ROGER SIMON: Why Trump’s War on Socialism Is More Necessary than Ever.
Archive for 2019
February 7, 2019
CALL IT “THE OBAMA RULE”: Trey Gowdy Urges Acting AG Matt Whitaker to Blow off Congressional Testimony.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Elizabeth Warren Put Her ‘American Indian’ Lie in Writing. “But then, if she weren’t completely hapless, she wouldn’t be Elizabeth Warren. Hey, what are the odds there’s a yearbook somewhere with a picture of Liz in blackface?”
Needless to say, read the whole thing.
DAVID HARSANYI: The State Of American ‘Fact-Checking’ Is Completely Useless. “With a veneer of impartiality, fact-checkers engage in a uniquely dishonest style of partisanship.”
For this, take Politico’s insinuation that Donald Trump was lying to the public about abuse of women at the border. During the State of the Union, Trump claimed “one in three women is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.” This contention is only “partly true,” according to Politico, because a “2017 report by Doctors Without Borders” found that only 31 percent of female migrants and 17 percent of male migrants said they had been actually abused while traveling through Mexico.
Whether Doctors Without Borders’ scary statistic is accurate or not, is one thing. Trump, however, was being called out for asserting that “one in every three” illegal immigrants has been abused attempting to cross the border rather than “33.333 percent of women”––probably a rounding error in the poll. It is almost surely the case that every past president and every politician has used “one-third” or “one-half” rather than a specific fraction, and walked away without being fact-checked.
Narratives don’t further themselves, David.
GOOD, I THINK IT’S VERY IMPORTANT THAT CHILDREN OF VIETNAMESE BOAT PEOPLE MAKE AMENDS FOR WHAT THIS COUNTRY DID 200 YEARS AGO: Georgetown students may pay reparations for slavery with new student fee.
And it’s not as if we can expect Georgetown administrators to take a pay cut or anything.
BUT IT’S NOT “SPEWING HATRED” WHEN THE LEFT DOES IT, IT’S JUST THAT THEY’RE “OVERCOME WITH PASSION.” Atlantic Writer Tweets Trump Assassination Fantasy. “It is hard to see how both of these things can be true: that the Atlantic is ‘of no party or clique’ and that they don’t hire any individuals who make other employees feel unsafe. Hill’s fantasy about the president’s assassination would surely make any employee who supports President Trump feel unsafe — if The Atlantic indeed has any such employees.”
Well, they don’t, so . . .
BUT OF COURSE: Muslim Congresswoman Blamed Western World for Al-Shabaab Terror Attack in Kenya.
Jeane Kirkpatrick’s “blame America first” used to be an effective jab at certain Democrats, but now it’s a point of pride.
PREDICTION: Watch for Virginia Democrats to come out with something, anything, on some Virginia Republican as a distraction. It won’t matter if there’s anything to it or not, expect the press to treat it as gospel. This Virginia stuff is killing them, and they’ll do whatever it takes to change the subject.
MICHAEL GRAHAM: A question for Elizabeth Warren: How could you? She probably believed it was true at first, then couldn’t bring herself to climb down as it became clear it wasn’t.
And she hasn’t given up yet: Elizabeth Warren faces new fire over Native American claims: But she still plans big 2020 announcement Saturday.
Plus: Hillary Chabot: Elizabeth Warren’s carefully crafted political image grows even fuzzier. To the contrary, I’d say it’s growing steadily clearer.
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LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Oops, They Did It Again and Much, Much More. “Does anyone think that either one of these jokers, Northam or Herring, would be accorded any courtesy by the media if they were Republicans. No. There would be special theme songs on cable and network news, there would be special graphics, there would be people interviewing every person that ever went to school with these blackfacers. They would be parked outside their residences, following relatives around, going through trash, confrontations by angry activists captured on video, think of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing as a paradigm. Why aren’t we seeing this?”
CHOKEPOINTS: Even cyberspace has maritime chokepoints.
Everyone using a computer knows internet data can be disrupted. The cyberspace “domain” has features analogous to geographic features. The 21st-century’s best-known cyber superhighway is the internet.
However, the internet has maritime chokepoints. In 2010, Jeremy Blackham and Gwyn Prins wrote that over 90 percent of global email traffic was “conveyed via undersea fiber-optic cables. These cables bunch in several critical sea areas (off New York … the English Channel, the South China Sea … and off the west coast of Japan).”
Maps from 2018 record more undersea cables, but their routes differ little from 2010. One trade organization estimated they handle over 95 percent of all intercontinental data.
From my latest Creators Syndicate column.
VERY RELATED: The column quotes a report by the Director of National Intelligence that says U.S. “adversaries pose challenges within traditional, non-traditional, hybrid, and asymmetric military, economic, and political spheres.” Cocktails from Hell explains what the DNI means — without the jargon.
IF SHE CAN’T RUN HER OFFICE, COULD SHE RUN THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT? Amy Klobuchar, Possible Presidential Candidate, One of Congress’s ‘Worst Bosses’?
MODERN PROBLEMS: Those annoying robocalls are about to get even worse.
Modern technology has made the annoying practice easy and cheap, and by the middle of the year, robocalls are expected to make up half of all calls that occur in the U.S. Some companies are working on a plan to curtail robocalling, but it hasn’t appeared to help much yet.
According to new data from Transaction Network Services (TNS), which facilitates calls for small and large carriers, April 15 – tax day – will most likely be the worst day of the entire year for robocalls. Call volume was up 13% over last year, so this year may see similar gains.
The analysis, which processed over a billion calls across hundreds of carriers, found that tax season is generally the most dangerous time when it comes to robocalls. Last year, tax day had the most robocall volume, a whopping 143 million “nuisance and high-risk calls,” according to the data.
We cut our landline years ago in no small part due to telemarketers. The spam problem has gotten so bad on mobile — 80% of the calls I receive, at a conservative estimate — that I’m tempted to ditch the iPhone for an iPod Touch (hot-spotted in to a cell-enabled iPad) and just go all-in on text messaging.
AT&T would miss my monthly payments a lot less than I’d miss AT&T, and “wireless cutting” is probably what it’s going to take to get the mobile companies serious about combating the endless spam.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: In Wake Of 93% Enrollment Decline, Florida Coastal Law School Seeks To Ditch InfiLaw, Become Nonprofit, And Merge With University In The Southeast (But Not In Florida).
HAWKEYE TRAP: Somewhere in the Indian Ocean an E-2C lands on the carrier USS John C. Stennis.
MARK PULLIAM REVIEWS Tucker Carlson’s new book, Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution. “Ship of Fools is selling well (debuting as #1 on the New York Times Best Seller list) for a reason: Carlson offers a fresh perspective on the cultural divide—the ruling class versus ordinary Americans—that characterizes the Age of Trump. Unlike most of his inside-the-Beltway media colleagues, Carlson is an unapologetic populist. Even though he grew up in affluent La Jolla, California, attended an elite boarding school followed by Trinity College, and now lives in uber-Establishment Washington, D.C., Carlson relates to the now-beleaguered American middle class in a way that most conservative intellectuals do not—with empathy rather than condescension or contempt.”
FLOWERS AND OWLS INVADE: Life on a new volcanic island.
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha’apai – named after the two islands it is nestled between – was born in December 2014 after a submarine volcano erupted, sending a stream of steam, ash and rock into the air.
When the ash finally settled, it interacted with the seawater and solidified. A month later, the new island was formed.
The island might “last between six to 30 years.”
CONRAD BLACK: Donald Trump’s Annihilation of the Democratic Party. Nice speech, kid. Don’t get cocky.
THE NEED OF SOME TO FIT EVERY CONTROVERSY INTO A “RACIAL” BOX APPROACHES A PSYCHOLOGICAL DISORDER: “Palestine” is a not a racial justice issue.
CHARGE! The next generation of wall chargers is getting smaller and better.
Gallium nitride is replacing silicon in at least two new chargers:
It’s not magic: as my colleague Angela Chen explains, GaN is much more efficient, meaning that chargers that use it can be much smaller and waste less energy than ones based on silicon. The biggest obstacle is simply that companies are used to working with silicon, whereas GaN is relatively new; in an ideal world, we’ll probably start to see more products taking advantage of the tech in the near future.
It’s not perfect yet: Anker’s 30W Atom PD 1 struggles to power something as large as a 13-inch MacBook Pro — you can charge it while the computer is sleeping, but while actively running, it’ll still struggle to really keep pace with the power drain (although it’ll work in a pinch). And for anything smaller, like a phone, iPad, Nintendo Switch, headphones, or anything else with USB-C, it’s practically a no-brainer for the $29.99 price.
My 2016-vintage MacBook Pro (since sold off) came with a 61-watt charger, so expecting to charge it — or any laptop — with a 30-watt charger is a bit silly. But that aside, bring on the smaller, faster chargers… faster, please.
