LIGHTNING DEAL: FAIRWIN Men’s Ratchet Web Belt. #CommissionEarned
Archive for 2023
February 8, 2023
WHO WAS THAT MASKED DEFENSE OFFICIAL? “The Free Beacon’s Chuck Ross reports that the Department of Defense won’t identify the senior Pentagon official who told the press on background this weekend that the Trump administration let Chinese spy balloons transit the United States at least three times. The senior defense official omitted the critical fact that these incidents went undetected by the defense and national security establishments. Ross links to the Pentagon transcript of the call here and notes that reporters reporters from CNN, the Associated Press, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CBS, Fox News, and Reuters were those invited to participate on the briefing held by conference call. What is the point? The identity of the senior defense official would let us determine the level at which the Pentagon is working the public relations issues raised by the Chinese spy balloon in the service of the Biden administration. . . . Whoever he is, he is in effect lyin’ for Biden. That by itself should be news. And he must be lyin’ because the truth hurts so bad.”
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hear Me Out — Let’s Scrap the State of the Union Address. “A gifted orator the man never was. Now he’s just the weird uncle at the Thanksgiving table who everyone is waiting to do something that makes them all uncomfortable.”
THAT’S DIFFERENT BECAUSE SHUT UP: When trans-activists stomp into a capitol building, aren’t they kinda insurrectiony, too?
WHY DOES THE BIDEN ADMINISTRATION NOT CARE ABOUT THE MURDER OF A BLACK COUNCILWOMAN? Family of Murdered New Jersey GOP Councilwoman ‘Haven’t Heard Anything’ From the Police: Authorities, including the FBI, are tight-lipped.
KOREA UPDATE: China gets a reality check.
NATO: US approves $10 bn sale of Himars rocket launchers to Poland.
Poland announced a sharp increase in defense spending in late January to four percent of gross domestic product, with the prime minister saying the country needed to arm itself “faster” in light of Russia’s war in Ukraine.
Warsaw had spent the equivalent of 2.4 percent of its GDP for the military in 2022, the third highest percentage among NATO countries, according to figures from the transatlantic alliance.
Other European nations have also announced increases in the budgets for their armies since Russia invaded Ukraine in February last year.
Poland and the Baltic States are leading and showing the way for the rest of NATO. No surprise, given their proximity to Russia and long memories of Russian occupation.
PROFILES OF THE FUTURE: Five Technologies That Five Billion Will Use by 2050. New video from Reason TV:
Note this section:
Since Amazon founder Jeff Bezos unveiled plans for delivery drones a decade ago, progress has been slow.
Today, there are only a few thousand delivery robots currently operating in the U.S. But that’s about to change: In December, Prime Air successfully completed commercial deliveries in College Station, Texas, and Lockeford, California.
On the other side of the world, Meituan and Alibaba have just started rolling out this service to customers.
In the U.S., delivery drones have been hindered by the Federal Aviation Administration’s approval process, and it’s the same regulatory story in China. But I predict that won’t be true much longer because of the overwhelming benefit this service brings in terms of convenience for customers and in reducing the traffic problems caused by delivery trucks clogging up our streets.
By 2050, I’m confident that the urban skyline will be buzzing with what will look like a swarm of carrier pigeons bearing books, spatulas, bottles of vinegar, or whatever else you might order on Amazon—not to mention, hearts and kidneys racing toward hospitals.
The guys at the “Birds Aren’t Real” parody* conspiracy theory Website are going to have a field day over that.
* Well, that’s what they want you to think…
DON SURBER: The Real State of the Union. A must-read.
ANALYSIS: TRUE.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Four misleading claims in Biden’s State of the Union address.
HOT!: My colleague J. Christian Adams discusses Americans’ civil right to be free from violent crime (and how the progressive members of the Commission on Civil Rights’s thwarted our efforts to look into rising crime).
MARK JUDGE: To solve the journalism crisis, honor is more important than objectivity.
With that crowd, I think honor is even harder to achieve than objectivity, which is basically impossible.
SARAH HUCKABEE SANDERS’ RESPONSE: She Killed It. “I have never paid too much attention to Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Not for any particular reason, other than the fact that she was overshadowed by the looming presence of her boss Donald Trump. So it was a revelation to me when she gave the first watchable response to the State of the Union address that I have ever seen. I have no idea how many people watched it, but I am pretty sure that clips from the speech will run for days in the media and on Twitter.”
THIS SORT OF THING HAS A TENDENCY TO END BADLY: Boston’s mayor just appointed two high school students to the city’s Reparations Task Force. What do you suppose their role will be?
Two members of Boston’s “Reparations Task Force” are high school students. Exactly what is the mayor thinking?https://t.co/YEjG9DmyMP
— Gail Heriot (@GailHeriot) February 8, 2023
DENVER: Rocky Mountain High to Rocky Mountain Hellhole.
In 1963, an unknown singer named Henry John Deutschendorf, Jr was urged to change his name if he wanted to pursue a musical recording career. “He took his stage name from the beautiful capital city of his favorite state, Colorado. Later in life, Denver and his family settled in Aspen, Colorado and his love for the Rocky Mountains inspired many of his songs.”
The rest is history. What would John Denver think of his namesake now? Would he still, “See it rainin’ fire in the sky, the shadow from the starlight softer than a lullaby”? Probably not. Now it’s raining crime, drugs, homelessness, illegal immigrants, and many other big city urban blights.
The Chronicle, noted above reports, “Crime in the Mile High City is now worse than New York City or Chicago, and growing increasingly dangerous as the new year begins.” This includes violent crime, where on a scale of 1 to 100, Denver outranks NYC by 2.5 points, and property crime where Denver surpasses Chicago by 4.5 points. Bet you haven’t heard that on the news.
“Auto theft is now an epidemic in Denver and the second highest in the nation”, according to Denver Police Department data. Nearly 100 vehicles are stolen every day in Denver and rather than “rainin’ fire in the sky”, Colorado is raining car thieves, now leading America in auto thefts per capita.
Other statistics are not flattering. Ranking, “U.S. cities for home and community safety, natural disaster risk, and financial safety”, Denver falls between Little Rock and New Orleans. For home and community safety, Denver sits between Baltimore and Fort Lauderdale. Not a flattering position for the Mile High City.
Gooder and harder, Denver.
ONLY MORONS THINK OTHERWISE: No, slavery didn’t create capitalism.
Despite all these failures — or in some cases, if you’re a Democrat, smashing culture war successes — Americans were treated to an evening-long, real-time revisionist take on our state of affairs from President Joe Biden. It was long. And it was ultimately a lie.
Yet in one single sentence of her response speech, Arkansas’ first-term Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders summed up the state of our union better than Biden did in nearly an hour and a half:
While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day.
For an increasing number of Americans, everyday life in 2023 is precisely that: a hard reality. Talk to any dedicated nurse who slaved through the height of the pandemic and was thanklessly fired for declining an experimental shot. Ask any professor who was dragged through the mud for refusing to instill racial division or deny basic biology. Speak to any parents who religiously pled with their school board to keep pornographic books out of their kids’ library and boys out of their daughters’ locker rooms. “Biden and the Democrats have failed you,” Huckabee Sanders summed it up. “They know it. And you know it.”
Exit quotes: “‘The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left. The choice is between normal or crazy,” and “At 40, I’m the youngest governor in the country. At 80, he’s the oldest president in American history.”
It’s not the years, Sarah. It’s the Trunalimunumaprzure.
JEFFREY CARTER: Never Trust A Politician With Your Money: They Don’t Understand Economics.
This past week, a giant in the accounting professorial profession passed away. Roman Weil was a Chicago Booth prof. I never took him for a class, but my friends did. He was a maniac. He had a gong in front of the class, and like John Houseman in the “Paper Chase”, he’d grill people in his class. He was old school.
One piece of his research was that the financial literacy that corporate board audit committee members have is surprisingly weak and that the gains in shareholder wealth accompanying improvement in such financial literacy are both significant and large. I would have loved to see him research politicians because, in my experience, most of them are pretty dumb.
Here is a recent tweet about the price of eggs from Nevada Democratic Senator Carol Cortez Masto. It’s so ignorant, it is offensive.
Well, consider the source.
THEY’RE CULTISTS WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND MATH OR PHYSICS: LA Time editorial delusional about fossil fuels.
NEWS FROM 2015. IT’S ALMOST LIKE WHAT THEY HATE IS COMPETENCY: MARSCON- DAVID WEBER WEIGHS IN.
I’d say I don’t find the science fiction squabbles funny anymore, but I never did. Stupid, however, the left continues to be.