QUESTION: Who Had Dan Markel Killed?

THE AIR GAP: As America’s Nukes and Sensors Get More Connected, the Risk of Cyber Attack Is Growing.

“These nuclear systems are increasingly reliant on cyber-enabled components. The adversary has advanced its capability to threaten those nuclear weapon systems, including that cyber and supply chain. The demand for the capability to certify this advanced number … of new systems that will be coming online and be able to protect them in this new type of threat environment …there certainly were resource constraints that might limit their ability to certify that number of upcoming systems,” Chow told reporters.

When asked if more digital interlinks among weapons made it harder to certify and secure them, Chow took a diplomatic evasion. Difficult was not the right word. “It’s more complicated,” he said. “The proliferation of those sorts of technologies, its a fact of life of on our weapons systems. There are new tools to provide cyber resilience to reduce your risk… the study found we need to consider those and come up with metrics that can help the decision maker.” Resilience in the context of digital and computer program functioning generally means ensuring that programs or systems continue to function as designed even when under cyber attack.

When our own NSA is using Russian antivirus software, this whole effort should give you pause.

I BELIEVE THAT: Senior Democratic Senate staffer reportedly brushes off anti-Semitism: ‘We do not care about anti-Semitism in this office.’

Writing for the Jewish News Service, Sarah Stern offered a staunch defense of Marcus’ record. In her Tuesday article, Stern reported that a senior Democratic Senate committee staffer made a bizarre statement while they were discussing Marcus’ nomination. From Stern’s account:

…while I was recently talking about Marcus with a senior policy adviser to the Democratic ranking member of the U.S. Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, the adviser interrupted me with the response, ‘We do not care about anti-Semitism in this office.’

Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is the ranking Democrat on the upper chamber’s HELP committee. That one of her senior policy advisers would flatly tell a pro-Israel advocate the office does not care about anti-Semitism seems almost unbelievably absurd.

Oh, it’s not as unbelievable as all that.

LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Venezuela’s Oil Production Is Collapsing. “Sharp drop in output increases the odds of a debt default, worsens economic crisis.”

Production fell 216,000 barrels a day to 1.6 million in a month to December, the 15th consecutive monthly decline, according to data reported by Venezuelan government to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries released Thursday. During 2017 as a whole, Venezuelan output fell 649,000 barrels a day, a decline of 29%.

This ranks among the deepest declines in the industry’s recent history. Russia’s output slid 23% during the fall of the Soviet Union, and Iraq’s output dropped by the same share after the 2003 U.S. invasion, according to data from OPEC and BP Statistical Review.

The decline has been caused by a deep economic crisis and widespread corruption and mismanagement, compounded by a purge of state-run Petroleos de Venezuela SA by President Nicolás Maduro that has paralyzed the oil giant. U.S. sanctions have scared off some of the last remaining investors.

“In Venezuela there is no war, nor strike, but what’s left of the oil industry is crumbling on its own,” said Evanán Romero, a former PdVSA director.

Since the country exports little else, Venezuela’s centrally planned economy relies on oil exports for 95% of its hard currency, according to the latest official data. That means the output decline will add more pressure to the government, which has drastically cut back on imports of everything from machinery to food and medicines to make ends meet. The economy has shrunk an estimated 40% in the past four years.

And yet I had been assured just last week that Venezuela’s oil production was in full recovery, and as recently as yesterday that Venezuela was suffering a mere recession due entirely to low oil prices.

CHRISTOPHER BUSKIRK IN USA TODAY: While Trump’s critics keep talking, our president is fulfilling his promises: By every measure of personal and national prosperity, the nation is better off than it was a year ago.

As I’ve said, Trump looks a lot better when you focus on what he does, as opposed to what he says, or what people say about him.

ALL WITHIN THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE, EH: A church’s ‘core mandate’ must be pro-choice to access summer jobs grant.

FLASHBACK: Funny how timely this 1972 piece from Joan Didion on feminism remains today:

And then, at that exact dispirited moment when there seemed no one at all willing to play the proletariat, along came the women’s movement, and the invention of women as a “class.” One could not help admiring the radical simplicity of this instant transfiguration. The notion that, in the absence of a cooperative proletariat, a revolutionary class might simply be invented, made up, “named” and so brought into existence, seemed at once so pragmatic and so visionary, so precisely Emersonian, that it took the breath away, exactly confirmed one’s idea of where 19th-century transcendental instincts crossed with a late reading of Engels and Marx might lead. To read the theorists of the women’s movement was to think not of Mary Wollstonecraft but of Margaret Fuller at her most high-minded, of rushing position papers off to mimeo and drinking tea from paper cups in lieu of eating lunch; of thin raincoats on bitter nights. If the family was the last fortress of capitalism, then let us abolish the family. If the necessity for conventional reproduction of the species seemed unfair to women, then let us transcend, via technology, “the very organization of nature,” the oppression, as Shulamith Firestone saw it, “that goes back through recorded history to the animal kingdom itself.” I accept the universe, Margaret Fuller had finally allowed: Shulamith Firestone did not. . . .

They totted up the pans scoured, the towels picked off the bathroom floor, the loads of laundry done in a lifetime. Cooking a meal could only be “dogwork,” and to claim any pleasure from it was evidence of craven acquiescence in one’s own forced labor. Small children could only be odious mechanisms for the spilling and digesting of food, for robbing women of their “freedom.” It was a long way from Simone de Beauvoir’s grave and awesome recognition of woman’s role as “the Other” to the notion that the first step in changing that role was Alix Kates Shulman’s marriage contract (“wife strips beds, husband remakes them”) reproduced in Ms; but it was toward just such trivialization that the women’s movement seemed to be heading. . . .

But of course something other than an objection to being “discriminated against” was at work here, something other than an aversion to being “stereotyped” in one’s sex role. Increasingly it seemed that the aversion was to adult sexual life itself: how much cleaner to stay forever children. One is constantly struck, in the accounts of lesbian relationships which appear from time to time in the movement literature, by the emphasis on the superior “tenderness” of the relationship, the “gentleness” of the sexual connection, as if the participants were wounded birds. The derogation of assertiveness as “machismo” has achieved such currency that one imagines several million women to delicate to deal with a man more overtly sexual than, say, David Cassidy. Just as one had gotten the unintended but inescapable suggestion, when told about the “terror and revulsion” experienced by women in the vicinity of construction sites, of creatures too “tender” for the abrasiveness of daily life, too fragile for the streets, so now one was getting, in the later literature of the movement, the impression of women too “sensitive” for the difficulties and ambiguities of adult life, women unequipped for reality and grasping at the movement as a rationale for denying that reality.

Read the whole thing.

Related:

Looking back on his famous battle with feminists, Norman Mailer once said, “I was chosen as the sexist pig mainly because I was the most available target. The women saying, ‘Let’s have a revolution,’ were having a revolution, but the revolution was taking place in New York. They weren’t going down to Texas, Mississippi, and Arkansas, and saying to the men down there, ‘Let’s free the women down here.’ They were freeing the women in New York who were already free. They were occupying powerful jobs in New York. They were a strong element in the publishing houses. So, in other words, it was a false revolution to a certain degree.”

Indeed.

CELEBRATE CONFORMITY: Transgender Mafia Puts Disabled Vet on Unemployment.

WINNING: Apple announces plans to repatriate billions in overseas cash, says it will contribute $350 billion to the US economy over the next 5 years.

The headline from Apple is that it will make a $350 billion “contribution” to the U.S. economy over the next five years, although it’s unclear exactly how the company came to that number.

The company also promised to create 20,000 new jobs and open a new campus.

It said it expects to pay about $38 billion in taxes for the horde of cash it plans to bring back to the United States. This implies it will repatriate virtually all of its $250 billion in overseas cash.

That’s quite the windfall, for Washington, for American consumers, and for the economy as a whole. And it doesn’t remind me at all of the heady days of the early Obama Administration, when we were told that “business climate” was just a myth.

SO IN THE ONGOING #METOO DISCUSSION, IS THERE ANY ROOM TO TALK ABOUT BAD THINGS THAT WOMEN DO? Like “Deceptive Conception?” “If men did this to women, it would be considered a species of rape.”

TITLE IX BLUES: If Aziz Ansari Were a College Student, He Could Have Been Expelled for Less.

Robby Soave at Reason:

Consider a few Title IX cases where young men suffered severe consequences for engaging in behavior quite similar to Ansari’s, or even less obviously bad.

At Occidental College, a male student, “John Doe,” had sex with a female student, “Jane Roe.” Jane had every intention of sleeping with John—she had asked him to keep a condom handy. Later, she felt badly about the experience, and was persuaded by a sociology professor that because she was impaired by alcohol during the encounter, she couldn’t have given consent. John was eventually expelled.

At Amherst College, two intoxicated students, “John Doe,” and “Jane Roe,” retired to a dorm room, where Jane performed oral sex on John. John would later claim he blacked out while this was happening, and had little memory of it. Amherst administrators deemed his story “credible,” but noted that drunkenness was never an excuse for engaging in nonconsensual sex—which is what Jane accused John of, two years later. He was expelled.

Two Michigan State University students, “Nathan” and “Melanie” agreed to meet up for sex in the summer of 2014. According to Bridge, Melanie was interested in an emotional, romantic relationship, while Nathan just wanted casual sex with a friend. They were interrupted during their sexual encounter—they were doing it in a car—which made Melanie extremely upset, and called to mind a traumatic experience from her past. Nathan, according to Melanie, did a bad job of comforting her, and then tried to resume the encounter by reaching under Melanie’s shirt and touching her bra. She said no, and he stopped—and that was the end of their relationship. A year later, Melanie underwent surgery to transition to a man. Afraid of running into Nathan in the men’s restroom at MSU, she filed a Title IX complaint alleging that he had violated the university’s sexual misconduct policy during the rendezvous in the car. Nathan was found responsible.

There’s more at the link, unfortunately.

JUST NBC THE SLANDER: Joy Reid attacks NRO’s David French with fabricated quote. “This is like a game of telephone where everyone involved is a progressive and an idiot. First of all, the bit that Joy Reid puts in quotes is not taken from David French’s story or even from the Newsweek story. She just made that up. Shouldn’t someone who does this for a living have some idea of how quotes work?”

To be fair, she works alongside Al Sharpton and Brian Williams and frequent guest Dan Rather at MSNBC, where being a fabulist is a resume enhancer.

THEY JUST CAN’T HELP THEMSELVES, CAN THEY? Nuclear Anxiety Is Becoming A Hallmark Of The Trump Era. Here’s What Would Happen In The Worst-Case Scenario.

That’s the BuzzFeed headline for what is actually a useful article on preparations, or lack thereof, for a high-yield ballistic nuclear attack of the kind North Korea might soon be able to launch.

The headline writer seems to forget (or perhaps is to ignorant to have known) that the North suckered the Clinton Administration into a useless nuclear deal 20 years ago, became a nuclear power late in the second Bush Administration, and that Barack Obama kicked the can down the road for eight years while the North tested bigger bombs and longer-ranged missiles.

But our “anxiety” is somehow a “hallmark of the Trump Era.”

Because BuzzFeed.

JOEL KOTKIN: Red States Roaring Back Under Trump.

Some positive trends can be traced to the Obama years, but there’s clearly been a shift in trajectory and direction of the economy. As President Obama once noted, “elections have consequences.” Under Obama, federal policies—the “stimulus,” non-regulation of tech giants, ultra-low interest rates— benefited urban core, blue-state bastions that now constitute the unshakeable base of the Democratic Party. Under Trump, most working- and middle-class workers benefit from higher standard tax deductions and energy deregulation, while the affluent in high-tax states like California, New York, and Illinois are likely not to do as well.

Today, the often-disdained red states have the wind at their back, while in blue America, the economy seems to be slowing, as industries and people move to lower-cost, lower-regulation states. Seven of the top 10 states in terms of population growth last year were deep red; overall, the South has become home to the better part of economic dynamism in the country, with Texas and Florida alone accounting for one-third of all U.S. growth since 2010. Some analysts suggest that the new tax law, which works against high-income earners in high-tax states, will accelerate these trends further.

The most recent employment numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics confirm these trends. Texas, as it has for the last few decades, is generating jobs at a higher rate than more populous California, lauded by the mainstream media as the premier anti-Trump economy. In November, the largest job increases—around 0.4 percent—occurred in three pro-Trump states: Iowa, South Carolina, and Texas. At the same time, the biggest drops in unemployment have occurred in the South, led by Alabama, where the rate fell by over 2.5 percent, followed by Tennessee, Florida, and Georgia. The BEA reports that the GDP of Texas, the linchpin of red America, over the past year is growing almost three times as fast as California and five times as fast as New York. Utah, Michigan, and Wisconsin also grew faster than California.

This marks a meaningful change in the geography of American economic vitality.

Trump should be using his bully pulpit to stress this sort of thing.

Related: Trump economy’s sustained growth pace unlike anything seen in 13 years.

CONSIDER YOURSELF WARNED: Man ruptures throat by stifling a sneeze.

UNEXPECTEDLY: President Trump Releases ‘Fake News Awards,’ Crashes GOP Website.

TOO GOOD TO CHECK: Hawaii missile alert caused a 50 per cent jump in PornHub traffic.

“By 8.23am, traffic was a massive -77 per cent below that of a typical Saturday. As residents were notified around 8.45 that the initial warning was sent in error, traffic began to return to normal and Hawaiians collectively breathed a sigh of relief.

“Those seeking further relief, headed back to PornHub where pageviews surged +48 per cent above typical levels at 9.01am.”

Heh.™

CHANGE: Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin On Trump’s Alleged Derogatory Remarks: ‘Let’s Move On.’ Must’ve polled this issue in West Virginia.

AT AMAZON, AmazonBasics AA Performance Alkaline Batteries (8-Pack).

BBC: Hey, Trump Hasn’t Actually Made The World More Dangerous. “President Trump may have stoked fears and churned up chaos with his erratic and volatile Twitter feed. But he has not torpedoed the alliances he has questioned. He hasn’t started any new wars and, by and large, he’s followed the script of his predecessor, Barack Obama, for the old ones. So, while he may have shaken things up, he hasn’t blown anything up.”

IT’S TONIGHT’S OPEN THREAD. ENJOY!

SAY GOODBYE TO HOLLYWOOD: Movie Theater Attendance Hits 24-Year Low.

All is proceeding as I have foreseen.

WEIRD HOW THAT’S SUDDENLY HAPPENING NOW: It looks like Apple is bringing back home nearly all of its $250 billion in foreign cash. “Using the new 15.5 percent repatriation tax rate, the $38 billion tax payment disclosed by Apple means they are planning a $245 billion repatriation. The tax overhaul, which President Donald Trump signed into law last month, also lowered the corporate tax rate to 21 percent from 35 percent. After the repatriation tax payment, the company will have $207 billion left over from the move it can use for investments, acquisitions, stock buybacks or larger dividends. Apple said it plans more than $30 billion in capital expenditures in the U.S. during the next five years.”

OR MAYBE THIS IS A COVER STORY FOR A WEAPON: China Wants to Use a Laser to Clean Up Space Junk.