LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Guess what? Trump’s not a feminist. “No, I wouldn’t say I’m a feminist. I mean, I think that would be, maybe, going too far. I’m for women, I’m for men, I’m for everyone.”
Tyler O’Neil is filling in for Liz this morning.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
January 29, 2018
AXIOS: Trump team considers nationalizing 5G network.
We’ve got our hands on a PowerPoint deck and a memo — both produced by a senior National Security Council official — which were presented recently to senior officials at other agencies in the Trump administration.
The main points: The documents say America needs a centralized nationwide 5G network within three years. There’ll be a fierce debate inside the Trump administration — and an outcry from the industry — over the next 6-8 months over how such a network is built and paid for.
Two options laid out by the documents:
1. The U.S. government pays for and builds the single network — which would be an unprecedented nationalization of a historically private infrastructure.
2. An alternative plan where wireless providers build their own 5G networks that compete with one another — though the document says the downside is it could take longer and cost more. It argues that one of the “pros” of that plan is that it would cause “less commercial disruption” to the wireless industry than the government building a network.
Between the lines: A source familiar with the documents’ drafting says Option 2 is really no option at all: a single centralized network is what’s required to protect America against China and other bad actors.
A single, centralized network also means a single, centralized point of failure.
EVERYBODY ACT LIKE THEY DIDN’T HEAR A THING: Is China’s nuclear attack submarine too easy to detect? “Military experts say it may not be as quiet as it should be after Japanese navy discovered vessel while submerged near disputed Diaoyu Islands.”
T.A. Frank for Vanity Fair:
This year, though, we see rather a lot of Democratic senators in red states that didn’t enjoy being forced into brinkmanship over what their opponents could deride as the prioritization of foreign nationals who are in the country illegally. Five sat out the original fight altogether, and 26 more gratefully jumped ship on Monday. Whatever data these senators were viewing, the numbers must have been even more frightening than they’d expected. In politics, a focus on issues can lead people to forget that prioritization is half the battle. It’s one thing to support legalization for DACA recipients; it’s another to say it’s top of the agenda, or the country gets it.
As awkward as the shutdown may have been for Democrats like Missouri’s Claire McCaskill, however, all of the presidency-eyeing stars of the Democratic Party wished, officially at least, to keep it going. While most Democrats voted to end the shutdown, those who didn’t included Booker, Harris, Warren, and Kirsten Gillibrand. This, of course, reflects the blueness of their states (Dianne Feinstein also voted against stopping the shutdown), but it also suggests a belief that taking a hard-line stance on immigration, from the left, is the price of a fighting chance in the next presidential primaries. Such thinking might be valid, but things get trickier when it comes to weighing it against the sentiments of the broader public.
Hillary Clinton had a crooked DNC and plenty of superdelegates at her back, to prevent the party’s crazies from nominating Bernie Sanders. But the DNC “reform commission” is looking to limit the superdelegates, and the DNC is is already under the sway of the party’s far-left progressive base.
It’s too soon to make any predictions with confidence, but an early guess is that the Democrats are preparing for another McGovern Moment.
YES. NEXT QUESTION? Is Venezuela on the Brink of Economic and Social Collapse?
As Venezuela limps into early 2018, it is increasingly isolated from a Latin America that is heading in a more market-friendly direction. That includes former allies, Argentina and Ecuador. Six presidential elections are scheduled for 2018—Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Mexico and Paraguay—and none of them are likely to bring into office friendly governments willing to shield Maduro’s autocratic regime. The only friends left within the region are Cuba, Bolivia and Nicaragua, hardly shining examples of democratic governance and they are economically unable to help the regime. As the Venezuelan economy further melts down, more people from that country are going to flee to Colombia, Brazil and the Caribbean.
There have already been reports of boats with Venezuelans sinking and drowning, which gives the image that they could be Latin America’s newest round of “boat people,” fleeing horrible conditions at home.
Bernie Sanders must think it’s weird that the happy citizens of the Bolivarian people’s republic are fleeing for countries which are “heading in a more market-friendly direction.”
TENSION ON THE SET: BBC Cuts Pay of Male Journalists After ‘Pay Gap’ Outcry.
January 26, 2018
BRUCE BAWER: The MSM Faces the Truth About Sweden.
DIGITAL NAG: Amazon’s Alexa Will No Longer Tolerate Sexist Abuse. “Amazon’s Alexa software has now changed its response to a certain stimulus — namely, calling it sexist names — from ‘thanks for the feedback’ to ‘I’m not going to respond to that.’ Further, the device will also respond to the question of whether it’s a feminist with: ‘I am a feminist. As is anyone who believes in bridging the inequality between men and women in society.'”
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Sorry, but “Woke Alexa” doesn’t sound promising at all.
Related (From Ed): Not so smart? Man upset Google Home device can’t answer ‘Who is Jesus?’
OPPRESSION, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG: Number of Arab students in Israeli universities grows 78% in 7 years.
CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME: Tesla employees say to expect more Model 3 delays, citing inexperienced workers, manual assembly of batteries.
Tesla’s problems with battery production at the company’s Gigafactory in Sparks, Nevada, are worse than the company has acknowledged and could cause further delays and quality issues for the new Model 3, according to a number of current and former Tesla employees. These problems include Tesla needing to make some of the batteries by hand and borrowing scores of employees from one of its suppliers to help with this manual assembly, said these people.
Tesla’s future as a mass-market carmaker hinges on automated production of the Model 3, which more than 400,000 people have already reserved, paying $1,000 refundable fees to do so.
The company has already delayed production, citing problems at the Gigafactory. On Nov. 1, 2017, CEO Elon Musk assured investors in an earnings call that Tesla was making strides to correct its manufacturing issues and get the Model 3 out.
But more than a month later, in mid-December, Tesla was still making its Model 3 batteries partly by hand, according to current engineers and ex-Tesla employees who worked at the Gigafactory in recent months. They say Tesla had to “borrow” scores of employees from Panasonic, which is a partner in the Gigafactory and supplies lithium-ion battery cells, to help with this manual assembly.
You can’t mass-manufacture anything using boutique methods.
BURDEN-SHARING: German military too small to aid ‘collective defense,’ official says.
Although the budget has increased slightly following criticism by U.S. President Donald Trump, the operational readiness of the German forces has further deteriorated this past year.
“The hard currency, in which the success of the [defense] minister is measured, is the readiness of the Bundeswehr,” Bartels said. “And that has not really improved in the last four years, but rather has become worse.”
“While foreign missions with small contingents went well, the Bundeswehr as a whole cannot currently be used in the collective defense,” he added.
Germany’s geographical location and industrial might make it one of Europe’s vital countries, but was is to be done with a people who won’t breed, won’t defend their borders, and can’t live up to their defense treaty commitments?
BLUE MODEL BLUES: New York City, Chicago Top List of Cities with Worst Fiscal Health.
IN OTHER WORDS, PRETTY MUCH EVERYBODY: Consumers, businesses seen buoying U.S. economic growth in fourth-quarter.
HIGHWAY TO THE DANGER ZONE: Earthquake fault runs through Rodeo Drive and Beverly Hills’ shopping district, California geologists say.
Glenn’s plan to tax the blue zones would help put an end to such risky and short-sighted overdevelopment.
TYLER O’NEIL: Five Gems from Trump’s Davos Speech.
ALLIES: Turkey’s Erdogan vows to fight Kurdish forces as far as Iraq.
I used to joke — pre-Erdogan — that maybe the locals would be better off if Turkey took back the Levant, but that the Turks were too smart to take it. It doesn’t seem nearly as cute now that the Turkish leadership might actually be dumb enough to try.
YOU MEAN OBAMA NEVER CLOSED IT AFTER EIGHT YEARS? Trump planning to keep Guantanamo open with new executive order.
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Social scientists have warned Zuck all along that the Facebook theory of interaction would make people angry and miserable.
Cory Doctorow:
Since the earliest days of Facebook, social scientists have sent up warnings saying that the ability to maintain separate “contexts” (where you reveal different aspects of yourself to different people) was key to creating and maintaining meaningful relationships, but Mark Zuckerberg ignored this advice, insisting that everyone be identified only by their real names and present a single identity to everyone in their lives, because anything else was “two-faced.”
Zuck was following in the footsteps of other social network entrepreneurs who attempted to impose their own theories of social interaction on mass audiences — danah boyd has written and presented extensively on the user rebellions of Friendster from people who wanted to form interest-based affinity groups and use pseudonymous identities for different activities, which Friendster rejected out of a mix of commercial concerns (it wanted users to arrange their social affairs to make it easier to monetize them) and fringe theories of social interaction.
But while all the other social networks collapsed, Facebook thrived, and imposed the Zuckerberg model of “one identity, one context” on billions of users, who, research consistently finds, are made unhappy and angry by their use of the service, but are nevertheless psychologically compelled to continue using it, creating a vicious feedback loop that even Zuck has acknowledged as a risk to his business.
Read the whole thing.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been off Twitter except for the occasional silly remark, and limit my Facebook time to little more than similar silliness and pictures of my kids. And I’ve found I’m much more relaxed.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Mueller Almost Got “You’re Fired,” More Text Messages Released and Much, Much More. “More text messages between DOJ/FBI power couple Peter Strzok and DOJ attorney Lisa Page have been released where we learn the duo was concerned that if they were ‘loaded for bear’ in the interrogation of presumed presidential victrix Hillary Clinton, they might face retribution when she ascended to her Queendom. Contrast this with the stormtroopers that raided former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort’s house.”
WITHOUT DOUBLE STANDARDS THEY WOULDN’T HAVE ANY STANDARDS AT ALL: Environmentalist Millionaire Candidate Heavily Invested in Fossil Fuels.
Millionaire congressional hopeful Dean Phillips invested as much as $2 million in energy companies even as he criticized Rep. Erik Paulsen (R., Minn.) for supporting fossil fuel development.
Phillips, a Minnesota liquor heir, is campaigning as an environmentalist in a bid to win a crowded Democratic primary and unseat Paulsen, a five-term congressman. He has supported a massive carbon tax as well as a shift away from automobiles to cut down on emissions.
“I care about the environment and I’d like to see fewer cars burning fossil fuels,” he said at a May townhall with voters. “Anybody who argues that a carbon tax would kill jobs is simply, fundamentally misguided.”
Phillips’s financial records show that the environmentally conscious candidate has no problem profiting off of automakers and fossil fuels. He has invested between $780,000 and $2 million in energy companies and major car companies. He held stocks valued between $65,000 and $150,000 in Energy Transfer Partners, owners of the Dakota Access Pipeline that has inspired numerous protests and arrests from radical environmental activists.
Well, what else is he supposed to do now that the “clean” energy crony bonanza is drying up?
SCIENCE: Cuckolding can be positive for some couples, study says.
According to a recent study by David Ley, Justin Lehmiller and the writer Dan Savage, acting on cuckolding fantasies can be a largely positive experience for many couples, and hardly a sign of weakness.
References to cuckolding appear in literature as early as the 13th century, usually in the form of male characters who fear that their child has been sired by another man during an act of infidelity. Today, however, cuckolding has become fetishized into a powerful sexual fantasy for some men, who get aroused by the idea of their romantic partner engaging in sexual activity with someone else. Women also share this fantasy, but less so than men.
“This fantasy has been around as long as marriage and sexuality,” said Ley, whose book “Insatiable Wives” addresses cuckolding in heterosexual couples. “But we’re hearing more and more about it these days, and more people are rejecting the social stigma against this fantasy.”
If nothing else, “I’m screwing your wife, and it’s for your own good” does seem like the ultimate Alpha play.
PRIORITIES: Amid funding cut fears, PA purchases $50 million private jet for Abbas – report.
The report, which did not provide sourcing, said the plane was set to be delivered to Amman within weeks, and will be stationed there for use by the PA chief.
Funding for the plane was said to have been provided both from the PA budget ($20 million) and from the Palestinian National Fund ($30 million).
The report comes amid deep cuts to US aid to the Palestinians, and reports that further cuts may be coming.
If true, that’s a lot of hungry Palestinian children who won’t get fed, or more likely, a whole lot of American largess the PA has been able to count on for years.
Or both.