IT WOULD BE EASIER TO BUY THIS IF MY LOCAL WEATHER HADN’T ALREADY TURNED COOL AND WET: Some things are more important than summer and beer.
Author Archive: Stephen Green
September 2, 2016
21ST CENTURY CRIME:
Florida man nabbed after using his wanted poster as Facebook profile image, police say. https://t.co/3ZsglyZfK4 pic.twitter.com/rVmDQgFint
— ABC News (@ABC) September 2, 2016
ROB TRACINSKI: Don’t Count Out the Internal Combustion Engine.
Notice that we have been talking about all of this simply in terms of fuel economy, granting the assumption that the most important issue is to reduce fuel use. The actual behavior of the market indicates that most people don’t really care that much about fuel economy. Reduced fuel consumption is the mania in the press because they think the electric car is necessary to save the world from global warming. Yet that depends on a whole chain of assumptions: that man-made global warming is actually happening, that the cars Americans drive will make a difference, that electric cars offer significant fossil fuel reductions rather than just a “long tailpipe,” and that we wouldn’t be better off doing something else to save the world.
While the media tends to have its own fixed views on those questions, the buying public clearly does not place as high a premium on fuel efficiency, certainly not at current gasoline prices. And thanks to another big, uncelebrated advance in energy technology—fracking—gas prices aren’t likely to go up very far in the foreseeable future.
The result is that advances in the design of the internal combustion engine have actually focused less on fuel-efficiency and more on performance. As my friend Jack Wakeland summed it up, “The world has just passed through a 25-year-long golden age of car design.”
Vroom, vroom.
WIPE THEM OUT; ALL OF THEM: Mosquitoes Are Deadly, So Why Not Kill Them All?
Powerful new gene-editing technologies could allow scientists to program mosquito populations to gradually shrink and die off. Some efforts have gained enough momentum that the possibility of mosquito-species eradication seems tantalizingly real.
“I think it is our moral duty to eliminate this mosquito,” entomologist Zach Adelman says about Aedes aegypti, a species carried afar over centuries by ships from sub-Saharan Africa. It derived from a forest dweller and adapted to thrive among humans, to whom the mosquito spreads at least four viruses that cause major diseases.
Prof. Adelman, a virologist and associate professor of entomology at Texas A&M University, is working to program Aedes aegypti mosquitoes to develop as males.
Eventually, females would run out of mates, crashing the species’ population in places it invaded and “cleaning up a global mess,” he says. Female mosquitoes are the only ones that bite people and transmit viruses.
This is not a new discussion for longtime Instapundit readers.
THE BUREAUCRATIC MENTALITY IS THE ONLY CONSTANT IN THE UNIVERSE: FEC demands proof of existence from God, Satan.
HE WHO CONTROLS THE PAST… Russia’s Supreme Court rules that the USSR did not invade Poland in 1939.
Russia’s Supreme Court has upheld the conviction of Perm blogger Vladimir Luzgin for reposting a text which states that both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939. The Supreme Court’s ruling came on September 1, 2016, the 77th anniversary of Hitler’s invasion of Poland, 17 days before the anniversary of the Soviet invasion from the east.
Henry Reznik, the well-known lawyer who was representing Luzgin, commented that the Supreme Court has discredited itself through this ruling and promised to appeal further. He added that an application to the European Court of Human Rights was simply demanded.
Vyacheslav Molotov and Joachim von Rippentrop could not be reached for comment, nor could more than 20,000 men and officers of the Polish Army last seen in or near the Katyn Forest.
DEATH PANEL DISCUSSION: Obamacare Costs Skyrocket; When Does It Stop?
Middle-class households are finding more of their Obamacare costs are coming out of their own pockets.
Self-covered individuals are hit hardest, but employers providing coverage have fought back against rising costs by reducing plan benefits.
Deductibles are up 67% since 2010. That’s seven times more than wages. And the cost of prescription drugs is out of sight.
Read the whole thing, including some scary-ass charts from the Obamacare-lovin’ Kaiser Foundation.
They’ll turn us all into beggars ’cause they’re easier to please.
CLAUDIA ROSETT: The Obama Narrative Goes to Midway.
Now comes President Obama, who enroute to a G-20 summit in China stopped Thursday on the Midway Atoll for some climate-change grandstanding, a golf-cart motorcade tour and some snorkeling.
According to the New York Times, Obama did make brief mention of the Americans who died defending Midway in World War II, praising their “courage and bravery” and calling Midway “hallowed ground.” But that part of the visit was apparently so perfunctory that the Associated Press reporter missed the message (or did he?), and instead described Obama’s mention of “hallowed ground” as a reference to the place Midway Atoll occupies “in Native Hawaiian tradition.”
Obama’s main purpose in traveling to Midway, according to a White House fact sheet, was to “mark the significance” of his own “historic conservation action” (has Obama done anything during his presidency that the White House has not described as “historic”?) in creating, off the coast of Hawaii, “the world’s largest marine protected area” — and to “highlight firsthand how the threat of climate change makes protecting our public lands and waters more important than ever.”
It’s always about him.
THERE’S A PLAN? Obama’s ISIS Plan Has Another Problem.
Others close to the ISIS fight say that when it comes to U.S. policy, information flow inside the administration has been tricky at best and nonexistent at worst, a fact that is complicated by the complex dynamics on the ground among allies who are sometimes at odds.
“This is not going to turn out well; it starts with the basics of using locals as our infantry,” says former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq James Jeffrey, who has been critical of the Obama administration for limiting U.S. military intervention against ISIS to rely so heavily on local fighters. “Letting them do it isn’t working out too well, is it, when they start fighting each other?”
Indeed, it is hard to understand why policy is being made seemingly on the fly when the conflict between Turkey and the Kurds was so easy to foresee.
Hoping against hope that groups who hate each other will band together to clean up your mess is not a plan.
Also note that first line about “information flow inside the administration.” Obama doesn’t know, doesn’t want to know, and has a staff devoted to making sure he doesn’t know.
Scottish Leader Calls for ‘New Conversation’ on Independence.
Scottish National Party leader Nicola Sturgeon says support for Scottish independence is growing and that the time is right for a “new conversation” on independence because of Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.
The Scottish First Minister said Friday her party would set up a website to gather public input on a possible independence referendum. A “listening exercise” with the goal of speaking to 2 million voters was also announced.
She spoke nearly two years after Scottish voters rejected independence in a referendum.
It seems that the SNP would like to continue the EU tradition of holding as many votes as it takes to achieve the desired result.
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: U.S. troops in Iraq increasingly active as Mosul battle nears.
FLASHBACK:
AUSTIN BAY ON “TRUMP’S MEXICAN TRADE SHOW”: More Presidential Than Hillary’s Ever Been.
That might seem like a low bar, but even those dreaded “Republican insiders” admit that Trump’s trip was a hit.
Hermine makes landfall in Florida as hurricane, starts to lose some steam.
Hermine hit Florida’s Gulf Coast as a Category 1 hurricane at around 1:30 a.m., but nearly four hours later it was downgraded to a tropical storm.
The storm is expected to move move through the mostly rural and lightly populated corner where the Florida peninsula meets the Panhandle and then drop back down to a tropical storm and push into Georgia, the Carolinas and up the East Coast with the potential for drenching rain and deadly flooding.
Hermine is nothing to laugh at, but as the story notes, it is also “the first hurricane to directly hit the Sunshine State in more than a decade.”
I’m old enough to remember when Al Gore’s panicked warning about increased hurricane activity was recent enough that people still bothered to debunk it.
QUESTION ASKED: What are Netanyahu and Putin plotting?
In an appearance before the UN Security Council on Aug. 29, Nikolay Mladenov, a Russian and the UN envoy for peace in the Middle East, sharply criticized Israel’s policies in the territories. His criticism included harsh statements regarding the onset of recently announced construction work on units in West Bank settlements and East Jerusalem and the new “carrot and stick” policies of Defense Minister Avigdor Liberman toward West Bank Palestinians. Mladenov emphasized that Israel’s settlement policy thwarts chances for peace, and he used extremely sharp language in criticizing the Israeli government. Jerusalem released an angry response instead of turning the other cheek.
There are a number of behind-the-scenes observers who believe this is all being staged, an act designed to mollify the Palestinians. Before the summit, Abbas will lay down conditions that Israel will have great difficulty in meeting, that is, a settlement construction freeze and the release of “pre-Oslo” Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails. Mladenov’s harsh statements were designed to show the Palestinians that Russia is pro-Palestinian, and therefore they should transfer their negotiating eggs from the American basket to the Russians’ basket.
Sources involved in negotiations told Al-Monitor that the entire sequence of events has been meticulously planned by Putin and Netanyahu, but with different objectives.
Read the whole thing.
SPOILER ALERT: It ends with President Obama looking feckless once again.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A LONGER WEEK: This Week in Clinton Corruption for September 1, 2016.
ALVARO VARGAS LLOSA: As despair spreads in Venezuela, Maduro doubles down.
The country’s GDP has had 10 consecutive quarters of negative growth. (The annualized rate is now minus 12 per cent.) Investment is down 26 per cent from 2015. Consumption, which had fallen precipitously, is down another 16 per cent this year.
The government, whose expenditure has dropped 50 per cent, cannot mitigate the disaster with oil money because, besides committing much of the reduced revenue to creditors or allies, it has decapitalized the industry. In 2015, oil revenue amounted to 915-billion bolivars ($119-billion); in the first five months of this year, the figure was a paltry 159-billion bolivars. Despite having eight times the reserves of the United States, Venezuela has had to import oil, which is cheaper than refining its own heavy crude.
Letting Venezuelans starve, unleashing a ferocious campaign of intimidation against critics and desperately seeking U.S. dollars are the only responses Mr. Maduro can come up with.
“Bad luck.”
September 1, 2016
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Bourbon Heritage Month kicks off Sept. 1.
I prefer each of my favorite liquors to have their own day of the week. Thursdays are for scotch.
NO HILLARY JOKES, PLEASE: 3.7-billion-year-old fossils may be the oldest signs of life on Earth.
It’s a stunning announcement in a scientific field that is always contentious. But if confirmed, this would push the established fossil record more than 200 million years deeper into the Earth’s early history, and provide support for the view that life appeared very soon after the Earth formed and may be commonplace throughout the universe.
A team of Australian geologists announced their discovery in a paper titled “Rapid emergence of life shown by discovery of 3,700-million-year-old microbial structures,” published Wednesday in Nature.
I hope this finding pans out.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Hollywood’s Summertime Bombs Got a Lot More Disastrous This Year.
Summer moviegoing, from the first weekend in May through Labor Day, is a vital stretch for Hollywood, when studios release many of their biggest pictures and generate about 40 percent of annual sales. This year’s results reveal flaws in the industry’s focus on costly remakes and sequels, casting doubt on a strategy they’ll be relying on for years.
“Overall it was pretty awful,” said Doug Creutz, an analyst at Cowen & Co. “We have been talking about the increasingly bad ecosystem that we see theatrically and I think it definitely played out this summer.”
Of 32 summer movies released through Aug. 19 by the six major studios, 17 lost a total of $915.6 million, according to The Numbers, which looks at film costs and projects revenue for movies all the way through their release on commercial TV. Last year the studios released a total of 15 bombs with losses of $546.3 million.
It’s fun having a decent superhero movie or two to take my young sons to see each summer, but there’s precious little else, even for a grownup who likes big dumb summer movies.
THIS WILL CONFIRM A FEW SUSPICIONS: Top Jeb Bush donor says he’s with Clinton.
YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG, BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOUR MARVEL COMIC BOOK COLLECTION: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Appears On New Marvel Comic Book Cover.
“Sadly, he won’t be shirtless,” Time magazine’s Abigail Abrams breathlessly informs us.