MICHAEL WALSH: Tear Down That Wall . . . of Silence. “From the moment it dawned on Hillary Clinton, late on election night, that she had managed to blow a fixed fight, and that there would, therefore, be hell to pay, the Democrat-Deep State-Media Complex suddenly had to conceal their own malfeasance by doing what the Left does best — projecting its own sins onto others.”
Read the whole thing.
INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST BROTHERHOOD: Cuba Is Making the Crisis in Venezuela Worse.
Pressing forward on a strategy of increased sanctions and multilateral pressure is right, but at the same time the Trump administration cannot delink Venezuela and Cuba, for there will be no resolution in Venezuela without addressing the pernicious influence of the Castro regime in fortifying Maduro’s grip on power and rooting out any internal opposition to the breakdown of democratic order.
Today, the penetration of Venezuela by thousands of Cuban operatives is complete. While it remains difficult to quantify the exact numbers, according to a Brookings Institution report, Cuban intelligence operatives and military advisors in Venezuela range from hundreds to thousands. Organization of American States Secretary General Luis Almagro puts the number at 15,000, likening them to “an occupation army from Cuba in Venezuela.”
Certainly, there is nothing new to the incestuous Venezuela-Cuba relationship. What is new is the Maduro regime’s increasing brazenness in pursuing an uncompromising survival strategy straight out of the Castro playbook: ever-more reliance on repression to maintain control, while driving the discontented out of the country. Cuba’s fingerprints are all over this human tragedy.
You might think that the Obama Administration would have made an issue out of Cuban enabling and meddling before normalizing relations with Cuba, but… no, you wouldn’t think that.
CAPITALISM FOR THE WIN: How Elon Musk Beat Russia’s Space Program.
And if you want to do big things, tycoon-based capitalism seems like the way to go, as opposed to corporate-committee-based capitalism: “Musk, with his crude salesmanship and nerdish cultural references, has a dream, described in a white paper he published last year: To colonize Mars. Musk admitted in the white paper that was his only motivation for getting rich. Russia doesn’t really have a dreamer to match.”
There’s never been a Russian D.D. Harriman, even in fiction.
WASN’T THAT THE WHOLE POINT OF OBAMACARE’S CRONYISM? Warren on Medicare for All: ‘Taxpayers Have Helped Make Insurance Companies Wildly Profitable.’
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Duluth schools remove ‘Huckleberry Finn’ and ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from curriculum.
As Ryan Holiday noted in a 2015 New York Observer article titled “The Real Reason We Need to Stop Trying to Protect Everyone’s Feelings,” In the 50th anniversary edition of Fahrenheit 451, “Bradbury includes a short afterword where he gives his thoughts on current culture. Almost as if he is speaking directly about the events above, he wrote: ‘There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running around with lit matches.’”
ANA QUINTANA: Venezuela resembles Dante’s ‘Inferno.’
You know there’s real trouble when a Detroit paper can — without hypocrisy or irony — publish a piece with that headline.
“DO THE LETTERS ‘FO’ MEAN ANYTHING TO YOU?” Yale Student Warns Men Can’t Be Left Alone Unless They’re Apologizing For ‘Toxic Masculinity.’
TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): Pickens teacher appealing conviction in sex case. “A former Pickens Academy teacher who was involved in relationships with two students is appealing her conviction, saying the law that prohibits sex with students is unconstitutional.”
SOON, TOO: Drones Will Surpass IED Threat in Future Conflicts.
Western air supremacy hasn’t been seriously challenged in a long time, but the threat is evolving quickly.
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Erie, Pennsylvania, Has Broken Its All-Time Snow Season Record.
(Via Small Dead Animals; classical reference in headline.)
FORMER CONGRESSMAN THADDEUS MCCOTTER: Adam ‘Pathfinder’ Schiff: Despicable, Smear-Mongering McCarthyite?
Consumer Reports just analyzed smart TVs from five big U.S. TV brands — Samsung, LG, Sony, TCL and Vizio — and found several problems. All can track what consumers watch, and two of the brands failed a basic security test.
How bad is the security? So poor, according to its report, that hackers were able to take over complete remote control of the TVs from Samsung and TCL’s branded Roku TV, which included changing channels, upping the volume, installing new apps and playing objectionable content from YouTube.
“What we found most disturbing about this was the relative simplicity of” hacking in, says Glenn Derene, Consumer Reports’ senior director of content.
The non-profit, which publishes a magazine and a website, partnered with a firm called Dissconnect to do the hack tests.
It was easy to break in, Derene said, because “basic security practices were not being followed.”
We own two smart TVs, because it’s impossible these days to buy something with a quality screen which isn’t “smart.” But neither one has any apps installed or is connected to the wifi, and both are used as dumb monitors for TiVo and Apple TV.
Even so, since both are wifi-equipped I have no idea what access third parties might be able to gain.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: FBI informant: Russians routed big bucks to Clinton Foundation to grease skids for uranium monopoly.
IN THE MAIL: How to Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
LIONEL CHETWYND: On Trump, Progressives Chose ‘Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards.’
MOLLIE HEMINGWAY: How The Media Buried Two Huge FBI Stories Yesterday.
Evergreen:
UP A CREEK ONCE AGAIN: “Whoops. CNN Senior Diplomatic Correspondent Michelle Kosinski became the latest person to fall for the North Korean parody Twitter account” DPRK News, retweeting and then deleting this tweet on Justin Trudeau:
You may recall Kosinski from her earlier days as an expert on hazardous deep water flooding dangers:
YES. NEXT QUESTION? MSNBC’s Katy Tur: Am I Out Of Touch For Not Cheering A $1,000 Bonus?
IT’S A DEBACLE EVERYWHERE IT’S TRIED, AND YET. . . Rent Control Needs Retirement, Not a Comeback.
According to the Wall Street Journal, rent control seems to be making a retro comeback. Most forms of intelligent life could be forgiven for asking why.
Serial experimentation with this policy has repeatedly shown the same result. Initially, tenants rejoice, and rent control looks like a victory for the poor over the landlord class. But the stifling of price signals leads to problems. Rent control starts by producing some sort of redistribution, because the people with low rents at the time that controls are imposed tend to be relatively low-income.
But then incomes rise, and rents don’t. People with higher incomes have more resources to pursue access to artificially cheap real estate: friends who work for management companies, “key fees” or simply incomes that promise landlords they won’t have to worry about collecting the rent. (One of my favorite New York City stories involves an acquaintance who made $175,000 a year, and applied for a rent-controlled apartment. He asked the women taking the application if his income was going to be a problem; she looked at the application and said, “No, I think that ought to be high enough.”)
So the promise of economic justice erodes over time, as lucky insiders come to dominate rent-controlled apartments, especially because having gotten their hands on an absurdly cheap apartment, said elites are loathe to move and free up space for others.
The longer the rent-control policies remain, the more these imbalances grow.
But politicians only care about the next election, and lots of voters are stupid. But if you want lower rents, allow more construction.
SEN. JOE MANCHIN, MEET SEN. JOE MANCHIN: Rarely has a major flip-flop happened within such a comparatively short period of time and with such photographic evidence.
OUCH: Tesla reports record loss in fourth quarter; Model 3 production still lagging.
Noting that the losses were the result of production costs on the Model 3, Efraim Levy of CFRA said, “The Model 3 production is the key to getting on a sustainable cash flow level. Once they get to correct levels, they will turn profitable.”
It might be awhile.
In a shareholder letter signed by Chief Executive Elon Musk and Chief Financial Officer Deepak Ahuja, Tesla also once again applied the brakes to delivery expectations for the Model 3, the company’s heralded lower-cost electric car.
The new Model 3 — see our recent review of the car here — has been touted as an affordable battery electric vehicle, with a base MSRP of $35,000. More than 450,000 hopeful consumers placed refundable $1,000 deposits to claim them when Tesla first began taking orders in early 2016.
Crucial to the company’s success, the car has suffered significant delays in getting up to production speed and in getting to consumers.
Tesla on Wednesday advised that production rates of the Model 3 could be 2,500 cars a week by the end of March and 5,000 cars a week at the end of June. Last fall, the company had said it would be producing 5,000 cars a week by the end of 2017.
Analysts expressed skepticism about Tesla’s ability to meet those numbers.
Eventually, customers are going to expect to take delivery of their cars — or of refund checks for their deposits.
HEATHER WILHELM: #METOO INFANTILIZES WOMEN AND MEN.
Companies such as Facebook and Google, of course, are free to do what they want — according to Google, the company has had a dating policy since 2004. But the cultural assumptions behind the “only ask once” rules, paired with the rise of similar #MeToo-inspired policies, should bother anyone concerned with equal opportunity. After all, why would you need such stringent rules unless you view women as essentially weak creatures who can’t stand up for themselves? Women, the assumption seems to be — and let’s be real, these rules are largely centered on “protecting” women, not men — can’t handle even the most minor uncomfortable situations, so HR must stop them before they start.
It’s strangely Victorian. It’s also pretty darn anti-feminist, as far as I can see. Strangely, modern feminism seems to have shifted our cultural focus from supposed “empowerment” and “choice” to treating people like not-so-resourceful children. Well, never mind. We’re rolling, and the consequences aren’t pretty.
As Megan McArdle wrote last month, “Listen to the ‘Bad Feminists’ — They’re the ones who still believe women have power.”
STEVEN GREENHUT: A Progressive Experiment That’s Doomed to Fail. “Formerly bankrupt Stockton teams up with foundation to see what happens when some residents are given a ‘universal basic income’.”
Mayor Michael Tubbs, an enthusiastic 27-year-old Democrat, has shown a keen interest in trying “new” things in the city. Last summer, for instance, he proposed paying people not to commit gun crimes, and now he’s working with some Bay Area entrepreneurs who are providing the funds to give some families $500 a month with no restrictions on how they spend the cash.
The Economic Security Project is backing the Stockton Experiment, based on its belief that “cash is an effective way” to rebuild the middle class and fight poverty. “Automation, globalization, and financialization are changing the nature of work, and these shifts require us to rethink how to create economic opportunity for all,” the group explains on its website.
Some conservatives have actually pitched a guaranteed-income concept. The thinking, advanced by Nobel laureate Milton Friedman, is to “replace the ragbag of specific welfare programs with a single comprehensive program of income supplements in cash — a negative income tax.” Such an idea, he added, “provides comprehensive reform which would do more efficiently and humanely what our present welfare system does so inefficiently and inhumanely.”
This is one of those cases where the concept makes a certain amount of sense in the philosophical realm, while being borderline crazy in the real world.
My inclination is to side with Friedman. If we must have a welfare state — and it seems politically that we must — it makes sense to make it as lean as possible. That said, I’m not sure the government of Stockton is competent enough to make anything work, sensible or not.
Either way, Stockton’s experiment might provide useful lessons about bad government, improved welfare, or both.
I have more on this over at Hot Mic.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Northeastern prof says he ‘wouldn’t mind’ seeing Trump dead.
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