WHEW! No, Marijuana Legalization Isn’t Crushing Craft Beer.
On the other hand, we could probably do with fewer craft beers trying to imitate cocktails.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
January 11, 2017
THE SMALL SILVER SCREEN: Coen Brothers to Write and Direct Their First-Ever TV Series, ‘Buster Scruggs’
The TV adaptation — reboot? reimagining? — of the Coen Brothers’ Fargo, which they produce, has been quite good in its first two seasons.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Meryl Streep’s 4 Worst Films.
WHO IS REALLY COVERED BY OBAMACARE?
It might not be who you think.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: U.S. Navy F/A-18 Hornets released a swarm of 103 Perdix semi-autonomous drones in flight.
The miniature Perdex drones, different from larger, more common remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs) like the well-known Reaper and Predator, operate with a high degree of collective autonomy and reduced dependency on remote flight crews to control them. The large group of more autonomous Perdex drones creates a “swarm” of miniature drones. The swarm shares information across data links during operation, and can make mission-adaptive decisions faster than RPV’s controlled in the more conventional manner.
In a statement released by the U.S. Department of Defense, Strategic Capabilities Office Director William Roper said, “Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” Director Roper went on to say, “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.”
Video at the link.
WRONG NUMBER: Louisiana man texts deputy about meth delivery, sheriff says.
The Assumption Parish deputy seemed to take it in stride, reportedly texting back an OK last Friday, before he mobilized the Narcotics Division.
Sure enough, the suspect, 39-year-old Dwayne Herbert of Pierre Part, showed up with crystal meth and two guns, Sheriff Leland Falcon said. The deputy arrested Herbert, who faces charges ranging from meth possession to resisting an officer.
The movies are filled with criminal masterminds because real life isn’t.
STOP ME IF YOU THINK YOU’VE HEARD THIS ONE BEFORE: Jeff Sessions Faces Democrats’ Decades-Old Race-Baiting Routine.
Then there’s something wrong with the law.
NO: ‘Are We Living in Nazi Germany?’
This is over-the-top, even by Trump’s standards, but a little perspective is always called for — it’s just a tweet.
FRACK, BABY, FRACK: A 2-year streak of U.S. oil output declines is ‘likely over’
POLITICO: Ukrainian efforts to sabotage Trump backfire.
Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers, a Politico investigation found.
A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.
The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia. But they were far less concerted or centrally directed than Russia’s alleged hacking and dissemination of Democratic emails.
Is there anybody not trying to mess with our elections?
In a way it’s comforting, though. Even after eight years of Obama, other countries still think we matter.
WHAT IS IT DOING UP THERE ALL THIS TIME? Air Force’s Mysterious X-37B Space Plane Wings by 600 Days in Orbit.
“It remains a very useful way to test out things,” Winston Beauchamp, deputy undersecretary of the Air Force for space, told Space.com last September during an American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) meeting in Long Beach, California.
And that’s about all the Air Force has to say about that.
IF IT WEREN’T FOR DOUBLE STANDARDS… Obama Boasts No Terror Attacks On Our Soil, Then Lists Terror Attacks On Our Soil.
It’s generally considered good form to wait at least 24 hours before contradicting oneself so completely.
HEALTH: 200 percent increase in kids’ use of artificial sweeteners concerns scientists.
The results, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, observed a 200 percent increase in consumption of the artificial sweeteners among children, and a 54 percent increase among adults, from 1999 to 2012. In 1999, only 8.7 percent of children reported consuming low-calorie sweeteners, but in 2012, that number jumped to 25.1 percent, the study found.
“The findings are important, especially for children, because some studies suggest a link between low-calorie sweeteners and obesity, diabetes and other health issues,” lead study author Dr. Allison Sylvetsky, assistant professor of exercise and nutrition sciences at the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health, said in a news release.
According to the release, the study offers the most recent data regarding the U.S. population’s consumption of low-calorie sweeteners in foods, beverages and packets.
A well-balanced diet, particularly for kids, shouldn’t require artificial anything.
SHOT: America will miss Barack Obama’s decency.
CHASER: A Divisive Obama Warns of Threats to National Unity in Farewell Speech.
HANGOVER:
It’s going to be with us for a long time.
FAKE NEWS: 4chan Claims It Invented the Trump Golden Showers Story.
Did 2017 just jump 2016’s shark?
THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK:
I’ve said several times on Right Angle that Trump ought to bring Scott Walker on board as his Pushback Czar or whatever he’d want to call it, for Walker’s experience in taking on the Deep State — and winning. It’s going to be a full-time job, and the President’s attention is always spread thin. Walker could be Trump’s point man on hitting back hard.
It isn’t bad advice.
OF COURSE HE IS: Army Leaker Chelsea Manning on Obama’s ‘Short List’ for Commutation.
ASIA PIVOT: China Sends Aircraft Carrier Into Taiwan Strait.
President Obama supposedly “pivoted” the focus of our diplomacy and military towards Asia in 2012, but it’s China making all the moves.
JAMELLE BOUIE: “Our first black president has an unyielding faith in the goodness of America. It got him elected. And it will cost him his legacy.”
What’s with all the America-hate from the Left this week?
LINDA STASI: Meryl Streep’s speech was annoying, elitist and full of lies.
And:
So how could Streep, who makes $5 million a movie, and will reportedly be making $825,000 per episode for a new TV show, cluelessly face that dazzling room of the luckiest people on the earth, and declare that they all “belong to the most vilified segments in American society right now. Think about it: Hollywood, foreigners and the press.” What?
That’s three lies in a row — four if you count the one about Mixed Martial Arts not being an art.
All would be forgiven if Streep would just apologize for abusing her reputation to trick me into sitting through 20 minutes of Ricki and the Flash.
DAVID HARSANYI: Sorry, But The Republican Party Isn’t ‘Extremist’
In Slate, Jamelle Bouie asserts that the “Republican Party in 2017 isn’t an ordinary political party. It is an ideological outlier, the most extreme party coalition since the Civil War.”
If this depiction sounds familiar, it’s probably because you’ve been hearing iterations of it from the moment you started following politics — and it doesn’t matter how long ago you started. This Congress, this president, this Republican, is always the most extreme America has ever seen. If this were always true, we’d be living in the America of Meryl Streep’s fertile imagination.
It’s probably safe to assume that most contemporary liberals view conservatives in similar terms (although weren’t Republicans the good guys during the Civil War?). Then again, for liberals, extremism resides mere millimeters to the right of their own position, which has rapidly shifted left over the past 15 years.
The extremist card stopped working after the trillion-dollar stimulus and the party-line passage of ObamaCare. 900+ lost elective offices later, and the Democrats still haven’t caught on.
OH: I love America. It’s Americans I hate.
Tim Kreider for The Week:
Unlike a lot of people, who had to try to make conversation with conservative friends and family over the holidays, I only know two confirmed Trump voters. One of them is from Texas and the other’s a Marine, so they both have their excuses. I recently sent a text to the former woman, letting her know I wasn’t going to meet her for dinner while she was in town because I considered her vote for Trump unconscionable. I didn’t feel I could politely ignore this vote, as though it had been for any ordinary callous avaricious Republican. But, having inflicted the negligible penalty of my absence on her, I didn’t feel just or vindicated; instead I just felt like a heel. She’d just gone through a bad breakup with an abusive boyfriend, and my normal instinct would’ve been to have dinner with her just to cheer her up. Repressing your normal instincts toward kindness seems like the kind of thing Hitler used to recommend.
My feeling has always been that if a religion or ideology has become more important to you than actual human beings, something may have gone seriously wrong with your values. A religious aunt of mine was literally on her deathbed before she told her gay daughter that that she had always loved her and accepted her and her partner. It was a moving reconciliation, but it also seemed to me it might’ve been nicer if she’d done it 20 years earlier. It depresses me to see people obliged by moral or political convictions to repress their basic decency — even their love for their children — and act crueler than they really are.
I don’t subscribe to the sophistry that being intolerant of intolerance is just as bad as intolerance itself — that, for instance, the humorless dogma of political correctness is as great an evil as good old-fashioned bigotry. But, as Nietzsche said, he who does battle with shitheads must beware that he does not thereby become a shithead. The most prejudiced people also tend to be the most provincial; they’ve never actually met any of the people they think they hate. (e.g.: an elderly friend of my mother’s once complained about gays in the church to her male hairdresser.)
Emphasis in the original.
Presuming every male hairdresser to be gay is a hallmark of worldly and tolerant thought. Anything else is just the kind of thing Hitler used to recommend.