JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE PARANOID DOESN’T MEAN THEY AREN’T OUT TO GET YOU: “Google Is Not What It Seems”, by Julian Assange. Between Facebook banning the sale of a book without rational explanation and the revelations of the inherent content-based discrimination at Twitter, it seems that Tucker Carlson and others are correct that corporations are rapidly becoming the New Thought Police.
Archive for 2018
January 12, 2018
RESET: Who’s an Oligarch? Rich Russians Fret Over U.S. Sanctions Label.
When Debevoise & Plimpton lawyers held a seminar in Moscow to explain the impact of new U.S. sanctions legislation, they had to rent out a hall in a hotel to hold all the worried clients who signed up.
A big reason for the interest is a provision in the law that gives President Donald Trump’s executive branch until February to identify “oligarchs” close to Vladimir Putin who can be slapped with visa bans and asset freezes as further punishment for Kremlin election meddling.
With the Treasury Department, which is leading the effort, giving little indication of how the list is being compiled, Russia’s billionaire class is in the throes of a kind of helpless anxiety. One of the country’s richest men said it would be stupid to try to lobby against inclusion in Washington because that would only put a bigger target on his back.
It’s collusion, I tells ya.
TOMORROW’S HOT TAKE TODAY: Trump’s so dishonest he won’t even stay bought.
CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Harvey Weinstein is too broke to pay child support.
DAS IST SCHRECKLICH: German Engineering Yields New Warship That Isn’t Fit for Sea.
Germany’s naval brass in 2005 dreamed up a warship that could ferry marines into combat anywhere in the world, go up against enemy ships and stay away from home ports for two years with a crew half the size of its predecessor’s.
First delivered for sea trials in 2016 after a series of delays, the 7,000-ton Baden-Württemberg frigate was determined last month to have an unexpected design flaw: It doesn’t really work.
Defense experts cite the warship’s buggy software and ill-considered arsenal—as well as what was until recently its noticeable list to starboard—as symptoms of deeper, more intractable problems: Shrinking military expertise and growing confusion among German leaders about what the country’s armed forces are for.
A litany of bungled infrastructure projects has tarred Germany’s reputation for engineering prowess. There is still no opening date for Berlin’s new €6 billion ($7.2 billion) airport, which is already 10 years behind schedule, and the redesign of Stuttgart’s railway station remains stalled more than a decade after work on the project started. Observers have blamed these mishaps on poor planning and project management, which also figured in major setbacks for several big military projects.
Undenkbar.
MORRIS FIORINA: The Revolt of the Masses. “The notion of ‘elites’ today has broadened to include cultural elites—people who work in academia, the professions, the entertainment industry, the media, and the higher levels of government, most of whom have advanced educations, if not always exceptional incomes. This appears to be something relatively new, perhaps because the cultural elite a century ago likely would have been a subset of the small economic elite.”
IN THE MAIL: From Joe Pappalardo, Spaceport Earth: The Reinvention of Spaceflight.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
Lois Lerner and Holly Paz are basically arguing that if people find out what Lois Lerner and Holly Paz did to them, people will want to kill them. Even assuming that’s true, it’s not a very compelling argument for secrecy.
MICHAEL LEDEEN: We Need Regime Change in Iran.
That’s been a recurring theme today.
BY THE NUMBERS: Eugene Volokh dug deep into that “Nearly 40 Percent of Sex Offenders in Oregon Prisons Are Illegal Aliens” and writes:
Steve: Sorry to trouble you about this [No trouble at all! -S], but I’m not sure the statistic adds up. I looked at the linked-to Paula Bolyard item, https://pjmedia.com/trending/one-fifteen-oregon-prisoners-criminal-alien-nearly-half-convicted-sex-crimes/, and then in turn to the original source, https://docfnc.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/oregon-department-of-corrections-criminal-alien-report-december-2017/, and here’s what I found:
(1) The original source is writing not about illegal aliens, but about “criminal aliens.” I assume this is the same “criminal alien” as that described in 8 U.S.C. sec. 1252(a)(2)(C) — an alien, whether or not legally present, who is removable because he has committed a certain kind of crime. See Freeman v. Holder (8th Cir. 2010), https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17372653859303192596, elaborating on this definition.
(2) The original source does report that 476 of Oregon prisoners were criminal aliens committed rape, sodomy, or sex abuse. But that is out of a total of 3738 total prisoners who committed those crimes; the ratio is about 12.7%, not the 39.32% that the PJMedia source reports.
By the way, it appears that the percentage of all Oregon inmates who are criminal aliens (6.6%) is quite close to the percentage of all Oregonians who are aliens (7%, see https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/distribution-by-citizenship-status/), though the percentage of Oregon inmate sex offenders who are criminal aliens does seem higher than that (though not by as much as the Bolyard item reports).
Paula has of course corrected the original story, although nearly 13% still seems high for the Pacific Northwest. More to come on this one, I’m afraid. But in the meantime, a big thanks to Eugene.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student files bias report after peer hogs weights at campus gym.
It’s rude to hog equipment at the gym, but most would attribute such behavior to poor etiquette.
At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, however, one student went so far as to file a bias report after a peer hogged weights at the campus gym then yelled at him to back off.
That incident is one of many a Wisconsin think-tank uses to contend that the university’s “Hate & Bias” reporting system is actually “clogged with pettiness and tattling.”
The MacIver Institute for Public Policy, a free market think tank in Wisconsin, recently obtained copies of 88 bias incident reports filed at the university during the first nine months of 2017 through public records act requests to determine they largely consist of a “cacophony of classroom disagreements, roommate squabbles, personal vendettas, arguments over workout room equipment, and Facebook fights.”
Sad.
BREAKING: STRANGE WEATHER IS STRANGE. US cold snap was a freak of nature, quick analysis finds.
Consider this cold comfort: A quick study of the brutal American cold snap found that the Arctic blast really wasn’t global warming but a freak of nature.
Frigid weather like the two-week cold spell that began around Christmas is 15 times rarer than it was a century ago, according to a team of international scientists who does real-time analyses to see if extreme weather events are natural or more likely to happen because of climate change.
The cold snap that gripped the East Coast and Midwest region was a rarity that bucks the warming trend, said researcher Claudia Tebaldi of the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the private organization Climate Central.
I’m so old, I can remember when climate change was going to cause more extreme weather events.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Scholars claim that statistics ‘serve white racial interests.’
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Plus, new Kindle Daily Deals.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: S***hole countries, 5 White Guys, 702 Re-authorization and Much, Much More.
ONE OF THE BIGGEST MYTHS AROUND WAS THE MYTH OF COMPETENT PROFESSIONALISM ON THE OBAMA FOREIGN POLICY TEAM: Tommy Vietor just encapsulated team Obama’s Iran delusions.
Team Obama never understood the reality of the Iranian hardliners or their exigent threat to the United States.
Still, we’ve gained a new insight into this philosophy over the past couple of days. It has come in the form a Twitter showdown between New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and former Obama national security council spokesman Tommy Vietor.
It began when Stephens asked Vietor whether, as a Kuwaiti news outlet reported this week, the Obama administration had indeed warned Iran of an impending Israeli strike against Qassem Soleimani three years ago. Suleimani is the 20-year head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ external action unit, the Quds Force.
Vietor’s responses were quite pathetic.
To begin, Vietor implied that any action to take out Soleimani would have been unjustified because the general is an “Iranian political leader.” . . .
Let’s be clear, when it’s Soleimani, you’re dealing with a blood-drenched terrorist mastermind. Not a politician.
In turn, when you offer “Obama sanctioned them” as a representation of effectively countering Soleimani, you are either a complete moron or utterly delusional.
I’m going with the latter here.
FORREST NABORS: Why The Time Is Ripe For A Free Iran.
If different types of political regimes are plants that grow, the soil is the people, and different types of soil determine what kind of political regime is possible in a given nation. The rise, prosperity, or fall of a political regime depends upon the customs and temper of a people that have developed since time immemorial and are not easily changed.
This important insight was once commonplace when the classical analysis of political regimes was the starting point in understanding nations’ politics, but political science in its modern form no longer teaches our young citizenry in this way. This is why you will not find many journalists or analysts in the media or government who can convincingly explain the prospects for democracy abroad.
The cost of this change in education is apparent in the last 15 years of American foreign policy. The Bush administration expected Western-style democracy to immediately take hold in Iraq after it toppled the regime of Saddam Hussein. The Obama administration expected the same following popular unrest during the Arab Spring. Noble though the goals of those administrations were, an intelligent citizen informed by Bernard Lewis’s “What Went Wrong” and educated in regime analysis could have foreseen that efforts to establish stable democracies in place of removed Arab tyrannies would encounter profound difficulties.
In Iran the case is different. Iranians are a great people well prepared for successful self-government and boast one of the oldest and most refined cultures in human history. Unlike Sunni Islam, their version of Islam always recognized the separation of mosque and state, a tradition that Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini struggled to reconcile with his goal of preserving Islamic purity in modernity. He finally abandoned the attempt, but that tradition is still remembered by Shiites and has shaped the political principles that they hold today.
Read the whole thing.
A BILLION DOLLARS HERE AND A BILLION DOLLARS THERE AND YOU’RE STILL ONLY TALKING TWO SMALL SHIPS: New Navy Frigate Could Cost $950M Per Hull.
Speaking at the Surface Navy Association 2018 symposium, NAVSEA’s Regan Campbell said the new class of small surface combatant would set a so-called threshold requirement for a net average cost of $950 million for the second through 20th hulls in the FFG(X) next-generation frigate program following a downselect to a single shipbuilder in 2020. The lead ship in the class is expected to cost more than the $950-million average.
In comparison, a Flight IIA Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer (DDG-51) costs about $1.8 billion to build and equip with sensors and weapon systems.
That frigate number is also above the $588-million per-hull cost of the existing Lockheed Martin Freedom-class (LCS-1) and Austal USA Independence-class (LCS-2) Littoral Combat Ships slated for the Fiscal Year 2018 budget.
That had better be one capable frigate.
I REMEMBER WHEN DEMOCRATS WERE TELLING US TO BE MORE SOPHISTICATED AND EUROPEAN ABOUT SEX: Frenchwomen — including Catherine Deneuve — come out in defense of sexual freedom and the freedom to importune.
IT’S COME TO THIS: “Temporary” means temporary, Trump administration controversially insists.
DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH(OUT) A BYLINE: WaPo Reporter Placed On Leave After She’s Exposed Giving Secret Strategy Briefing At Soros Conference.
The Washington Post has placed national reporter Janell Ross on leave after she was exposed giving a strategy briefing at a secret strategy conference for left-wing donors, politicians and activists in November, according to a new report.
Ross was a featured speaker a conference funded by Democracy Alliance, a network of left-wing donors aligned with billionaire financier George Soros. Ross’s role at the conference, which was closed to reporters, was only revealed when the Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of the conference agenda. She did not notify her employers before speaking at the left-wing summit, where she briefed attendees on “getting the economic narrative right” in future elections.
Nearly two months later, Ross has been placed on leave for secretly briefing the left-wing conference, CNN reports. Ross is not expected to return to the paper, according to the CNN report.
I suspect she won’t be without a byline for long.
SUZANNE VENKER: #MeToo isn’t about sexual harassment, it’s about destroying masculinity. “The thing about grievances is they’re a lot like crabgrass: The more heat they get, the more it spreads. That’s what’s happening in Hollywood right now with the #MeToo movement and its faux concern for victims of sexual harassment. The current outcry against men in power has nothing to do with giving a voice to victims. It’s about putting feminists in power.”