OTHER PEOPLE’S MONEY: VA chief took in Wimbledon, river cruise on European work trip; wife’s expenses covered.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
September 29, 2017
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Trump Court Nominee Upheld Rights of Police Against Holder DOJ Misconduct.
Trump nominated Engelhardt to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, a district that covers the area from Alabama to the Rio Grande. Engelhardt already serves as a United States District Court judge in New Orleans.
Engelhardt will be familiar to PJ Media readers.
He is the judge who wrote a scathing 129-page order blistering the misconduct of lawyers at the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and the local New Orleans U.S. Attorney’s Office in a prosecution of New Orleans police officers. His order offers a look behind the curtain of some of the worst ideological misconduct that occurred at the Obama DOJ.
Misconduct may be an inadequate word to describe the behavior of DOJ lawyers, and Engelhardt saw it all up close.
Read the whole thing.
OOPS: China’s booming electric vehicle market is about to run into a mountain of battery waste.
The average lifespan of a lithium-iron phosphate (LFP) battery, the dominant type in China’s electric vehicles, is around five years, according to Li Changdong, chairman of the Hunan-based Brunp group, China’s top electric car battery recycler in 2016 (link in Chinese). Most batteries installed on electric vehicles during the 2012 to 2014 period will be retired on a large scale (link in Chinese) around 2018, Li told the Beijing-based newspaper Economic Information Daily.
In 2020, nearly 250,000 metric tons (276,000 tons) of batteries, or 35 gigawatt-hours of batteries, are set to be retired—nearly 20 times those depleted in 2016, GaoGong Industry Institute, a Shenzhen-based electric car industry research firm, told Quartz.
The battery is the heart of the electric vehicle industry, and the country needs a well-established battery recycling system, Xin Guobin, a top industry and tech official, told a national forum for the battery-powered engine industry Tuesday (link in Chinese) (Sept. 26). But recycling these batteries isn’t easy, due to the sophisticated chemical procedures involved. If it’s not done properly the heavy metal contained in the battery can lead to contamination of soil and water.
Unexpectedly.
PAGING WILLARD STILES: A Giant Coconut-Eating Giant Rat Was Discovered in the Solomon Islands.
It’s four times the size of a typical North American rat and can chew through coconut shells.
OH NO: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, star of “Veep,” reveals she has breast cancer.
Not only is Louis-Dreyfus a tremendous comedic talent who has earned continuing success long past what Hollywood considers most actresses’ sell-by date, but Veep is belly-laugh funny, take-no-prisoners, and anti-PC.
Thoughts and prayers for a full and speedy recovery.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: The First Primary in the Party of Trump.
The argument between Moore and Strange was over who would best serve Trump. The fact that both contestants highlighted their allegiance to the president underscores the true significance of the result: This was not a primary over who would represent Alabama in the United States Senate as a member of the Grand Old Party. It was the first primary in the Party of Trump.
The election of Moore was not an aberration but part of a long-running trend. Moore’s voters are Trump’s voters: rural, working class religious conservatives furious at Beltway insiders more interested in lowering the corporate tax rate and upholding standard legislative procedure than in building a wall along the southern border and protecting religious liberty. Moore’s method is also similar to Trump’s. Both men are inflammatory, both are unpredictable, both are conspiracy-prone, and both are the self-appointed defenders of powerful cultural symbols such as the Ten Commandments and the National Anthem against subversion from the left. Their constituencies not only do not watch CNN, they loathe the network and its peers for trying to impose on audiences a set of non-traditional and politically correct values. As Trump said of National Enquirer readers in 1999: “Those are the real people.”
That Strange lost despite Trump’s support shows that Trumpism is bigger than Trump himself — and Continetti’s column is a nice reminder that Trumpism even predates Trump as a political force.
Both parties have been shaken to the core by this ongoing realignment, but it remains to be seen whether the swamp can actually be drained.
BRUCE BAWER: Meet Lorraine Ali, Mendacious Muslim ‘Media Critic.’
THE RED TOURIST PLANET: Elon Musk Projects First Private Trips to Mars by Middle of Next Decade.
Mr. Musk sketched out his aggressive vision of private space exploration by his company SpaceX—complete with technical details of capsules larger than superjumbo airliners and the basis of a business plan to pay for it—at an international astronautics conference in Australia on Friday.
The presentation, delivered in a folksy manner, was the serial entrepreneur’s most dramatic effort yet to provide specifics demonstrating the viability of his long-standing goal of colonizing the red planet.
To begin with, he downsized the proposed rocket from earlier ideas and made it more versatile, so it could be suitable for less-demanding missions closer to the earth as well as the moon.
Projecting the first trips to Mars by 2022 or 2024—more than a decade before the U.S. or any other government anticipate coming close—Mr. Musk’s latest plans are built around a business principle he had never publicly broached before.
Space Exploration Technologies Corp., as his company is formally called, seeks to create a single fleet of super-powerful rockets and spacecraft able to serve commercial satellite operators, U.S. government customers and Mr. Musk’s dreams of deep space exploration.
By leveraging technology from his current boosters and vehicles to build much larger, more-capable versions, Mr. Musk—who is also the co-founder of Tesla—aims to use cash flow from ongoing operations to finance his Mars ambitions. The existing hardware would be phased out and relatively quickly replaced by the multi-purpose systems.
And: “Mr. Musk acknowledged that the 2022 deadline was largely ‘aspirational,’ but added that by 2024 he was fairly confident about flying as many as half-a-dozen spacecraft to the Martian surface and starting to build a fuel depot there.”
Cue the wailing that Musk’s fuel depot will despoil the pristine Martian environment…
LOWER, PLEASE: Pentagon targets lower-tier suppliers on new $60M F-35 affordability effort.
The goal is to get the Air Force F-35A variant down to $80 million a copy, which isn’t all that much more than a less-capable and less-survivable Block 52 or Block 60 F-16.
CONSIDER IT DONE. Delanie Walker To Upset Titans Fans: ‘Don’t Come To The Game.’
That’s certainly a generous stand for Walker to make, but apparently the fans are way out ahead of him on this one.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: The Latest on RUSSIA, the NFLOL and Much, Much More.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: Twitter Says It Found 201 Accounts Linked to Possible Russian Election Interference.
The company also told congressional investigators that the Russian-backed news site RT spent $274,100 on ads on Twitter last year. A U.S. intelligence report said RT sought to meddle in the U.S. election.
The revelations, coming weeks after Facebook Inc. first disclosed Russian actors paid for divisive political ads on its platform, further inflame tensions that Russians sought to manipulate public opinion in the U.S. through social media. Russia has denied interfering in the election.
Twitter’s announcement drew a swift rebuke from some congressional leaders including Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat and the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is investigating Russian activities during the election. Mr. Warner called the meeting with Twitter “deeply disappointing” and said the company hadn’t done enough to examine the extent of Russian activity on its platform.
The blue-on-blue action is always fun, but a quarter-million dollar ad buy in a billion-dollar race barely adds up to a pittance. And anyway, the Russians were wise to be so cheap because: A) political ads don’t work, and; B) the Kremlin’s goal wasn’t to pick a winner but rather to sow dissension.
And on that last score, Democrats are proving themselves the Kremlin’s more-than-useful idiots.
BLOWBACK: NFL protester says father has lost work because of it.
Lions defensive linemen Akeem Spence tweeted Thursday that a contractor denied his father work on a house because of his protests.
There were eight Lions players who kneeled during the anthem on Sunday, and Spence was one of them. After the game, he explained his actions as every protester has when asked — that it is not about the flag or the anthem or disrespecting the military, but rather to raise awareness for racial inequality in America.
“No disrespect to the flag, no disrespect to any of the veterans or anything,” Spence told ESPN after the Lions’ 30-26 loss to the Falcons. “It was just right is right, wrong is wrong, and what the guy said about us as NFL players, I just feel like that’s something that’s us, as NFL players, we have to stand up for that’s not what we are. You know what I’m saying. We’re human beings. We give back to the community.
“We do great things, and our owners, you know what I’m saying, they do great things. So that’s something we don’t represent around the NFL. That’s something every team should have come out and showed this Sunday, that it’s not what that guy said about us.”
It’s impossible to tell from his statement exactly what Spence thought he was protesting or supporting by taking a knee, but it is clear that he fails to understand that freedom of expression is a two-way street.
YES, BUT THEY’D HAVE TO ACTUALLY FIGHT: Eight Things Feminism Could Fight For In Saudi Arabia.
September 28, 2017
EVERYONE SHOULD: How I learned to stop worrying and love chaos.
NARRATIVE FAIL: Russia Facebook Ads Showed Support For Black Lives Matter, Clinton.
As I’ve written here before: The Kremlin cares much less about picking winners and losers, than it does about discrediting our political system in the eyes of the American people. That’s a Russian game the post-election Democrats have been eager to play along with.
BUT OF COURSE: Chelsea Manning Inspired Communist West Point Graduate To Infiltrate The Military.
First rule of Communist infiltration? Don’t post pictures of yourself wearing a Che shirt on social media.
EVERYTHING IS PROBLEMATICAL: The Repressive, Authoritarian Soul of “Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends.”
THE 21ST CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT THE WAY I’D HOPED: Use of Powerful Large-Animal Tranquilizer Rises Among Opioid Addicts.
SHAMELESS: Showtime websites secretly mined user CPU for cryptocurrency.
The crypto mining Javascript is called Coinhive, and according to the site, it was made as an alternative to banner ads as a way for website owners to get around pesky ad-blockers. Ironically, some ad-blockers have now included Coinhive on the list of the banned.
The script mines the cryptocurrency known as Monero. Launched in April 2014, Monero is meant to be a more anonymous version of Bitcoin because you can purchase it offline with cash. Thirty percent of the proceeds go to Coinhive, while sites using the service, like Showtime and The Pirate Bay, keep the rest. For its part, The Pirate Bay has apologized for secretly running the script and then asked its users if they preferred ads or CPU mining. Surprisingly, many of the comments indicate a positive reception towards the idea.
Coinhive updated its site to include the statement: “We’re a bit saddened to see that some of our customers integrate Coinhive into their pages without disclosing to their users what’s going on, let alone asking for their permission.” Going forward, the service claims that it will now ask people browsing a site for permission before mining their CPU. Showtime declined to comment.
I’m not sure this is any worse than video ads which also hog your CPU and get in your face.
BEHIND THE SCENES: Despite Legislative Setbacks, Trump Winning War on Regulations.