BLUE WAVE? Trump Driving Both Dem and GOP Leaders in Florida Governor Race. “Immigration, healthcare, the economy and gun control are at the top of voters’ minds going into Florida’s August primary.”
Author Archive: Stephen Green
August 6, 2018
RENEWABLE NOTHING: New York Spent $5 Million On Wind Turbines That Don’t Even Work.
The project was expensive, with the five windmills costing $4.8 million and another $500,000 for design expenditures. The authority believed that the turbines would pay for themselves, saving as much as $420,000 annually on energy bills.
However, the project did not go as planned. Of the five turbines that are dotted across the thruway from Eden, New York to the Pennsylvania state line, four aren’t even spinning.
“They are currently offline waiting for replacement parts and/or maintenance,” thruway authority spokeswoman Jennifer Givner said, according to Buffalo News. “We’re working with the manufacturer to get replacement parts.”
Between October 2017 and January 2018, all the turbines except for one were taken offline. The issue appears to stem from inoperable parts made from Vergnet, a French renewable energy company that declared itself insolvent a year ago.
The lifespan of a windmill typically spans 20 to 25 years, but these turbines began to break down in less than three.
Yes, but did all the right contractors and union officials get paid?
ANTIFASCISM, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Antifa Behind Several Assaults at Patriot Prayer Rally in Portland. “The counter-protest was organized by ‘a coalition of labor unions, immigrant rights groups and artists’.”
SO TAKE AWAY THEIR ACCOUNTS: Social media is making children regress to mentality of three-year-olds, says top brain scientist.
It isn’t doing much to benefit adults, either.
KNOW NUKES, NO PEACE. NO NUKES, KNOW PEACE. Will North Korea Give Us Anything for a Peace Treaty?
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Mark Zuckerberg wanted Facebook to change the world. And it has — but not for the better.
All these companies began with a gauzy credo to change the world. But they have done that in ways they did not imagine — by weaponizing pretty much everything that could be weaponized. They have mutated human communication, so that connecting people has too often become about pitting them against one another, and turbocharged that discord to an unprecedented and damaging volume.
They have weaponized social media. They have weaponized the First Amendment. They have weaponized civic discourse. And they have weaponized, most of all, politics.
Which is why malevolent actors continue to game the platforms and why there’s still no real solution in sight anytime soon, because they were built to work exactly this way. And ever since, they have grown like some very pernicious kudzu and overtaken their inventors’ best efforts at control. Simply put, the inventors became overwhelmed by their own creations, which led to what I can only describe as a casual negligence, which led to where we are now.
At a recent employee Q and A I did at YouTube, for example, one staffer told me that their jobs used to be about wrangling cat videos and now they had degenerated into a daily hell of ethics debates about the fate of humanity.
Social media remains a great place to catch up with old college friends or find silly LOLcat images. But the rest has become a cesspit.
MICHAEL WALSH: In Minnesota, a Muslim ‘Backlash’ Warning.
Spoiler: The backlash never comes.
THEY SAY THAT LIKE IT’S A BAD THING: Hardline U.S. ‘gundamentalists’ pressure NRA from within.
Its rise has rattled the NRA leadership and threatens the association’s ability to hold on to moderate supporters and to make compromises that might help fend off tougher gun control measures, according to some of the two dozen gun-rights activists, policy experts and gun-control advocates interviewed for this story.
“Generally, they have a disproportionately huge amount of power in the gun-rights movement,” said Richard Feldman, a former NRA lobbyist.
The NRA has faced divisions before. An internal revolt at the 1977 meeting in Cincinnati turned the polite, sport-shooting organization into a bare-knuckled political lobby that today claims five million members and is closely aligned with the Republican Party, funding pro-gun politicians. The NRA, which spent $30 million to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, is often viewed by gun-control advocates as implacably opposed to tighter gun laws.
The NRA leadership has put up obstacles to Kraut’s election, both with bylaws that make it harder for candidates not put forward by the nominating committee to get elected to the board, and by enlisting a senior member to campaign against him.
Positions on both sides of the gun control debate are hardening, but only one has the Constitution on its side.
PAULA BOLYARD PRESENTS: A quick and dirty guide to Ohio election fraud.
SEE THE CRIMINALITY INHERENT IN THE SOCIALISM: Brazil’s Workers Party launches jailed Lula for president.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Drone Strike on Maduro and Much, Much More. “I’ll go out on a limb and say there are probably plenty of people who have it in for Maduro, who has starved and murdered his people.”
IT’S NOT ALWAYS GOOD TO BE THE KING: China’s new woes unravel Xi’s personality cult.
Extraordinary veneration of Xi and promotion of his glorification led David Bandurski, co-director of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, who translated part of the article, to call it “China’s new science of sycophantology.”
Apparently, all praise of Xi now turns out to be not only sycophantic, but also false or even counterproductive.
Beijing is thus faced with a big dilemma. If the trade war escalates, then it will certainly greatly damage China’s economy and Xi’s ambition. The fundamental factor behind the country’s emergence as a major power is its impressive economic growth over the past four decades.
Such an economic performance is also the ultimate reason behind Xi’s overt ambition of transforming it into a global power and leader. His failure to maintain high economic growth and to achieve the “Chinese dream” that he has ardently championed will make many within the Party and wider society question his unalloyed power and indefinite rule.
If he blinks first and makes concessions, his country will also suffer, though perhaps less severely. But the greater damage will likely come to his reputation, as any concession to Trump could make the Chinese perceive their supreme leader is weak and outplayed.
A problem with one-man rule is that there’s only one man to the blame, and no easy or nice way to get rid of him.
HEY, #METOO! Yes, the U.S. Military Loves Shotguns.
UH-HUH: Cory Booker ‘didn’t realize’ sign he held for photo was pro-Palestine.
Booker held a sign that read “From Palestine to Mexico, all the walls have got to go,” as he was photographed with three other people at the Netroots Nation progressive political convention in New Orleans.
A spokesman for Booker told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Booker was caught in a rush of people asking for photos when he was handed the sign to hold.
“He didn’t have time to read the sign, and from his cursory glance he thought it was talking about Mexico and didn’t realize it had anything to do with Israel,” Jeff Giertz said in a statement.
As Bill Whittle likes to say, we need a wall because Democrats wouldn’t let us have a border.
STICKER SHOCK: Cost to dismantle USS Enterprise set to top $1 BILLION if Congress doesn’t take action, warns watchdog agency.
The Navy’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Enterprise was commissioned in 1961, and built at a cost of $3.9 billion, in current dollars.
The Enterprise was the first and only Enterprise-class carrier ever built, and the longest naval vessel ever constructed the world. The carrier sailed more than 1 million miles over 51 years of service.
Since she was decommissioned last year, the Enterprise has been awaiting strip-down and dismantling at Puget Sound Naval Shipyard in Washington state.
Now, the GAO warns that the ‘unprecedented’ undertaking of dismantling and disposing of the ship could cost between $1 billion and $1.55 billion.
Under the current plan, the work on the ship’s nuclear components, including the eight nuclear reactors that powered the carrier, is to be carried out by Navy workers at the Puget Sound Shipyard, with the non-nuclear components handled by a private contractor.
It’s a shame she can’t be brought back into service to help get the US Navy up to 350 ships, but that’s an old hull with a lot of obsolete electronics — and that one-off, eight-reactor design had to have been a maintenance nightmare.
SHARP BREAK: UK Trade Minister Says ‘No Deal’ Brexit More Likely Than Not.
Trade Secretary Liam Fox told the Sunday Times newspaper that “intransigence” by EU officials “is pushing us towards no deal.” He put the chance of Britain crashing out without a deal at 60 percent.
Britain and the EU say they aim to hammer out an agreement on divorce terms and future trade by October so that it can be approved by all individual EU countries before the U.K. leaves the bloc on March 29.
But the talks have stalled, and the British government is trying to heap pressure on the other 27 EU nations to compromise by stressing the economic harm to all sides that would come from a “no-deal” Brexit that imposes tariffs and other barriers on U.K.-EU trade.
That’s assuming Brexit happens at all, of course.
Plus:
Fox accused EU officials of putting a “theological obsession” with sticking to the rules ahead of “the economic wellbeing of the people of Europe.”
That’s the history of the EU in a nutshell.
AS SURELY AS NIGHT FOLLOWS DAY: Venezuelan opposition leaders warn of government crackdown after blast targets Maduro.
It was a pretty lame assignation attempt — desperate amateurs or false flag?
August 3, 2018
THE ONE IN YOUR HAND. NEXT QUESTION? We Asked 10 Brewers: What’s the Best Stadium Beer?
FAKE NEWS: The NRA Says It’s in Deep Financial Trouble, May Be ‘Unable to Exist.’
Clearly, they want it to be true — Twitter’s Blue Check Mafia is giddy over Rolling Stone’s false report.
ANDREW SULLIVAN: Is the newest member of the New York Times editorial board, Sarah Jeong, a racist?
From one perspective — that commonly held by people outside the confines of the political left — she obviously is. A series of tweets from 2013 to 2015 reveal a vicious hatred of an entire group of people based only on their skin color. If that sounds harsh, let’s review a few, shall we? “White men are bullshit,” is one. A succinct vent, at least. But notice she’s not in any way attacking specific white men for some particular failing, just all white men for, well, existing. Or this series of ruminations: “have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation. there’s literally nothing. like skiing, maybe, and also golf. white people aren’t even allowed to have polo. did you know that. like don’t you just feel bad? why can’t we give white people a break. lacrosse isn’t for white people either. it must be so boring to be white.” Or this: “basically i’m just imagining waking up white every morning with a terrible existential dread that i have no culture.” I can’t say I’m offended by this — it’s even mildly amusing, if a little bonkers. (Has she read, say, any Shakespeare or Emily Dickinson?) But it does reveal a worldview in which white people — all of them — are cultural parasites and contemptibly dull.
A little more disturbing is what you might call “eliminationist” rhetoric — language that wishes an entire race could be wiped off the face of the earth: “#cancelwhitepeople.” Or: “White people have stopped breeding. you’ll all go extinct soon. that was my plan all along.”
I’ll take that as a Yes then.
And do read the whole thing.