TONI AIRAKSINEN: Wake Forest University Launches ‘Leave Patriarchy Behind’ Club.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
August 26, 2017
WE CAME, WE SAW, PEOPLE ARE STILL DYING: Beheadings in Libya Reaffirm Islamic State’s Foothold.
IS EUROPE LOST? An Appropriate Jewish Response to Barcelona.
August 25, 2017
JUST DON’T MAKE IT SO EXPENSIVE THAT WE ONLY BUY FOUR OF THEM AND CAN’T LET THEM LEAVE THE GROUND: The F-22 Raptor’s Replacement Is Starting to Take Shape.
Citing the existence of advanced Russian weapons such as the S-400 air defense missile system and the Su-57 (formerly PAK-FA) fighter, Air Combat Command commander General Mike Holmes told Aviation Week & Space Technology that while the F-22 and F-35 will continue to be improved, “Eventually you will run into a limit in your ability to improve those platforms, and so we need to have something else ready.”
The U.S. hasn’t designed a clean-sheet fighter in twenty years, and Penetrating Counter Air (PCA) will differ from the F-22 and F-35 in some ways to deal with new strategic realities. For one thing, PCA will emphasize range, particularly in order to fly escort missions for B-2 and B-21 bombers over Russia and against China in the Asia-Pacific. These sort of missions were unthinkable just five years ago.
“Unthinkable?” By whom?
ANALYSIS: TRUE. PC Corporate Culture Is a Plague That Government Helps Spread.
The problem is that the scientific evidence doesn’t support the liberal view. Sex differences in interests emerge within several hours after children are born, with girls showing more interest in people and boys in systems/things. One-day-old girls look longer at faces than one-day-old boys, who spend more time looking at mechanical objects. Our primate cousins, rhesus monkeys, show exactly the same sex differences in interest as young children. Male monkeys prefer to play with trucks, female monkeys with dolls. Two- to three-week-old female macaques look more than males at other macaques’ faces, and four to five weeks after birth they exhibit more “affiliative behaviors.” Returning to humans, the greatest sex disparities in career choice are found in the richest and most egalitarian countries, where individuals have more freedom to pursue their interests. In Sweden, 79 percent of computer systems designers, analysts, and programmers and 97 percent of heavy truck and lorry drivers are men. Meanwhile, 89 percent of child-care workers and 74 percent of people working in research and development in education are women. In contrast, in relatively conservative and less wealthy India, more than 30 percent of computer programmers are women. Only 9 percent of engineers in the U.K. are women, while almost 30 percent of engineers in relatively poor EU countries like Bulgaria and Cyprus are women. Interest in people versus things is tied to prenatal testosterone levels even within sexes: Girls who had higher levels of testosterone in the womb end up with more stereotypically masculine cognitive styles and interests, and conversely for boys.
It is of course theoretically possible that one day we will discover that girls and boys are socialized to have different interests a few hours after they are born (or perhaps in the womb?), or that people are socialized differently depending on their prenatal testosterone levels. But since so far no one has come up with a non-ridiculous theory of how this socialization might work, it seems reasonable to assume that sex differences have (at least in part) a biological basis. The claim that the evidence supports an environmental explanation of all sex differences in interests can only be motivated by ignorance or dishonesty. To protect the men-and-women-are-exactly-the-same theory, the liberal establishment cannot appeal to scientific evidence, so it must resort to silencing dissenters: firing them, making ad hominem attacks, and calling them names.
“Celebrate diversity” morphed into “Conform, proles” so slowly I hardly even noticed.
HALF PAYCHECK: Amazon moving swiftly to cut prices at Whole Foods.
CNN TODAY: Was Cuban sonic attack a weapon, or an accident?
US STATE DEPARTMENT TODAY: 16 U.S. Embassy Personnel in Cuba Injured by Sonic Device Attack.
CNN has a history of kowtowing to dictators in order to maintain “access.”
If the leaked samples are any indicator, Clinton’s new book will be a Nixonian “modified limited hangout” explaining her loss, drowning in an ocean of unreadable prose.
YES. Could Trump’s Transgender Military Ban Actually Become Policy?
It was policy right up until the last six months or so of Obama’s second term.
THANKS, OBAMA: Waiting Longer for an Ambulance When Seconds Count? Blame Obamacare. “Study finds that expanded coverage from ACA put strain on emergency services not equipped to deal with the demand.”
I’m so old, I can remember when Obama promised that his law would relieve the stresses on emergency medical services.
Tesla’s Push to Build a Self-Driving Car Sparked Dissent Among Its Engineers.
The pressure was high to get testing done and develop the product. In a 2015 email, Mr. Rose urged engineers to get started on validating the technology, or to proving it works in tests, “RTFN”—right the f— now.
Some engineers and suppliers pushed back. Issues they debated included the amount of time a driver would be given to retake the wheel if a car’s autonomous driving features stopped working; mechanisms to keep drivers engaged; and whether the technology should be allowed on all roads.
Weeks before the October 2015 release of Autopilot, an engineer who had worked on safety features warned Tesla that the product wasn’t ready, according to a resignation letter circulated to other employees and reviewed by the Journal.
Autopilot’s development was based on “reckless decision making that has potentially put customer lives at risk,” the engineer, Evan Nakano, wrote.
There’s an old geopolitical jokes which goes: “Brazil is the next superpower — and always will be.” Some days you get the same feeling about fully automated cars.
WHAT IS IT WITH THE LEFT AND FECES? San Francisco dog owners lay minefield of poo for rightwing rally.
THE GREAT WHITE NORTH: Justin Trudeau tones down warm welcome for migrants as Canada struggles to cope with influx.
SHE SEEMS NICE: New Labour MP says she will not ‘hang out’ with Conservative women because they are the ‘enemy.’
Ms Pidcock explained: “The idea that they’re not the enemy is simply delusional when you see the effect they have on people”.
She also tweeted: “Whatever type they are, it’s visceral. I’m not interested in being cosy with Tories. My interview with @skwawkbox”.
New Tory MP Kemi Badenoch disagreed with Ms Pidcock that Conservatives are an enemy to women.
She told Refinery29: “I would call myself a feminist. I have a son and a daughter – I want to make sure they have the same opportunities in life. [The Conservatives] have had two female prime ministers. We haven’t had as many female MPs (the Conservative party currently has 67 female MPs while Labour has 119) but we have had a different way of doing things. For us, a woman in power is more important than lots of women taking orders from men.”
Dozens of young girls from Rotherham and Newcastle could not be reached for comment.
THE MORNING BRIEFING: Trump Put on Diet of Highly-Curated Information and Much, Much More.
CAPITALISM ALWAYS FINDS A WAY: Cash is useless in Venezuela thanks to hyperinflation — so people are turning to bitcoin.. “Bitcoin miners can make as much as $500 a month, which is enough to afford things such as baby diapers and insulin from overseas.”
As Venezuela suffers its worst meltdown in history, with inflation skyrocketing and basic necessities running in short supply, many have taken to bitcoin mining in a bid to survive, according to a report in the current issue of the Atlantic.
The reason? Electricity is now cheaper and more affordable in the crisis-hit country than most basic goods. That’s because under President Nicolás Maduro, electric power is heavily subsidized to the point that it’s essentially free, the Atlantic said.
Bitcoin mining works like this: Miners use computer hardware to perform complex computations that ultimately create each new link in the bitcoin blockchain — the massive, decentralized ledger technology that underpins the cryptocurrency. In return, they are rewarded with bitcoin. One of the key requirements to mine bitcoin is to have a large supply of power.
Cheap power might be Maduro’s last remaining, reliable bribe to keep himself in power.
SKYNET WANTS US DIVIDED: Defense Technologists Divided Over Killer Robots.
The blunt talk by leaders of the AI world has raised eyebrows. Musk has put AI in the category of existential threat and is demanding decisive and immediate regulation. But even some of the signatories of the letter now say Musk took the fear mongering too far.
What this means for the Pentagon and its massive efforts to merge intelligent machines into weapon systems is still unclear. The military sees a future of high-tech weapon systems powered by artificial intelligence and ubiquitous autonomous weapons in the air, at sea, on the ground, as well as in cyberspace.
The United Nations has scheduled a November meeting to discuss the implications of autonomous weapons. It has created a group of governmental experts on “lethal autonomous weapon systems.” The letter asked the group to “work hard at finding means to prevent an arms race in these weapons, to protect civilians from their misuse, and to avoid the destabilizing effects of these technologies.”
Longterm, I’d feel better about battlefield automation if the Executive hadn’t effectively usurped (or perhaps more accurately, been voluntarily given) Congress’s power to declare war.
IS THERE ANYTHING HE CAN’T DO? Trump Has Made Progressives Fall in Love With Federalism.
It’s almost as though they should never have fallen in love with overweening centralized power in the first place.
CHRISTOPHER JACOBS: Here’s The Obamacare Grand Bargain That Will Satisfy Both Republican Factions.
Rather than constructing substantively cumbersome waiver arrangements—the legislative equivalent of a camel being a horse written by committee—Occam’s Razor suggests a simpler, cleaner solution: Preserving the status quo (i.e., the enhanced federal match) on Medicaid expansion in exchange for full repeal of Obamacare’s insurance regulations at the federal level.
A “grand bargain” in this vein would give Senate moderates a clear win on Medicaid expansion, while providing conservatives their desired outcome on Obamacare’s regulations. For this conservative at least, the regulations represent the heart of the law, prompting both its spending on exchange subsidies—to offset the higher premium costs from the regulatory mandates—and the taxes needed to fund that spending. Expelling the regulations from the federal statute books would represent a clear step towards the promise of repealing Obamacare “root and branch,” and return control of health insurance to the states, where it lay from 1947’s McCarran-Ferguson Act until Obamacare.
ObamaCare was never meant to be the Democrats’ “final solution” on health coverage, and repealing it in this political climate is also going to have be a multistep process.