Archive for 2022
December 6, 2022
WE NEED TO GET SERIOUS AGAIN ABOUT DOMESTIC AIR DEFENSE: China’s H-20 stealth bomber is expected to introduce an entirely new sphere of threat dynamics. “While there is much still to be known about the H-20, there are many reasons why U.S. weapons developers are likely to take it very seriously. For instance, if the H-20 can extend its range beyond the first Island Chain off the coast of China, then it could not only hold the Philippines, Japan and areas of the South China Sea at risk, but also threaten Guam, a US territory. Certainly if extended with a refueler, the H-20 might be in position to threaten Hawaii or even parts of the continental US.”
BE PREPARED FOR THE HOLIDAYS: Victorinox carving knife,medium, Silver/Black. #CommissionEarned
DECOUPLING: China loses grip on global manufacturing.
A small portion of Apple’s newest iPhones is already being made in India, where that share could grow to potentially 25% of all iPhones by 2025.
The country’s share of global exports of furniture, footwear and clothing accessories has fallen since 2016, recent data from transport economics firm MDS Transmodal shows, as reported by CNBC.
Meanwhile, trade between the U.S. and E.U. has risen sharply, and analysts view Mexico and Vietnam as countries that could benefit the most from diversifying supply chains.
Plus: “Beijing’s aggressiveness toward the West and its ties with Moscow have ‘left executives nervous that they could be caught on the wrong side of global conflict,’ she adds.”
GOODER AND HARDER, PHILADELPHIA: This Philly Gas Station Owner Has Had Enough of His City’s Criminals.
A gas station owner in the crime-plagued city of Philadelphia is sending a stern warning to any would-be robbers and carjackers: You’re at risk of being shot by the heavily armed security guards.
Fox29 and NBC10 Philadelphia are reporting that Neil Patel, owner of KARCO in North Philadelphia, has hired several security guards armed with firearms to protect customers while they get gas or shop inside the store. Oftentimes, carjackers and muggers like to target customers while their vehicle is stopped.
A North Philly owner says he’s had enough violent crime at his gas station so he’s hired these guys to protect his customers and store.
Does this make you feel safer? Or uncomfortable. pic.twitter.com/ZOXvUxTvyW
— Jason Martinez (@JasonFox29) December 6, 2022
In answer to the Fox 29 reporter’s query, his clip makes me feel like I’ve seen something similar before:
As Philadelphia continues to morph into Detroit, it’s a reminder that the city’s last Republican mayor left office in 1952.
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON TO THE WHITE COURTESY PHONE: How worried should we be about solar flares and space weather? “Although such consequences are rare, satellites and technology that relies on electricity and wireless networks are particularly vulnerable. In 1989, a geomagnetic storm set off by a powerful solar flare triggered a major blackout across Canada that left six million people without electricity for nine hours. In 2000, a solar eruption caused some satellites to short-circuit and led to radio blackout. In 2003, a series of solar eruptions caused power outages and disrupted air travel and satellite systems. And in February 2022, a geomagnetic storm destroyed at least 40 Starlink satellites just as they were being deployed, costing SpaceX more than $50 million.”
—BuzzFeed News, February 10th, 2014.
Chaser: BuzzFeed to cut 12% of staff, citing possible downturn that could extend ‘well into 2023.’
—MarketWatch, today.
ANALYSIS TRUE. ‘They Failed at Every Juncture.’ The Loudoun County, VA Grand Jury Has Unsealed Its Findings. “The report also states that despite the lack of a cover-up, school board members were deliberately deprived of information about both assaults and had to learn about them through the press.”
THEY’RE ALWAYS IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK: Body of last Tasmanian tiger found in museum cupboard.
AT AMAZON, shop the Home Gift Guide. #CommissionEarned.
FALLOUT: Supply Disruption From Russia Price Cap Is Here: Tanker Jam Forms Off Turkey. “The cap is imposed by barring Western businesses from insuring, financing or shipping Russian oil unless the price is at or under the cap. The insurance aspect is particularly meddlesome, as maritime insurance is dominated by western firms, most notably Lloyd’s of London.”
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Raphael Warnock: I Support Abortion Because “It’s Exactly What Jesus Would Do.”
GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS SHOULD BE HELD ACCOUNTABLE FOR THEIR ACTIONS: After a Crackdown on a Pain Clinic, a Tragic Double Suicide: After losing access to opioids, many patients can’t live with constant pain.
Government officials accountable, yeah, I know, I crack myself up.
THIS IS LIKE WHEN KRAMER WENT ON STRIKE FROM THE BAGEL PLACE: Nikole Hannah-Jones to join NYT walkout: Despite the fact that the 1619 Project author has not written anything for the paper for over two years.
JUST NBC THE MEMORY HOLE! Pin your yarmulkes back and listen to Al Sharpton bemoan Kanye West’s antisemitism on MSNBC:
As far as we know, Al Sharpton has never expressed anything resembling genuine regret or contrition for his own antisemitism. And yet here he is, talking about Kanye West’s antisemitism. West’s antisemitism is indeed “wrong no matter what” … so why isn’t Sharpton’s?
Related: O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West.
Now, as then, anti-Semitism has a function: It translates traditional and retrograde attitudes into a political interpretation with potential for radical social action.
So it was in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, where local preachers laid the groundwork and served as apologists for the deadly 1991 riots. For three days, black rioters proclaiming themselves the second coming of Hitler beat up any Jew they could find. In this magazine in November 1979, Dorothy Rabinowitz foresaw the violence, noting that in Crown Heights, “public expression of anti-Semitic sentiment, as a means of conveying political antagonism, seems now to have become normal.” When I spoke to one of the rabble-rousing black reverends in 2021, he still justified his actions with all kinds of grievances, comparing Chabad to the Ku Klux Klan and substantiating his claims with minutiae about political maneuvering and access to government funding. Decades from now, I expect to hear similar figures use the New York Times’ latest distortion—that Hasidic schools steal funds from poor black children—as a justification for some future attack.
Even after a Jew had been murdered in Crown Heights, with dozens beaten and thousands forced into hiding, “civil-rights leaders” such as Al Sharpton continued to fan the flames and suggest that the Lubavitchers had deserved the pogrom they got. Only days before the riot, Sharpton had said, “If the Jews want to get it on, tell them to pin their yarmulkes back and come over to my house.” He said it in defense of Leonard Jeffries, then the chairman of black studies at City College, who was under fire for blaming Jews for the slave trade, among other wild theories. The black New York radio station WLIB and the Amsterdam News and City Sun papers also rallied to Jeffries’s defense. Not one black lawmaker in Albany signed the condemnation of Jeffries.
In reporting on the 30th anniversary of the Crown Heights riots last year for the Wall Street Journal, I spoke to Brooklyn’s Laurie Cumbo, then majority leader of the New York City Council. Cumbo called the riots “the Crown Heights Uprising,” because “‘riots’ give the impression of [having] no basis.”
So I hope you’ll forgive my cynicism about the response to Kanye West. If West hadn’t first raised the ire of black leaders with his friendly treatment of Donald Trump, we would hear now that he’s speaking from a place of pain. We’d hear that anti-Semitism “is for some black folks a defense against antiblack racism on the part of Jews,” as bell hooks, the pioneering black feminist scholar, wrote in 1992. Adapting James Baldwin, apologists would explain that when West said “Jew,” he really meant “white.” But, as Earl Raab pointed out in COMMENTARY in January 1969, “that is an exact and acute description of political anti-Semitism. ‘The enemy’ becomes the Jew, ‘the man’ becomes the Jew,… who stands symbolically for generic evil.”
Exit quote: “Anti-Semitism from above, in speeches and tracts, has always proceeded in a dialectic with anti-Semitism from below, with rocks and bricks. Kanye West is nuts, and so is the guy who sucker punches a Hasid in Brooklyn. They hear the same noise—and each other.”
NEARLY AS WELL-INFORMED AS THEIR INTENTIONS ARE PEACEFUL: ‘Janes Revenge’ Abortion Zealots Threaten to ‘Shoot Up’ Catholic Newman Center With ‘New AR14 Rifles.’
AND YET THE DELICIOUS-LOOKING PICTURE OF CHILI DOGS ACCOMPANYING THE STORY MAKES ME WANT ONE: Study links eating lots of ultra-processed foods daily with cognitive decline.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Facebook Parent’s Oversight Board Criticizes ‘Cross Check’ Program That Protects VIP Users.
The report offers the most detailed review to date of cross check, which Meta has billed as a quality-control effort to prevent moderation errors on content of heightened public interest. The oversight board took up the issue more than a year ago in the wake of a Wall Street Journal article based on internal documents that showed that cross check was plagued by favoritism, mismanagement and understaffing.
The board’s report doesn’t take issue with the value of a secondary review system for moderating posts from high-profile or sensitive accounts. But the board said the program in practice has put Meta’s business interests over the program’s stated goals of protecting public discourse, and it noted that the highest levels of protection are generally reserved for accounts that might stir up trouble for Meta’s senior leadership.
…
The Journal article last year found that under the cross check program, also known as “XCheck,” some VIP users were “whitelisted,” meaning they were exempted from some or all penalties for violating platform rules. Other accounts were given “remediation windows” in which they could remove violating posts without penalty or received watered-down punishments for misconduct.
Some Facebook users are more equal than others.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Horrified Balenciaga Teddy Bear Can’t Remember Safe Word.
MILES MONROE, CALL YOUR OFFICE! The great Covid and cigarettes cover-up:
I achieved a personal milestone in April 2020 when, for the first time, one of my articles was flagged up as fake news on Facebook. spiked rather invited trouble by giving it the headline ‘Smoke fags, save lives’, but even with a subtler title it would have been enough to alarm Zuckerberg’s minions, since it discussed the growing evidence that smokers were heavily under-represented in Covid-19 wards.
Since back then Big Tech’s fact-checkers were still describing claims about SARS-CoV-2 being airborne and face masks preventing infection as ‘misleading’, a fake-news flag was something of a badge of honour. And, as with those claims, the ‘disputed’ information in my article has been borne out by the evidence.
After a brief burst of incredulous coverage in the spring of 2020, the media soon lost interest in the hypothesis that smokers are less likely to get Covid-19, but dozens of studies have been quietly published in the past two-and-a-half years which confirm it. I have been listing them on my blog and last week added the hundredth study. It seems a good time to stop. By any reasonable standard, the jury is in.
Of the 100 studies from around the world, 87 of them show a statistically significant reduction in SARS-CoV-2 infection risk among current smokers as compared to non-smokers. Seven of them found no statistically significant association either way. Two of them found mixed results. Four of them found a positive association between smoking and infection, although three of these looked at people with a genetic propensity to smoke rather than at smokers themselves.
The studies used a range of methodologies. Very few of them set out to look at the effect of smoking specifically, but epidemiologists tend to ask people if they smoke as a matter of course and so the association kept popping up. Some of the studies looked at specific outbreaks of Covid-19, such as on a French aircraft carrier. Several of them looked at healthcare workers, such as this one from Germany and this one from Chile. Others looked at groups of hospital patients, such as psychiatric patients in New York or HIV patients in South Africa. A large number of them used seroprevalence surveys to see who had antibodies and, therefore, who had been infected in the past (prior to the vaccines).
Yet another mile marker on the Sleeper diet becoming a reality:
RESPONDING TO ARGUMENTS AGAINST MARS COLONIZATION: “When people who are either disinterested in space colonisation, or actively opposed to it, comment on the prospects of travelling to Mars they often make the same or very similar arguments, unaware that these arguments were either ill-formed to begin with or have already been convincingly refuted.”
THAT’S BEEN THE LEFT’S ENDGAME FOR A VERY LONG TIME: Biden’s DHS Signals It Wants to Criminalize Political Dissent.
VIDEO: Russia’s Failure To Achieve Air Superiority. “One reason not covered: Russia seems to have used up a good portion of its high tech weapons in the opening phases of the war, and western sanctions mean that it can’t easily replace them.”
Once again, if you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a video, Lawrence Person has done a fine job of breaking out the bullet points.
Related: Ukraine Hits Airbase 600 Kilometers Inside Russia. “Ukraine’s ever-increasing range puts a whole lot of Russian infrastructure (military and otherwise) under potential threat.”