PRIVACY: Apple Reportedly Blocked Police iPhone Hacking Tool and Nobody Knows How. Say what you will about Apple and Tim Cook — no, really, go ahead — but they’re much better on privacy than Google/Android.
Archive for 2018
October 26, 2018
COLD WAR II HAS INTERESTING NEW PARAMETERS: China to U.S.: My Tax Cut Is Bigger Than Yours. “China is turning to its consumers to boost growth this time around— not just buildings and bridges.”
It’s a moral imperative that America doesn’t get left behind in the race to cut taxes.
ROGER KIMBALL: Bombgate and the new species of political theatre.
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: Liberal Darlings Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel And Sarah Silverman All Wore Blackface.
THE SPY AND THE TRAITOR: How A KGB Double Agent Saved Britain And Won The Cold War For The West.
In his new book The Spy and the Traitor: The Greatest Espionage Story of the Cold War, veteran espionage historian Ben MacIntyre confirms a troubling decision—or lack thereof—that some had suspected for years. This is the fact that in 1983 the man overseeing both British spy services MI6 and MI5, head of British Civil Service Robert Armstrong, knew that Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s main opponent in the upcoming election was a KGB agent and did not tell her.
Labor Party leader, member of Parliament, and former employment secretary Michael Foot had been a paid KGB agent for decades, and was still on the KGB books as an agent of influence when he headed the British Labor Party and ran against Thatcher for leadership of England in 1983. Foot would have become prime minister if Labor had won.
MI6 told MI5, its domestic sister agency, and MI5 told Armstrong, but Armstrong kept Foot’s duplicity to himself. Nobody informed Thatcher.
James Comey, call your office.
CONTINUOUS UPDATES ON THE “PIPE BOMBER” at the PJM Live Blog.
PATRICK POOLE: Toledo Woman Arrested for Directing Financial Support to Al-Qaeda. “Alaa Mohd Abusaad told an undercover agent how to send the money undetected.”
WHAT DO COLLEGE CHIEF DIVERSITY OFFICERS ACCOMPLISH? George Leef covers a recent paper that suggests that whatever it is they’re doing, it’s not increasing the number of diverse faculty members. I have met a few of these folks, and they are generally smart, well-intentioned people. Regardless of how you feel about their goals, if this job isn’t working, these folks shouldn’t be wasted on it — and neither should our money.
LIGHTNING ABOVE THE CLOUDS: An F-35B refuels somewhere over the East China Sea.
ITALIAN INSTITUTE FOR INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL STUDIES: Confronting an “Axis of Cyber”? The subtitle is “China, Iran, North Korea, Russia in Cyberspace.”
ALWAYS — WHEN IT ADVANCES THE PREFERRED NARRATIVE: Should We Believe Whatever a Man or Woman Says?
CATO: The Tangled Mess of Occupational Licensing.
In the 1950s, 1 in 20 workers needed government permission in the form of a license to work. Today licensing has ballooned to ensnare 1 in 4 workers. Most of that expansion is new license regulations for previously unlicensed occupations and the broadening scope of existing licenses.
Licenses are now required not just for doctors, dentists, and lawyers but also for shampooers, makeup artists, travel agents, auctioneers, and home entertainment installers. According to the Council of State Governments, 1,100 occupations were licensed in 2003.
State lawmakers once uncritically accepted dubious arguments for licensing rooted in quality assurance and public health or safety. Only in the past decade have they started paying attention to licensing’s substantial effects on wages, consumer prices, and unemployment. Today, state legislators have begun to view licensing for what it often is: naked rent-seeking behavior, compelling would-be entrepreneurs and workers to buy expensive and needless training to secure a license.
Just another way government makes life more difficult for entrepreneurs and innovators, and more expensive for consumers.
WELL, GOOD: NATO Dusts Off a Cold War Skill: Moving Troops.
U.S. Admiral James Foggo has spent months planning for NATO’s largest exercise since the Cold War. His first target: getting all 50,000 troops in place by the time drills start on Thursday.
Moving forces from 30 countries to Norway for the Trident Juncture maneuvers has been almost as big an endeavor as the exercises themselves. Ten thousand vehicles, 250 aircraft and 65 ships were dispatched, with most of the matérial directed to southern Norway.
Getting everything in place “is a serious logistics challenge,” said the U.S. admiral, who is commanding the exercises and usually oversees the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s joint-force operation in Naples, Italy.
In the bad old days, a more serious NATO held the even larger REFORGER exercise every year.
WINNING: U.S. Economy Grew At 3.5% Rate In Third Quarter. Plus: “A measure of overall inflation moderated from the second quarter. The price index for personal-consumption expenditures increased at a 1.6% pace in the third quarter. Core prices—which exclude food and energy–rose at 1.6% rate too.”
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Somebody Set Us Up the Bomb and Much, Much More. “These pseudo-bombs, coupled with the clumsy “targeting” of lefty political celebrities and washed up politicians makes me think this was done by someone really, really dumb or a leftist who thinks that its an October surprise to turn the narrative to Trump’s ‘violence’.”
ROGER KIMBALL ON SOCIALISM: The Eternal Return Of A Malevolent Charade.
CONRAD BLACK: Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Coming Into Focus.
NOT STORMY DANIELS: Trump-Hating Former Porn Star Engages In Shootout With Cops.
Jonathan Oddi, 42 can be seen in the footage dragging a large American flag with him and holding a gun. He unfurls the flag on the resort’s concierge desk and angrily shoves a cannister off the end of the desk.
The footage then shows him leaning against that desk and putting on socks before spreading out the flag and attempting to reach the security camera. Oddi unfurls the flag some more and smashes the resort’s front desk computers before police arrive outside.
At first, Oddi puts the gun down and puts his arms in the air, but then picks the gun up and begins shooting at the officers, using the desk as cover. After some back-and-forth shooting, Oddi takes off into the hotel, still firing. He briefly slips on the hotel’s floors as officers pursue. He then runs up a flight of stairs and knocks over some furniture before an officer is able to arrest him.
Video at the link, but Ashe Schow’s description of it is somehow more fun.
MICHAEL BARONE: Will ‘burly men’ stop the Democrats’ blue wave?
Do they live in two different worlds? White college graduate women favor Democrats over Republicans in House elections, 62 to 35 percent. White noncollege-graduate men favor Republicans over Democrats in House elections, 58 to 38 percent.
Those results are from a Washington Post poll conducted only in 69 seriously contested congressional districts, 63 of them currently held by Republicans. The numbers in other polls are only slightly different for these two groups.
They all tell the same story. These Americans live in the same relatively small slices of America (average population about 750,000), not many miles away from each other. But they take very different — often angrily different — views of where the nation is headed and on sensitive issues. . . .
It’s not that white college women are diehard Keynesians and white noncollege men supply-siders. People tend to tailor their economic theories to partisan preference, not vice versa. But the economic policies of the last two administrations and concurrent trends have had — and were intended to have — very different effects on white college women and white noncollege men.
President Barack Obama’s 2009 stimulus package was heavily tilted toward college women. As my American Enterprise Institute colleague Christina Hoff Summers wrote in The Weekly Standard in June 2009, the Obama economic team’s original idea was to finance infrastructure, construction, and manufacturing, sectors which lost 3 million jobs in 2007-09.
But feminist groups objected. Obama economist Christina Romer, Summers wrote, recalled that her first email “was from a women’s group saying, ‘We don’t want this stimulus package to just create jobs for burly men.’” So Obama ditched his “macho” stimulus plan for one stimulating creation of jobs in government and especially in education and healthcare, which had gained 588,000 jobs during the 2007-09 recession. Forget the bridge-building and electric grid modernization; let’s subsidize more administrators, facilitators, liaisons.
The results were disappointing. Sputtering growth nudged up toward 3 percent and down toward zero, which is what it was during the last quarter of the Obama administration. Administrators outnumbered teachers in higher education but added little value; government payrolls were sheltered from cuts, temporarily. There was little recovery in blue-collar jobs, and millions of men lingered on the disability rolls. Life-expectancy fell among downscale groups amid a rise in opioid dependency and deaths.
The trajectory of the economy — and the beneficiaries — seem different in the Trump presidency so far. Growth is more robust, obviously, though some economists thought this was impossible, and the the biggest gains are, in contrast to the last 30 years, in blue-collar jobs and downscale earnings.
Yep. You know, if Obama had stuck with his instincts on infrastructure, he could have cemented Democratic rule for a generation. But when he caved to the feminists, he planted the seeds for the Trump revolution.