I HAVE A CHAPTER IN THIS BOOK EDITED BY MICHAEL WALSH: Against the Corporate Media: Forty-two Ways the Press Hates You.
Archive for 2024
March 14, 2024
BE PREPARED: NOCO Boost X GBX155 4250A 12V UltraSafe Portable Lithium Jump Starter. #CommissionEarned
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Schumer Denounces Netanyahu as an ‘Obstacle to Peace’, Calls for New Elections in Israel.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) denounced Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as an “obstacle to peace” in a Thursday floor speech and called on Israelis to hold a new election to replace the Netanyahu government amid the ongoing war with Hamas.
“Netanyahu has lost his way by allowing his political survival to take precedence over the best interests of Israel,” Schumer said in a 40-minute speech on the Senate floor, suggesting Israel should elect a new leader who can deal with the threat of Hamas.
Schumer’s call for an Israeli election comes as President Joe Biden and other Democrats are becoming increasingly frustrated with Netanyahu over the rising civilian deaths in Gaza and his refusal to agree to a cease-fire deal with Hamas, which would include the establishment of an official Palestinian state. The Israeli leader again rejected the possibility of a two-state solution earlier this week, saying his nation wouldn’t support the proposition after the brutal October 7 attack.
I’m so old, I can remember when Schumer claimed to be against foreign interference in another country’s elections:
you almost have to admire this level of shameless hypocrisyhttps://t.co/9HlHBsiHrb
— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) March 14, 2024
DISPATCHES FROM THE BLUE ZONES: A $22 burrito? San Francisco restaurant owner says he’s keeping up with inflation.
The owner of La Vaca Birria says it’s not an attempt to make more money, but an attempt to continue to break even as prices for everything rise.
When you walk into the restaurant, it smells, “either like birria, or charcoal,” said Ricardo Lopez, owner of La Vaca Birria.
For the last two years, he has operated the spot — built out of a former record store in the Mission.
His vision has been to make the kind of food his aunts, uncles and mother used to make — but kicked up a notch.
The only problem is, the price of nearly everything he uses to make his food has gone up. Like onions for example.
“Before COVID, they were like $9 a sack at Restaurant Depot, I used to pick them up. During COVID, and after, it was $40 dollars. Right now, it’s $80,” said Lopez.
That’s obscene.
WHOSE SIDE IS HE ON, ANYWAY? Biden Rewards Iran’s Murder of 3 US Troops with a Cool $10 Billion.
TERRORISTS CAN CUT CABLES BUT THEY CAN’T KNOCK OUT SATELLITES: Global communications are under attack — optical satellite networks can bolster them.
What are the alternatives to undersea cabling? Elon Musk’s Starlink, which now provides coverage to more than 70 countries, including Ukraine (and, according to reports, Russia) has popularized the use of satellite internet. But even though traditional radio frequency satellite-to-ground connectivity like that offered by Starlink is an alternative, and one that supports individual end-user desired speeds, it is limited by physics to speeds well below what is required to provide the reliable, continent-to-continent connectivity currently brought via undersea cables. And though a system like Starlink dramatically reduces reliance on terrestrial infrastructure for end-user connectivity, it still relies on traditional internet infrastructure for data routing between different parts of the world. These, like the fiber-optic cables allegedly attacked by the Houthis, are at risk.
An optical ground station (OGS) network that uses lasers to communicate with satellites, in contrast, can carry data at a rate of about 100 gigabits per second – more than 1,000 times higher than that of the radio-frequency links typically used for satellite communication. The laser beam technology that connects satellite-to-satellite and ground-to-space stations is now mature, and has the speed to be a reliable and resilient alternative to traditional undersea cable connectivity, even at a time of conflict.
OGS networks also offer greater geographical flexibility. While cable-based networks inherently must be tied to the physical route and endpoints of that cable, OGS networks can rely on a mesh satellite network to be established in geopolitically stable and accessible locations, close to ground infrastructure for lower latency and less vulnerability. And free space optical communication also has the major advantage of being very hard to intercept or detect.
Nanny-statists might be hardest hit.
STANDARDIZED TESTS CONTINUE THEIR COMEBACK. Should have been a no-brainer, but the education system will go to virtually any length to avoid objective measures of its total failure to deliver on its promises at the K-12 level.
NOTHING IS ALLOWED TO BE FUN ANYMORE: Woke Sonja Looks Like Something Red Sonja Wouldn’t Hesitate to Kill. “Say what you will about the 1985 movie but at least Neilson looked the part and, more importantly, didn’t dis the source material or her intended audience.”
DIVERSITY PROBLEM: Study Finds Law Professor Contributions to Political Campaigns Skew Overwhelmingly Democratic. “The overall result here is far from surprising. Lots of previous studies find that law professors are skew towards the political left. Still, the extent of the imbalance is notable. Exclusively Democratic contributors outnumber exclusively Republican ones by over 35 to 1. That’s a larger disproportion than in previous studies. In addition, Democratic contributors outnumber Republican ones at every single school included in the study, usually by large margins.”
PEAK EV? Tesla Gets Tagged With Once-Unthinkable Call: Sales Will Fall. “There’ll be zero growth in sales volumes for the electric-vehicle maker this year, Wells Fargo’s Colin Langan said. And in 2025, it’ll be worse yet: volumes will drop.”
SPACEX STARSHIP TEST LAUNCH LOOKING GOOD! Hot staging worked perfectly.
UPDATE: Still going great. First stage return failed to light all motors and was lost, but everything else has gone perfectly. They’re playing elevator music during the telemetry blackout windows, which got this from the comments: “This is the future I was promised. And the easy listening music really gives the whole thing that 70s feel. Which is when this should’a been happening.” Indeed it should have.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: Hunter Biden Knows He’s Untouchable While Daddy Has Garland on a Leash. “Here’s the thing, Hunter Biden can keep giving the finger to the Republicans — or anyone, for that matter — who comes after him because his father has transformed the Department of Justice into his political expediency enforcement agency. Sure, Merrick Garland and his goon squad have made a show of going after Hunter, but he’s still doing OK.”
WIRED TURNS THE POST-PRIMARIES SCAREMONGERING UP TO 11: The ‘Emergency Powers’ Risk of a Second Trump Presidency.
DONALD TRUMP APPEARS to dream of being an American authoritarian should he return to office. The former US president, who on Tuesday secured enough delegates to win the 2024 Republican nomination, plans to deport millions of undocumented immigrants and house scores of them in large camps. He wants to invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy the military in cities across the nation to quell civil unrest. He wants to prosecute his political opponents. There’s an organized and well-funded effort to replace career civil servants in the federal government with Trump loyalists who will do his bidding and help him consolidate power.
What’s also concerning to legal experts, though, are the special powers that would be available to him that have been available to all recent presidents but have not typically been used. Should Trump decide to go full authoritarian, he could utilize what are called “emergency powers” to shut down the internet in certain areas, censor the internet, freeze people’s bank accounts, restrict transportation, and more.
These powers that all presidents have are extra scary when Trump holds them… even though he did nothing with them the first time around.
But the FUD won’t ramp itself up between now and November, so we’re going to see all all-news/all-education/all-entertainment all-hands-on-deck effort that will make 2016 and 2020 seem tame.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Starship’s Third Test Flight.
Weather is 70% favorable for today’s third integrated flight test of Starship.
The live webcast will begin ~30 minutes before liftoff, which is currently targeted for 7:30 a.m. CT → https://t.co/G1H8uoTxWD pic.twitter.com/uN3I9WBtKe
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) March 14, 2024
Godspeed…
ED MORRISSEY: Bitter Harvest: The True Roots of Rural ‘Rage.’
The Protection Racket Media has spent the last few weeks running with a new narrative of panic pornography: “white rural rage.” Along with “Christian nationalism,” these media explanations of the current dysfunction in American politics start and end with Donald Trump and his alleged “threat to democracy.”
The general gist of these narratives is that Trump spent 2015-16 blowing dog whistles to bigots and transformed them through misinformation into angry conservo-populists. Trump and his cult have essentially hoodwinked voters, especially in the rural South and Midwest, by feeding them on xenophobia and anger over true progress in America. Trump and his “white rural rage-ists” will undermine the institutions of the republic — not to mention the institutions of the cultural elite.
To put it mildly, this overlooks a very long stretch of political, cultural, and economic history. The collapse of confidence in these American systems began long before Trump — decades before, in fact, and had nothing to do with race. The signs of this betrayal began in the rural and industrial Midwest not long after the launch of the Great Society and the Vietnam War warped American fiscal policy, destroyed agricultural markets, forced farmers and small bankers into retreat, and left massive destruction in our once-dominant manufacturing base.
Salena Zito has written about these issues for years, but she’s not alone. . . .
The issue driving populists on both sides of the political aisle isn’t “rage,” either inchoate or focused. It’s the betrayal of the ethos that governed rural America: Take care of the land, and the land will take care of you. Its origins go back to the massive redistribution of capital to the urban centers in the 1960s, the deficit spending that forced the US off the gold standard and triggered ruinous inflation rates for a decade, and the abandonment of American manufacturing to the enticements of deregulation and free trade — which may have produced benefits for the US overall, but laid waste to the rural and industrial heartlands.
The experts thought they knew better. The elites wanted “progress.” Is it any wonder that their failures and the damage they caused have alienated the people who paid the price of those failures — especially when the experts and elites kept failing, right through the pandemic and the changes they imposed to deal with it, which turned out to be largely unnecessary?
And prospered, and smugly congratulated themselves, right through those failures. Plus:
Just recall why the Protection Racket Media needs to gin up slanderous narratives like “Christian nationalism” and “white rural rage.” The US establishment media now entirely come from the elite institutions that created this massive destruction and betrayal and want to desperately distract from it now by pretending the anger just materialized out of Trump’s wizardry. They want to rewrite history as well as the present and sneer at tens of millions of Americans who have waited decades for someone to address their decline and despair.
Flashback: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
DEAL OF THE DAY: EcoNour Pickleball Paddles Set of 2. #CommissionEarned
SUSTAINABILITY!
This is an amazing number to watch in the next few years. Individual income taxes are about 1/2 of the govt revenue.
For February, the US govt collected $120 billion from individual income taxes. They had to spend $76 billion in February to pay interest on the nation debt.
— Wall Street Silver (@WallStreetSilv) March 12, 2024
Previously: You Won’t Believe What We’re Spending ONE TRILLION DOLLARS to Buy.
Of course, I wrote that piece back in August and we’ve added another $2 trillion to the debt in the seven months since — with another trillion due to be added in less than the next hundred days.
RISE OF THE MACHINES: “A ‘fully autonomous’ ‘male’ humanoid robot named ‘Muhammad’ groped the behind of a female reporter during a televised interview now available for viewing on the Internet, but it was only engaging in his ‘expected behavior’ according to his creators.”
PAULA BOLYARD: Is America Past the Point of No Return? “It’s all designed to ensure a permanent Democrat (read: leftist) government and ruling class. They want the rubes in flyover country to have no say in our government and to be marginalized (or jailed) out of existence — especially the ones who wear MAGA hats.”
WHEN GOVERNMENT FAILS:
Residents of Hartford, Connecticut form an armed community watch group to protect their town from the rise in violence.
As leftist leaders continue to defund the police, expect more of these groups to form to defend themselves. pic.twitter.com/v6ChdxMrcP
— MRCTV (@mrctv) March 13, 2024
Flashback: Oregon Residents Arm Against Criminals, Form ‘Glock Blocks.’