I SKIP PAST ALL THE ADS: Why I Hate Pharmaceutical Industry Commercials and You Should Too.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
August 31, 2017
THEY ALMOST LOST ME AT “SIMULATED”: U.S. Bombers, Fighters Fly Simulated Strikes Against North Korea.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Identity Politics Are Tearing America Apart.
The divisions in society are real. So are national legacies of injustice. All can and must be addressed. Those who preach hatred should be called out for their odious beliefs. But even as extremism is condemned, Americans of good will need to keep up lines of civil, constructive conversation.
The country faces a stark choice. Its citizens can continue screaming at each other, sometimes over largely symbolic issues. Or they can again do what the citizens of this country have done best in the past—work together on the real problems that confront everyone.
Both of us have been at the center of heated disputes in this country and around the world. And there’s one thing we’ve learned over the decades: You achieve peace by talking, not yelling. The best way to resolve an argument is to find common ground.
Which is all well and good and true. But it also presumes goodwill on the part those whose evidential desire is permanent division.
A SPENGLER TWOFER: The Sacrifice of Black Americans for Raison d’Etat.
INDEED! Three Cheers for Cultural Appropriation.
Everything great and iconic about this country comes when seemingly disparate parts are blended in revelatory ways. That merging simply doesn’t happen in places where people are separated by race and ethnicity and class. And it’s not only what makes American culture so rich, but it is also a big part of the reason America is so successful. When we see a good idea, we steal it; when we have a good idea, the rest of the world is welcome to it as well.
More than half of the countries in the world now have some form of democracy — a system of government we enjoy and have evangelized, but was invented by ancient Greeks. Britain beat us to the abolition of slavery; the Isle of Man, New Zealand and Finland all decided to give women the vote well before the United States. Eventually, we got smart and borrowed these egalitarian innovations. In 1989, when the Tiananmen Square protesters wanted to express their yearning for freedom, they erected a homemade Statue of Liberty. But even Lady Liberty isn’t purely American: We have France to thank for the statue.
These days our mongrel culture is at risk of being erased by an increasingly strident left, which is careering us toward a wan existence in which we are all forced to remain in the ethnic and racial lanes assigned to us by accident of our birth.
So-called Progressivism has grown so thuggishly provincial that it really ought to be renamed to something like “modern feudalism.”
ARCHEOLOGY: The Oldest Known Human Remains in the Americas Have Been Found in a Mexican Cave.
How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4,000 miles away from the Bering land crossing.
“Scenarios of travel by boat along the Pacific shoreline, the ‘Kelp Highway,’ must be taken seriously, but alternative migration routes by boat from Europe along the Greenland ice margin or via Antarctica are also possible, though highly speculative,” lead author Wolfgang Stinnesbeck of the Institute of Geosciences at Heidelberg University said.
“If travel by boat is correct,” he added, “then likely camp sites are now set underwater due to the early Holocene rise of sea level.”
We’re likely going to find that human migration to the Americas was much more varied than is widely believed — or in some cases, accepted.
FUNNY HOW THESE THINGS ALWAYS SEEM TO LEAN THE SAME DIRECTION: Feds Quickly Release Trump Lawyer’s Emails To Liberal Group, Bury Dem Records For Years.
Records show the Federal Election Commission (FEC) reviewed more than 4,400 pages of emails related to a Freedom Information Act (FOIA) request filed by Andy Kroll, a reporter with the liberal news outlet Mother Jones. Kroll sought all emails Don McGahn sent between July 2008 through September 2013 while he was an FEC commissioner.
The FEC received Kroll’s request Jan. 30, 2017, and released more than 1,000 pages of McGahn’s emails in June. McGahn became White House counsel 10 days before the request was received.
FOIA requestors can ask for priority handling for particular newsworthy or time-sensitive documents, but Kroll did not ask for such treatment, records show. He did not receive the records in time for use in an April article and has not published any stories using information from this FOIA request, the Mother Jones Washington Bureau Chief told TheDCNF.
Read the whole thing, which is another Daily Caller exclusive. They’ve been covering themselves in glory there lately.
LIZ SHELD’S MORNING BRIEF: Harvey Explosion, Trump’s Tax Reform, Sanctuary City Law Smacked Down and Much, Much More.
AND THE HUNGER WAS CAUSED BY…? Venezuelan lawmaker says hunger, not politics, will drive Maduro from power.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: ‘Dream Chaser’ Space Plane Hitches a Ride with a Helicopter.
At 30 feet long, it looks like a Matchbox car crossed with a stingray. But it has outsize ambitions. Its maker, Sierra Nevada Corporation, calls it a “space utility vehicle,” marketing it as a crew and cargo transport to low Earth orbit. After delivery, the idea goes, it will fly down to the kind of runways that line big-city airports. That could make it a uniquely accessible piece of space infrastructure—for NASA, other nations, or even companies that want to try their hands at spaceflight.
During today’s “captive carry” test, Sierra Nevada aimed to see whether its SUV rides as expected at the altitudes where it will later free-fly. But it’s not ready to go that high on its own, so the Chinook lifted it there, flying it around in loops like a parent keeping a hand on the back of a kid’s bike seat.
The Dream Chaser’s basic design came from Russia—or, to be more precise, from spying on Russia.
You’ll want to read the whole thing.
UN CHIEF: Democracy ‘barely alive’ in Venezuela.
President Nicolas Maduro “was elected by the people,” Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein told reporters in Geneva, but added that the government’s recent actions “support the feeling that what is left of democratic life in Venezuela is being squeezed”.
Asked about French President Emmanuel Macron’s accusation yesterday that Mr Maduro was creating a “dictatorship”, Mr Zeid said there had been “an erosion of democratic life”.
“It must be barely alive, if still alive.”
It’s dead, Jim.
WELL, GOOD: Erdogan guards face three new indictments over Washington DC brawl.
Tuesday’s grand jury decision means that a total of 19 people – 15 identified as Turkish security officials – have now been charged over their roles in the violence on 17 May during Mr Erdogan’s state visit to the US.
Nine people were hospitalised and two members of the Turkish leader’s security detail initially arrested in the brutal altercation with Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians protesting Mr Erdogan’s human rights record and Syria policy.
In footage from the incident Turkish bodyguards can be seen suddenly rushing at the protesters.
An elderly man holding a megaphone is kicked in the face, and several women are also hit. Police officers can be seen attempting to hold some of the aggressors back, dragging them to the other side of the street.
Plus, “All 19 have been charged with conspiracy to commit a crime of violence, which is punishable by a statutory maximum of 15 years in prison, and several face additional charges of assault with a deadly weapon.”
DOJ should send a clear signal by prosecuting them to the fullest extent of the law.
FASTER, PLEASE: ‘Safer’ thorium reactor trials could salvage nuclear power.
If it’s so safe and reliable why hasn’t thorium been used all along? Because (unlike uranium) it’s much harder to weaponize. As a result, it’s historically been sidelined by nations in search of both energy and a potential source of weapons-grade plutonium. The downside is that thorium is only slightly radioactive, making it harder to prepare than uranium. That’s where NRG’s next-gen reactor comes in.
You see, molten salt reactors melt down salts for fuel and then use that molten liquid to initiate the reaction that creates power. As part of its Salt Irrigation Experimentation (SALIENT), the NRG team will melt a sample of thorium fuel and batter it with neutrons to convert it into fissionable uranium. Future trials will involve temperature-resistant metal alloys and other materials that can sustain the heat inside the reactor. Ultimately, the researchers will have to figure out how to dispose of the waste created by thorium — which is substantially less toxic than that produced by a nuclear reactor.
With the fear of nuclear disasters (and nuclear war) on the rise, a switch to safer nuclear power couldn’t come at a better time.
This is not news to Instapundit readers.
GOOD QUESTION: What stopped Japan from intercepting North Korean missile?
The projectile was apparently tracked by the three Aegis destroyers, each equipped with Standard Missile-3 interceptor missiles that are constantly deployed in the Sea of Japan. A second layer of close-in defense is provided by the Air Self-Defense Force’s ground-based Patriot Advanced Capability-3 missiles, with the ASDF’s PAC-3 unit in Hokkaido based at Chitose Air base.
“By the time this got over Japan, this thing was very high and moving extremely fast,” Lance Gatling, a defense analyst and president of Tokyo-based Nexial Research Inc., told DW.
“It was apparently at an altitude of 550 kilometers when it passed over Hokkaido, which is at the very limit of the intercept range for the SM-3, and any Aegis destroyer would have needed to be in just the right position to intercept,” Gatling said. “All in all, it was a pretty low percentage shot if they had gone ahead and ordered it.”
Boost-phase is when an ICBM is most vulnerable, but also the most difficult time to arrange an intercept.
THAT’S WHAT THEY ALWAYS SAY WHEN IT’S HELD BY REPUBLICANS: Labor Leader Sees A White House Of ‘Racists’ and ‘Wall Streeters.’
How is President Goldman-Sachs doing these days, anyway?
August 30, 2017
De Clarens stole one of the vital secrets of the war — Germany’s plans to build and test the V-1 and V-2 rocket bombs at Peenemünde. Her intelligence encouraged the British to bomb Peenemünde, delaying and disrupting the program, and “saving thousands of lives in the West,” said R. James Woolsey Jr., then CIA director, at a private ceremony at the agency in October 1993 honoring de Clarens.
How did this charming, diminutive woman accomplish her mission impossible? She listened. De Clarens was a fluent German-speaker, and in 1943, she teased the first threads of information about the rocket program out of some German officers she had befriended in Paris as a translator. And then she kept pulling on the string.
“I was such a little one, sitting with them, and I could not but hear what was said. And what they did not say, I prompted,” she told me in 1998. “I teased them, taunted then, looked at them wide-eyed, insisted that they must be mad when they spoke of the astounding new weapon that flew over vast distances, much faster than any airplane. I kept saying: ‘What you are telling me cannot be true!’ I must have said that 100 times.”
Read the whole thing.
PATRICK POOLE: Motley Crue’s Nikki Sixx Met This Holocaust Survivor, And You Won’t Believe What Happens Next.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): In a slightly-related matter, here’s the Insta-Wife talking about Nikki Sixx’s childhood.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Trump Says Texans Can Handle Anything.
RAND PAUL: No, the feds shouldn’t give war machines to the police.
What kind of equipment are we talking about? Well, Haverhill, Mass., a town of fewer than 65,000, got a nearly 20-ton Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle. Keene, NH, a town of fewer than 30,000, got an 8-ton armored BearCat. Over 10,000 bayonets have been handed out. Yes, bayonets.
Police work is unquestionably difficult — and often thankless. I have nothing but the utmost respect and admiration for those who put it all on the line to protect our communities, and I saw their bravery firsthand this summer when Capitol Police officers made all the difference during the attack on our congressional baseball game practice.
To support our local police, we must first realize they aren’t soldiers. But today the line between the two is being eroded.
It’s no surprise you can find big government right at the heart of this problem. Washington has incentivized the militarization of local police precincts by using federal dollars to help municipal governments build what are essentially small armies — where police departments compete to acquire military gear.
Plus, over a third of the “surplus” equipment is new, so it’s disingenuous to portray it as banged-up old stuff lying around the garage.
Whether or not the kind military equipment Paul mentions is ever actually deployed against its residents, how does a town of 65,000 properly pay for the upkeep and maintenance of a million-dollar (when new) MRAP vehicle?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Me on police militarization, in Popular Mechanics.
SCIENCE: Study gives first proof that the Earth has a natural thermostat.
The idea of a natural temperature thermostat was first proposed in 1981, but until now no-one has been able to provide data to show that the recovery from the hot and cold temperature fluctuations were associated with a specific mechanism.
Now a group of British scientists has shown that recovery from global cooling events is associated with changes in the rate of weathering of rocks, which is the main mechanism of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. In weathering, rocks are dissolved by rain and river water; the process removes CO2 from the atmosphere, which is then transported to the seas by rivers to be locked up in carbon-rich rocks such as limestone. The more weathering, the more CO2 is removed from the atmosphere.
The team had previously found evidence supporting the role of weathering in cooling the Earth in times of high temperature. This current work confirms that a slow-down of weathering takes place in cold periods, and so supports the concept of an “Earth thermostat”.
Fascinating.