CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is This the End for Lena Dunham, Culture Warrior?
Author Archive: Stephen Green
November 21, 2017
ACTUALLY, “IGNORING” WOULD BE A STEP UP FROM “DISDAINING”: If Democrats want to win back votes in the Trump era, they will need to stop ignoring people of faith.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Cocktails to Get Your Thanksgiving Going.
WORKERS’ PARADISE: Rape and no periods in North Korea’s army.
A former soldier says life as a woman in the world’s fourth-largest army was so tough that most soon stopped menstruating. And rape, she says, was a fact of life for many of those she served with.
For almost 10 years Lee So Yeon slept on the bottom bunk bed, in a room she shared with more than two dozen women. Every woman was given a small set of drawers in which to store their uniforms. On top of those drawers each kept two framed photographs. One was of North Korea’s founder Kim Il-sung. The second was of his now deceased heir, Kim Jong-il.
It was a decade ago that she left, but she retains vivid memories of the smell of the concrete barracks.
“We sweat quite a bit.
“The mattress we sleep on, it’s made of the rice hull. So all the body odour seeps into the mattress. It’s not made of cotton. Because it’s rice hull, all the odour from sweat and other smells are there. It’s not pleasant.”
One of the reasons for this was the state of the washing facilities.
“As a woman, one of the toughest things is that we can’t shower properly,” says Lee So Yeon.
“Because there is no hot water. They connect a hose to the mountain stream and have water directly from the hose.
“We would get frogs and snakes through the hose.”
Plus: “Though Lee So Yeon joined the army voluntarily, in 2015 it was announced that all women in North Korea must do seven years’ military service from the age of 18.”
And yet it’s always the U.S. progressives accuse of militarism.
CUE THE WORLD’S SMALLEST VIOLIN: Iraq Is Giving OPEC a Headache.
The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, due to meet next week in Vienna, is already grappling with volatile production in Nigeria and Libya, and Iraq adds another layer of unpredictability. For policy makers, the short-term disruption risks masking a longer-term truth: Iraq, which only got a production quota last year after decades of exemptions, has never felt comfortable with constraints and wants to maximize the country’s potential output.
“Production will remain volatile,” said Issam Chalabi, a consultant and former Iraqi oil minister. While it will be difficult for Iraq to replace barrels lost in the north quickly, Iraq’s “real intention is to reach the 5 million-barrel mark by year-end. Politics is the name of the game.”
The uncertainty makes it more difficult for OPEC to judge the global balance of supply and demand next year and make a decision about how long to extend supply curbs. The producers’ group is seeking to build consensus with non-members including Russia on whether to extend beyond March output cuts aimed at mopping up a supply glut.
Cartels deserve every headache they get, and then some.
THIS WAS PROBABLY INEVITABLE: New Drone License Plates Stoke Fears About Tracking, Hacking.
BUT OF COURSE: New Yorkers are footing the bill for Governor Cuomo and Mayor de Blasio’s quixotic energy-efficiency plans.
Even if we stipulate that increased energy efficiency in New York buildings is a good thing, the emissions-reduction targets are financially burdensome and unrealistic. Cuomo’s appointees at the New York State Public Service Commission have mandated that buildings must slash their energy use by 600 trillion BTUs by 2030. But as economist Jonathan Lesser points out in a recent report for the Manhattan Institute, the New York Independent System Operator has projected that those energy savings will be about 51 trillion BTUs—or about one-twelfth the required amount.
Opposition to nuclear energy has compounded the problem. The Cuomo administration negotiated the premature closure of the Indian Point Energy Center, but city documents show that shutting the state’s nuclear plants will mean more reliance on natural gas. In California and New England, carbon-dioxide emissions increased immediately after nuclear plants were shuttered, with gas-fired generators replacing the nukes.
Renewables can’t meet New York’s energy needs. In his August report, Lesser estimated that achieving 80 x 50 would require either 300,000 megawatts of new solar-energy capacity—equivalent to all existing solar capacity on the planet—or 100,000 megawatts of offshore wind capacity; that’s more than six times as much as now exists globally.
Anything that can’t happen, won’t.
OH: Flows of ‘water’ on Mars may actually be sand, new study reveals.
Those dark streaks may be the result of granular flows like sand and dust, according to a study published Monday in the journal Nature Geoscience. The study is the product of a research team made up of representatives from the US Geological Survey, the Planetary Science Institute, the University of Arizona and Durham University in England.
The study is based on observations made with the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
The RSL have been perplexing scientists since their discovery. Thousands recur during the warmest season on Mars each year, growing longer and darker until they fade in winter. They’re found on steep, rocky slopes on the darkest areas of Mars: the equator, the northern plains, the southern mid-latitudes.
Researchers studied 151 RSL at 10 sites and found all ended at similar points, no matter the length of the slope. If liquid had been involved, there would be longer streaks of liquid on longer slopes. But a closer study of the streaks revealed that they behave just like dry grains of sand on active dunes, all settling at the same “angle of repose.”
That’s disappointing.
RENDER UNTO CAESAR THE THINGS THAT ARE CAESAR’S — AND EVERYTHING ELSE, TOO: China’s Communist Party Forces Christians to Replace Jesus With Xi Jinping Posters.
PROCUREMENT: Pentagon’s Inspector General Praises Secret $80 Billion Bomber.
While big-ticket weapons systems like the B-21 frequently end up with significant cost increases and production delays, in the initial stages the Air Force was cited for its “comprehensive acquisition strategy and risk-management process to support a cost-effective program,” according to the audit. The program had “clearly defined requirements to ensure” warfighter “needs are being met,” it added.
That initial assessment is no guarantee the B-21 won’t encounter serious cost, schedule and performance problems as system development continues, with the service seeking to declare an initial operating capability by the “mid to late 2020s,” Global Strike Command spokesman Joe Thomas said in an email. The aircraft’s first flight “along with specific details of the technical capability of this platform, is protected by enhanced security measures,” he added.
The CBO’s $97 billion estimate includes $69 billion in production costs, though the office says the program’s secrecy made it difficult “to generate an independent estimate of its costs.”
Don’t pop the champagne corks just yet.
HMM: North Korea punishes top military leaders, South Korea says.
Two key figures in the North Korean military have been punished for “impure behavior,” according to a South Korean lawmaker, a move analysts say is likely intended to help leader Kim Jong Un tighten his grip on power.
A closed-door briefing by South Korea’s National Intelligence Service (NIS) identified the two officials as Hwang Pyong So, the director of North Korea’s General Political Bureau (GPB), and his deputy Kim Won Hong, said South Korean Rep. Kim Byung-kee after the meeting.
The General Political Bureau, which is also referred to as the General Political Department (GPD), is being audited for the first time in 20 years, Rep. Kim added, citing the NIS.
It’s unclear how exactly how Hwang and his deputy were disciplined, but one analyst told CNN they could have been required to undergo re-education, which is likely to include a period of re-indoctrination of North Korean ideology.
At least they weren’t executed by antiaircraft gun — yet.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Harassment Allegations Abound and Much, Much More.
FASTER, PLEASE: Checks on Trump’s Court Picks Fall Away.
Last week, Sen. Chuck Grassley (R., Iowa) reined in a tradition that empowered senators to block federal appeals-court nominees from their home state. His decision came about four years after Democrats, citing Republican filibusters of President Barack Obama’s circuit-court nominees, eliminated a Senate rule that required the majority party to mount 60 votes to advance a nominee to a confirmation vote.
Together, the threat of a filibuster—or delaying tactic—and use of “blue slips”—so-named because senators indicate support or opposition to nominees on blue slips of paper—guarded against lifetime appointments for nominees deemed far outside the mainstream, court experts said. Getting rid of these checks could foment distrust in judges’ work if Mr. Trump and later presidents prioritize ideology over experience or legal talent, some of the experts said.
“When judges lose legitimacy in the public eye, they lose the ability to enforce unpopular decisions,” said Arthur Hellman, an expert on the federal judiciary and law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. “And that’s when you see an unraveling in the rule of law.”
Others said the changes were part of a natural progression away from Senate traditions that allowed the minority party to stall nominations for partisan reasons.
“If you’re not a fan of the Senate-wide filibuster, you’re probably not a fan of a filibuster by one senator,” said Ilya Shapiro, a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, referring to the practice of senators blocking nominees from their states.
Next up, abolish the Ninth?
ISN’T IT ALWAYS? The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid.
The real culprit of the climate crisis is not any particular form of consumption, production or regulation but rather the very way in which we globally produce, which is for profit rather than for sustainability. So long as this order is in place, the crisis will continue and, given its progressive nature, worsen. This is a hard fact to confront. But averting our eyes from a seemingly intractable problem does not make it any less a problem. It should be stated plainly: It’s capitalism that is at fault.
As an increasing number of environmental groups are emphasizing, it’s systemic change or bust. From a political standpoint, something interesting has occurred here: Climate change has made anticapitalist struggle, for the first time in history, a non-class-based issue.
If you want enough wealth, innovation, and technology to deal with any kind of serious problem, you’d better embrace free markets harder than Glenn Thrush embraces young female reporters.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Air Force aims for laser weapons on a fighter jet by 2021.
The Self-protect High Energy Laser Demonstrator program, or SHiELD, which launched this year, seeks to equip supersonic warplanes, such as the B-1 Lancer, F-35 Lightning and F-22 Raptor, with defensive lasers mounted in external pods.
The Air Force wants a high-energy laser system compact enough to complement the internal cannon and missiles equipped on its fighter jets.
The new system uses a type of optical fiber as the light-emitting material, instead of the neodymium-doped crystals used in conventional solid-state lasers. Since fiber can be coiled, more power can be packed into a compact system.
Difficult-to-detect supersonic jets armed with invisible weapons is exactly the 21st Century I was hoping for.
KEVIN WILLIAMSON: We Were Young.
Yglesias may have been a callow youth in 1998 rather than the callow adult he is today, but that excuse doesn’t go very far outside of Vox’s little orbit. James Carville wasn’t a kid when he dismissed one of Bill Clinton’s accusers as what you get when you “drag a $100 bill through a trailer park.” Paul Begala wasn’t a child when he defended Clinton and lambasted the man investigating him — not for adultery, but for perjury and obstruction of justice — as a sex-obsessed reincarnation of Roger Chillingsworth. Maureen Dowd wasn’t young when she lampooned Monica Lewinsky as “a ditsy, predatory White House intern who might have lied under oath for a job at Revlon” and suggested that the affair was the result of psychological problems rooted in Lewinsky’s being “too tubby to be in the high school ‘in’ crowd.” The men who awarded her the Pulitzer Prize for that work were not middle-schoolers. The editors of the New York Times and the Washington Post weren’t little ’uns. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a grown woman when she took charge of destroying the women caught up in her husband’s “bimbo eruptions.”
And Matthew Yglesias wasn’t a high-schooler in 2008 or 2016, either.
Juanita Broaddrick, who says she was violently raped by Bill Clinton, has been trying to tell her story since 1999. In 1999, Bill Clinton wasn’t the pathetic, used-up has-been he is today: He was, if memory serves, the president of the United States of America. As Mrs. Clinton’s political career advanced, Broaddrick continued trying to tell her story, to the general indifference and occasional hostility of the media and the self-satisfied progressives who advertise themselves as the champions of women. Why did no one listen? Yglesias credits Mrs. Clinton’s status as the presumptive first woman president with “creating a kind of reputational vortex that shielded her husband’s behavior from scrutiny.” If reputational vortices were named the way hurricanes are, the one surrounding the Clintons would be named “Matthew Yglesias.” It would have a few other names, too: Call it Legion, for they were — and are — many.
And they will remain legion. Today’s purge is just clearing the deck for tomorrow’s new generation of power users and abusers.
November 20, 2017
YES: Want Widespread Prosperity? Radically Lower Costs.
The New Deal was based on the notion that the solution to poverty was to make everything more expensive. Obamanomics was a smaller-scale implementation of the same flawed thinking. Neither approach did much good for the working families their authors purported to be helping.
Anyway, do read the whole thing.
NOW THAT’S A HOT TAKE: The human side of Charlie Manson.
SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED: Does Time Travel Already Exist? Video Claims It Does.