MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Progressive Demagogue-in-Training Likes Billionaires After All. “Never one to let consistency be the hobgoblin of her little mind, New York congresscritter Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez seems to have done a 180 on the moral worth of billionaires.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
May 20, 2019
WELL, GOOD: Google limits Huawei’s access to Android code. “As a result of a U.S. government order, Google has stopped providing non-public hardware or software to Huawei, severely impacting the Chinese device maker’s ability to create new smartphones and update existing ones.”
Kudos to the Trump Administration for tightening the screws on this communist front corporation.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The Air Force Wants to Use Air Taxis to Rescue Troops.
The U.S. Air Force wants a drone that can fly out the back of an air transport, land, pick up a soldier, airman, or Marine trapped behind enemy lines, and whisk them to safety. The Personnel Recovery/Transport Vehicle would leverage technology being developed to support the emerging air taxi industry to develop a new, autonomous, search and rescue vehicle.
The concept would work like this: a U.S. military pilot is shot down and lands in enemy territory. A C-130J Hercules transport is quickly loaded with a Personnel Recovery/Transport Vehicle, and the Hercules flies to the vicinity of the pilot’s location. The PR/TV is rolled out the back of the aircraft ramp, and with the help of parachutes the autonomous vehicle slows its descent and then begins operating under its own power. The PR/TV flies to the pilot’s location, the pilot gets inside, and the PR/TV flies back toward friendly lines.
Nifty.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Justin Amash Gone Wild. “One more thing, J-Am, where are your libertarian principles regarding illegal surveillance on American citizens? On Illegal FISA warrants, national security letters, human intelligence assets being placed around a political campaign by the unelected political bureaucracy? The jack-booted fedgov strong-arming people to plead to process crimes? U cool with that bro, because TRUMP?”
REVOLUTIONARY STATUS QUO: Bernie Sanders rolls out education plan that cracks down on charter schools.
ELI LAKE: John Bolton Is Exactly What Trump’s Iran Policy Needs.
Iran has historically attacked U.S. targets with its proxies when it assesses it will not face direct military reprisals. Iran used proxy forces to lay roadside bombs during the U.S. war in Iraq, for example, because its judgment at the time was that Bush lacked the support, in Congress or with the public, to respond with a strike inside Iranian territory. (In retrospect, this assessment was correct.) When Iran believes the U.S. will use force, however, it backs off. Iran has not mined the Persian Gulf, despite occasional threats to do so, because the U.S demonstrated three decades ago that it will destroy the Iranian navy if it tries.
This is where Bolton comes in: He’s kind of a one-man psychological warfare operation. If Iran’s leaders believe Trump’s advisers are trying to constrain him, they may assess they can get away with a proxy attack on U.S. positions. If they think Trump is trying to constrain his national security adviser, they may decide not to.
It’s generally beneficial to your diplomatic efforts if you have a pit bull straining at the leash.
May 17, 2019
IT’S MY DUTY AS A BLOGGER TO SAMPLE AS MUCH PERIL AS I CAN: Emily Ratajkowski Poses Nude To Punish ‘Old White Men’ For Alabama Abortion Law.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: The Coming Democrat Civil War. “Remember Steve’s Second Law of Holes: When your opponent is in one, get him a bigger and nicer shovel.”
YOU DON’T SAY: Many Democrats Exaggerated Mental Distress After 2016 Election.
“Our research suggests that for many Democrats, expressing mental distress after the election was a form of partisan cheerleading,” write researchers Masha Krupenkin, David Rothschild, Shawndra Hill and Elad Yom-Tov in their findings. “Clearly, many Democrats were, and are, upset about the Republican victory in 2016; these findings do not invalidate those feelings but put their depth and related actions into perspective.”
This so-called “reverse” cheerleading occurs when a person misreports or exaggerates a condition publicly in order to show support for their affiliated group, or in this case, their political party. The authors say that a person’s actions in private reveal their true condition, however, and for the study, that can be determined by evaluating private search terms. In other words, a person who might describe suffering psychological distress on social media or to their friends, but doesn’t search for any type of help or relief, is more likely showing a form of reverse cheerleading.
It’s minor neuroticism dressed up as severe neuroticism, which is the lamest kind of virtue-signaling.
AUTOMATION: Autopilot was active when a Tesla crashed into a truck, killing driver.
Jeremy Banner was driving his Model 3 on a divided four-lane highway in Palm Beach County, Florida. As the car approached a driveway, a semi truck pulled out in front of the car, making a left-hand turn from the driveway to the opposite travel lanes.
The Tesla was moving at 68mph (110km/h) and slid under the truck’s trailer. The trailer sheared off the top of the car, killing Banner. The vehicle continued down the road for another 1,600 feet (500m) before coming to a rest in the median.
“Preliminary data show that the Tesla’s Autopilot system… was active at the time of the crash,” the NTSB reports. “The driver engaged the Autopilot about 10 seconds before the collision. From less than 8 seconds before the crash to the time of impact, the vehicle did not detect the driver’s hands on the steering wheel.”
The NTSB says that preliminary data suggests that neither the driver nor the Autopilot system made evasive maneuvers.
Automated driving still feels like a solution in search of a problem.
STILL NOT TIRED OF ALL THE WINNING: Trump Gets Another Judge on the Ninth Circuit Over Democrat Objections.
YES: The Best Brexit Strategy Is To Leave First, And Then Deal.
The next prime minister should first affirm Britain’s decision to leave. He or she can do so either under the terms of Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union or, better yet, by abrogating the treaty altogether.
Although Clause 1 of the Treaty of the European Union affirms that member countries may decide to leave the European Union unilaterally “in accord with their own constitutional requirements,” the fine print in subsequent clauses complicates that process. In particular, Clause 2 requires the leaving nation to negotiate an exit deal with the European Council of Ministers or with whichever EU entity the council designates to represent it.
In Britain’s case, that has meant dealing with the unelected European Commission, whose sole interest has long been advancing the project of European political integration. The exit deal May negotiated with the commission reflects those priorities and May’s tepid support for a genuine Brexit that restores British Parliamentary democracy. (Since 1973 when Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC), the EEC and the EU, its courts, and various agencies have imposed more than 20,000 laws on the British public with the British Parliament powerless to stop them.)
The point of Brexit wasn’t to reduce trade, but to reduce EU interference in British sovereignty. The whole purpose of the EU (as opposed to the earlier EEC) is to reduce member states’ sovereignty. That’s why negotiating a good “out” was always an impossibility, and why May — a reluctant Brexiteer at best — was the wrong person trying to do the wrong job the wrong way.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: A.G. Barr is Getting ‘Inadequate’ Answers. “I’ve been trying to get answers to the questions and I’ve found that a lot of the answers have been inadequate and some of the explanations I’ve gotten don’t hang together, in a sense I have more questions today than when I first started.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE. MOVE ALONG. Nellie Ohr deleted emails sent from husband’s DOJ account.
Nellie Ohr, the wife of Justice Department official Bruce Ohr, told her husband she was deleting emails sent from his government account.
The revelation comes as both Ohrs remain under intense scrutiny for their ties to Fusion GPS and British ex-spy Christopher Steele, the author of the anti-Trump dossier that was used to obtain warrants to wiretap a member of President Trump’s 2016 campaign.
Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch obtained a series of April 2016 emails from a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the Justice Department that show a correspondence between the Ohrs, an aide to Bruce Ohr named Lisa Holtyn, and Stefan Bress, a first secretary at the German Embassy.
They discussed setting up a dinner for the German delegation as well as a meeting to discuss Russian organized crime. Included in a proposed agenda is the “Impact of Russian influence operations in Europe (‘PsyOps/InfoWar’).”
On April 20, responding to the email thread with the subject line, “Analyst Russian Organized Crime – April 2016,” came the email from Nellie Ohr about deleting the emails. “Thanks! I’m deleting these emails now,” she said.
Bruce Ohr was an associate deputy attorney general and director of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force while his wife Nellie was an independent contractor and Russia specialist.
Accountability is for the little people.