WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY YOU KNOW: Hypersonic weapons race.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
June 12, 2018
ERDOGAN BANS UBER: ‘That Business Is Finished.’ “Istanbul taxi drivers claimed Uber was providing an illegal service.”
How do you say “rent-seekers gotta seek rents” in Turkish?
WHAT COULD GO WRONG? Philadelphia’s Affordable-Housing Plan: a Tax on New Buildings.
Philadelphia’s City Council is weighing a proposed 1% tax on construction to raise millions of dollars for affordable-housing programs, marking the latest push by a U.S. city to address rising residential costs.
The council could pass the new tax this week, setting up a possible showdown with Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney, whose administration warns the levy would hurt the city’s competitiveness as it vies to land Amazon.com Inc.’s second headquarters.
It would be much easier just to reduce regulatory and zoning burdens retarding affordable housing construction, but that would also reduce opportunities for corruption and graft.
NOW THAT’S REAL SOCIALISM: Held Incommunicado for Tweeting in Venezuela. “Pedro Jaimes Criollo Has Not Been Seen for Nearly a Month.”
HEALTH: CDC Warns Residents in Eight U.S. States of Cut-Fruit Salmonella Outbreak.
On Friday, Caito Foods LLC, a unit of SpartanNash Co, recalled fresh-cut watermelon, honeydew melon, cantaloupe and fresh-cut mixed fruit products containing one of those melons produced at a Caito Foods facility in Indianapolis.
The recalled products were distributed to Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio and sold in clear, plastic containers at stores including Costco Wholesale Corp, Kroger Co, Payless, Owen’s, Sprouts, Trader Joe’s, Walgreens, Walmart Inc, and Whole Foods, a unit of Amazon.com Inc.
Check your fridge.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Trump Meets Kim Jong-Un, Larry Kudlow, and Much, Much More.
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz today.
THE ART OF THE DEAL? Trump Agrees to Stop U.S.-South Korea Military Exercises, Says He Trusts ‘Very Talented’ Kim.
“We’re prepared to start a new history and prepared to write a new chapter between our nations,” Trump said at a press conference in Singapore after daylong meetings with Kim and a joint signing of a declaration between the two that Trump said could lead to Kim being “remembered as the leader who ushered in a glorious new era.”
The two leaders did not discuss the contents of the document at the signing; Trump only called it “comprehensive.” The White House released the document about halfway through Trump’s press conference.
“President Trump committed to provide security guarantees to the DPRK, and Chairman Kim Jong Un reaffirmed his firm and unwavering commitment to complete denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula,” the document states, not elaborating on the security guarantees. It also said the two parties “commit to recovering POW/MIA remains, including the immediate repatriation of those already identified” and would “commit to establish new U.S.–DPRK relations in accordance with the desire of the peoples of the two countries for peace and prosperity,” but Trump did not say what those new relations would look like.
Much more to come.
SO… IN REALITY WE ALL DIED WEEKS AGO? How Net Neutrality Actually Ended Long Before This Week.
I was so busy online I hardly noticed.
WINNING: Donald Trump is wooing black voters and killing the Democratic party.
He doesn’t really have to do much.
He does it by inviting the presidents of some of nation’s historically black colleges to gather in the Oval for a photo op, and watch them do it, because their schools are struggling or dying.
He does it by freeing the Johnsons — freeing the history of Jack and commuting the sentence of Alice.
Anyone who thinks that Trump didn’t gain some black votes by those actions last week doesn’t understand the power of connecting with the disconnected.
In Detroit, and other urban areas – where we can’t get more than 14% to 20% of registered voters to turn out for a municipal election — and where many people still love Kanye West (though he thinks slavery was a choice) or R. Kelly (who is avoiding jail by inexplicable means) — Trump may be resonating.
And now he’s considering pardoning Muhammad Ali, who doesn’t need his support, but that won’t stop Trump from claiming that he saved his reputation.
As I wrote yesterday, this isn’t dumb.
In any election there are five main classes of voters, listed here from the easiest to most difficult to win:
• Your devoted party loyalists.
• Your leaners.
• Undecideds.
• Their leaners.
• Their party loyalists.
Turnout matters greatly — that’s how you get your leaners to act like loyalists. But so do results and salesmanship, which, if successful move the undecideds into your column.
A booming economy and a popular leader can even suppress “enemy” leaner turnout, or even win a few over. This usually results in a blowout, like Reagan in 1984.
The most difficult voters to win are the other side’s loyalists. They’re also the most valuable, since stealing one of those is effectively winning two votes. The vote you won for yourself and the vote you took from the other guy. Sustained efforts at winning over party loyalists results in a landslide, obviously. But doing so may also result in that most elusive gain: Realignment.
If Trump can crack the black vote by 15% or more, then we might just witness a once-in-a-generation political realignment.
While it’s uncertain if it can be done, Trump would be stupid not to try. Black Americans were sorely disappointed by Barack Obama, and millions live in the Rust Belt states Trump is attempting to revitalize. That makes this the perfect moment to try, and whatever other flaws Trump may have, he’s not stupid.
FIRST THEY TAKE YOUR GUNS, THEN THEY TAKE YOUR SPEECH: UK Police Shut Down Popular Gun Channel on YouTube, Branding it a ‘Forum of Extremism.’
June 11, 2018
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Surprising Voices Now Claim Globalization Was a Mistake. “Some supporters are admitting they knew it was a con all along.”
Speaking from his hotel suite by Lake Zurich, billionaire patron of liberal causes George Soros lamented the fate of the globalized world. “Everything that could go wrong has gone wrong,” he said:
His favored presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton, lost to President Donald Trump, whose “America First” platform runs counter to the globalism Soros embraces. Trump, he said, “is willing to destroy the world.” The European Union, which Soros once hoped would be so successful that he could end his charitable work in the region, is contending with the impending loss of Britain and a rise of anti-immigrant sentiment. And Soros himself has emerged as a political target in elections from Hungary to California, where his donations have been used as a cudgel against the causes he supports.
Though Soros defiantly vowed to double down on his efforts despite setbacks, Reihan Salam of The Atlantic is willing to consider the alternative: maybe globalization itself, or at least the way it was implemented, was a big mistake. Salam argues it facilitated Beijing’s entry into corporate networks which now constitute “Chimerica,” the meld of multinational corporations with “China-centric supply chains” that, like Frankenstein’s monster, Washington can no longer rid themselves of.
As always with Richard’s stuff, read the whole thing.
THIS COULD BE FUN: Trump, Kim to First Meet with Only Translators in the Room.
MARKET SHARE: Crude oil futures mixed on rising US rig count, lower OPEC supply.
According to data released by Baker Hughes on Friday, US oil rig counts inched up by one to 862 for the week ended June 8.
“WTI declined as investors digested the sustained climb in oil rigs for the third consecutive week into June 8,” OCBC Commodity economist Barnabas Gan said.
The Permian oil rig count rose by three for the week ended June 8 to 479. The basin, sited in West Texas and southeastern New Mexico, is the US’ most active oil and gas drilling area.
Last week’s Permian oil rig count has risen 13 of the last 18 weeks and is at its highest level since mid-2015.
The data comes at a time while US crude production is at record high of 10.8 million b/d as of June 1, latest figures from the US Energy Information Administration showed.
Meanwhile, some support came from lower OPEC crude production, which slid for the fourth straight month in May to its lowest in over a year, latest S&P Global Platts survey showed.
A strong economy, summer demand, and Venezuela’s woes are likely to keep prices high at the pump for a while.
YUGE: 5 Reasons Trump Will Win 40 States in 2020.
Here’s one:
He Will Garner Record African American Support.
Driven largely on great home-ownership numbers, George W. Bush garnered the modern era’s greatest numbers of African American voters. It was all of 11%.
The lock-hold that the American left has handcuffed the African American vote with is both cultural and economic. And while President Trump will — like all GOP Presidents in the era — not likely gain the majority of African American votes, even an increase of 15-20% of their overall votes would trigger a seismic landslide. Consider that Bush was able to improve the lives of many by increased home-ownership. Consider that President Obama oversaw a rapid decline in the lives of African Americans. Then consider that no group has benefitted more from Trump reforms, deregulation, and job creation initiatives than the nation’s African Americans. But also consider the cultural impact President Trump is making on the issue of prison reform, cracking down on dangerous gang activity (of which minorities are the overwhelming majority of victims,) and pardoning African Americans wrongfully imprisoned, and their is a cultural shift occurring that no one is yet reporting. That he is even reaching out to the very sports figures who have opposed him and embracing cultural figures and giving them audience to hear their hearts and minds in order to achieve justice on some social level—is a picture that African American communities are unaccustomed to seeing. President Obama’s went to black churches, put in affected speech patterns, and bemoaned conditions. By contrast President Trump invites them to the White House, listens to their legitimate complaints and plots solutions. I would not be surprised if he were to break 30% of African American support in 2020.
Don’t get cocky.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Twitter Revokes Louis Farrakhan’s Blue Check Over Anti-Semitic Tirade. “His most recent anti-Semitic rant was apparently one too many.”
CHRISTOPHER BUSKIRK: If There’s a Red Wave Election in 2018, This Will Be Why.
WINNING: The US again has the world’s most powerful supercomputer. “The US just grabbed back the crown from China with the AI-focused Summit.”
The Department of Energy pulled back the curtain on the world’s most powerful supercomputer Friday. When Summit is operating at max capacity, it can run at 200 petaflops — that’s 200 quadrillion calculations per second. That smokes the previous record holder, China’s Sunway TaihuLight (which has a 93 petaflop capacity). Summit is also about seven times faster than Titan, the previous US record holder which is housed at the same Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee. For perspective, in one hour, Summit can solve a problem that it would take a desktop computer 30 years to crack.
Summit’s 4,608 servers, which take up the size of two tennis courts, house more than 9,000 22-core IBM Power9 processors and more than 27,000 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPUs. Cooling the system takes 4,000 gallons of water a minute and Summit uses enough power to run 8,100 homes.
DOE will use it in part to study your carbon footprint.
NOW THAT’S REAL SOCIALISM: Polio Returns to Venezuela as Economic Crisis Cripples Healthcare System.
This is Newsweek, so of course:
Which is odd when you remember how fond they were of the s-word just a few short years ago:
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Kim Summit, Trudeau Scuffle, a DOJ Deadline, and Much, Much More. “On Friday, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, gave the Justice Department a deadline to provide documents concerning the FBI’s alleged informant looking into Russian ties to Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The documents must be handed over by Tuesday.”
Or…?
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz while she’s on vacation.
DEMOGRAPHICS IS DESTINY: Darn. I may outlive Social Security.
This week we learned Social Security will spend more than it collects this year for the first time since 1983. Unless trends change, the new go-bust date for the retirement program is 2034.
That’s just 16 years from now. I’ll be 79, and hope I’ll have a few years left, though I doubt I’ll be in shape to go job hunting.
Even worse news is that Medicare, the retiree health care program, will be spent out by 2026 — I may not even be retired yet.
As maddening as that prospect is for someone who has been paying into both systems for a half-century, I feel for the generations behind me. I’ve still got a shot at getting some of my money back. There seems no chance they’ll ever collect anything.
Given the vast number of Baby Boomers heading into retirement, you’d think these doomsday reports would trigger a panic response from Washington.
No way.
Anything which can’t go on forever will stop.