DEFINED BY MEANNESS: Steven Hayward: Portlandia: City of the Petty, Bankrupt, Vindictive Left.
Related: “What a flimsy, pathetic place.”
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Democrats are still rushing to extremes.
Jolted by Hillary Clinton’s unexpected loss to Donald Trump, Democrats and progressives have retreated to an alternate reality. In this safe space that they’ve created for themselves, Clinton didn’t lose so much as the Russians won.
Red Mania hasn’t been confined to the fringe, but is being promoted by Democratic representatives, including Maxine Waters and Ted Lieu.
Waters took it so far as to suggest on MSNBC that GOP Rep. Jason Chaffetz, chair of the House Oversight Committee, is leaving Congress because of his “connections” to “what is going on in the Ukraine and perhaps in Russia itself.”
Their reward for pushing this craziness? Becoming national heroes to the Democratic faithful.
As Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”
UNEXPECTEDLY! German Govt: Crime by Immigrants Skyrocketed 50% Last Year. And it’s probably worse than they admit.
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RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: Maldives Blogger and Activist Yameen Rasheed Stabbed to Death.
Through his blog The Daily Panic and Twitter account @Yaamyn, Rasheed had become known as an outspoken critic of the government and radical Islamism. Shocked by this death, Maldivians expressed their grief and concerns on social media, while some demanded an international probe.
Rasheed was found in the stairwell of his apartment at 3 a.m. with multiple stab wounds and died soon after he was taken to the hospital. He suffered 16 stab wounds to his body, including 14 on the chest, one on the neck and one on the head. He had received several death threats via text messages and social media for his views against the government and religious extremists, which he had reported to the police.
Stabbing murders like this one have been going on in the Maldives for years.
ANTI-TRUMP ASTROTURF: Out: It’s a grassroots movement! In: So what if the protesters are paid?
MIGHT AS WELL DEFUND HIGHER EDUCATION. IT’S FAILED. Intimidation Is the New Normal on Campus. From now on, any speaker who arouses a protest is at risk of a beating.
Punch back twice as hard.
ANTITERROR: Explosion rocks Damascus airport.
Israel’s Intelligence Minister Israel Katz appeared to back up claims that Israel was responsible for the explosion in an interview with Army Radio Thursday.
“I can confirm that the incident in Syria is completely compatible with the Israeli policy of operating to prevent the smuggling advanced weaponry from Syria to Hezbollah in Lebanon by Iran,” Katz said in response to a question on the incident.
“I don’t want to go any further as is natural in these circumstances but this event is completely compatible with our declared policy, a policy which we carry out as the Prime Minister has said, at any moment that we receive intelligence that shows the intent to pass advanced weapons to Hezbollah.”
Maintaining communications and logistics with their favorite terror groups is one reason why Iran is so desperate to maintain a presence in Syria.