IN THE EMAIL FROM STEPHANIE OSBORN: Alpha and Omega (Division One).
BECAUSE SHE WAS GUILTY AS SIN? Why Ethel Rosenberg Should Not Be Exonerated.
THERE IS NO INTELLIGENT LIFE…: ‘Star Trek ship’ spotted in the sky by UFO sceptic – who admits he’s baffled by the sighting.
BAH, SHUT UP AND REVIEW. GET UP OFF THE FLOOR. AMERICA IS TIRED OF YOUR EXTENDED LIBERAL TANTRUM: To Disappointed Hollywood Liberals, Everything is Trump’s Fault.
TELL STORIES, STORIES WILL MAKE YOU IMMORTAL: Newly translated, a sequel to ‘The Three Musketeers’ is as fresh as ever.
GIVE MILO CREDIT, HE REALLY UPSETS THE GLITTERATI: Who’s Trolling Who?
I DON’T THINK FEMINIST SCOLDS NEED A LIST: How To Alienate Family And Friends In 7 Easy Steps: A Fisking.
LAYERS AND LAYERS OF FACT-CHECKERS AND EDITORS:
Between the WaPo (twice!), CNN and Yahoo, the DNC-MSM really covered themselves with glory yesterday.
YEAH, SURE, BUT THE RUSSIAN MIND-RAYS PREVENTED HER RESPONDING AND STUFF: FBI warned Clinton campaign last spring of cyberattack. (And yes, I realize the article is old. Think about it.)
WELCOME TO THE CRAZY YEARS. MAY I HAVE MAYO IN MY CLAY SANDWICH? High School Ditches ‘Stallion’ Mascot, Says It’s ‘Sexist’.
January 5, 2017
IT’S COME TO THIS: Feminists knit “Pussy Hats” for the anti-Trump march on Washington.
They told me if Trump was elected, feminists would be told to stick to their knitting. And they were right!
ANNALS OF RACIAL HATE: 10 years later: Remembering Christian-Newsom. “Ten years ago, a small group kidnapped, beat, tortured, raped and killed Channon Christian and her boyfriend Christopher Newsom, eventually leaving the young couple’s bodies in an industrial section of North Knoxville. . . . Newsom was almost immediately raped, fatally shot in the head, and set afire along nearby railroad tracks between Ninth Avenue and Cherry Street. Christian was tortured and raped for several days before suffocating in a trash can with plastic bags over her head.”
There was no White House commentary, and no mass marches or riots. And not all that much press attention. Because these horrors did not Advance The Narrative.
WHITE MAN MINIMIZES RACIST VIOLENCE: Shaun King: “So no, I won’t be writing angry tweets about what these folk did in Chicago.”
AT AMAZON, save in Arts Crafts and Sewing.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.
A FALSE SENSE OF ABUNDANCE: “What is confusing is the words people are using all denote a fear of a shortage of good men. But if you look at the attitude that accompanies these missives, you will see that the overwhelming sentiment is one of abundance, of being in a position to nitpick, and select the very cream of the crop.”
Well. If you want one of the top 5% of men, you should probably be one of the top 5% of women. The odds that you in fact are one of those women are 1 in 20. If, as a woman, you have high expectations for men, ask yourself: What do I bring to the table that would attract such a man? And the reverse is true for men, too, of course, but I think men engage in less self-delusion here.
Related: Men aren’t irrelevant @glamourmag. Who drove the delivery trucks? Those are low-status men, unsuitable as marriage partners and hence beneath notice.
MAKE AMERICA MATE AGAIN: “Shortly before Christmas, the U.S. Census Bureau put some coal in the nation’s holiday stocking. It released data highlighting a worrisome trend: The population grew a subdued 0.7 percent, the lowest rate of growth since the Great Depression years of 1936 and 1937.” Birthrates always fall under socialism. They’ll rise again over the next few years, if things go as expected.
SEXISM AT DISNEY: Why does Disney hate boys so much? All their male characters are losers. “I have only boys. We watch the Disney Channel. But they have noticed that there is no commercial for them. There is no encouragement for boys to have big goals. Boys are completely left out of the equation. There isn’t even a picture of a boy in any of their videos or ads. In a world that is pushing gender inclusivity, this seems like a big oversight.”
Oh, it’s not an oversight.
Plus: “Even the new Star Wars movies offer strong women and very few strong men.”
QUALITATIVE IMPROVEMENT IN NORTH KOREAN MISSILES: This is from Reuters. The source is the U.S. State Department. For a change the State Dept. and moi agree on something. In missile testing failure is progress. Except when The New York Times reports on U.S. anti-ballistic missile tests. Then failure is failure is failure (I apologize to roses) and the failure is attributed to Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush…Hold the presses…and attributed to Donald Trump!
The United States said on Thursday North Korea had demonstrated a “qualitative” improvement in its nuclear and missile capabilities after an unprecedented level of tests last year, showing the needed to sustain pressure on Pyongyang to bring it back to disarmament negotiations.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Antony Blinken told a joint news conference after a meeting with his Japanese and South Korean counterparts that North Korea had conducted 24 missile tests in the past year, as well as two nuclear tests, and learned from each one.
“Even a so-called failure is progress because … they apply what they have learned to their technology and to the next test. And in our assessment, we have a qualitative improvement in their capabilities in the past year as a result of this unprecedented level of activity,” he said.
“With every passing day the threat does get more acute,” Blinken said, and referred to comments by North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong Un, on Sunday that his country was close to test-launching an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) of a kind that could someday hit the United States.
Wynken, Blynken and Nod…excuse me, his name is Blinken.
VERY MUCH RELATED: My latest Creators Syndicate column.
AT AMAZON, New Year, New You!
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Why I Married Myself: Self-marriage is a small but growing movement around the world.
TROLL LEVEL: GALACTIC OVERLORD. Milo Yiannopoulos named LGBTQ Nation’s 2016 ‘Person of the Year’ by readers. With about 70% of the vote. . . .
UPDATE: From the comments: “Jill Stein is calling for donations to her recount effort. The Russians obviously hacked it.”
NEVER GONNA DRINK YOU UP: 80’s pop singer Rick Astley coming out with his own craft beer.
“I enjoy a beer with friends and I’m hoping to sell my own brand soon,” Astley said.
“I’ve been working with the Mikkeller brewery in Copenhagen, which was founded ten years ago by a teacher who made his own beer at home. Mikkeller beer is quite experimental and they’ve been sending me various bottles to sample.”
The singer explained that the brewery has a variety with ales with some being “quite fruity – one was a pear beer they make for a restaurant.” His own beer is reportedly a fruity tasting pilsner.
If I’m reading this right, Astley isn’t coming up with his own brew, but sampling Mikkeller’s to find one he likes well enough to put his name on.
So no different from most celebrity-branded perfumes then.
JOHN HINDERAKER: Vicious Hate Crime In Chicago Whitewashed By Press.
A FITNESS DOWNSIDE TO STATIN DRUGS?
Taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs seemed to make exercise more difficult and less beneficial, a new study in mice suggests. Mice are not humans, obviously, but the study does raise interesting questions about whether and how statins might affect physical fitness in all of us.
In the experiment, statins were very effective in lowering cholesterol levels. But animals moved less if they were taking statins than if they were not taking the drugs. And when they did move, mice on statins developed fewer advantageous physical changes within their muscles than animals that were not given the drugs.
Statins are already one of the most widely prescribed drugs on earth, and their use is likely to grow still more in coming years. Last November, in an article published in JAMA, a group of scientists proposed that any adult past the age of 40 with even a single risk factor for cardiovascular disease start taking a statin in order to lessen his or her risk of eventually developing heart disease.
If implemented widely, that recommendation would vastly increase the number of people using the drugs.
But statins are not without risks. They have been found to increase the risk for Type 2 diabetes. They also can result in muscle aches and fatigue. In some studies of people taking statins, as many as 20 percent report significant muscle pain, with the incidence rising even higher among people who exercise while taking statins.
I wonder how much of that is offset by taking CoQ10?
AT AMAZON, Every Man’s Favorite Dress Shirt.
I’VE GOT A LITTLE LIST, THEY NEVER WOULD BE MISSED: 9 People We’re Hoping Will Just Shut Up and Go Away in 2017.
The group being released will be drawn from those held at Guantanamo – who include an accused senior al Qaeda bomb-maker, the terror group’s top financial manager, and two intended 9/11 hijackers, who have all been held in the Cuba-based U.S. detention facility for more than a decade.
According to a military source briefed on the process, 22 detainees are being prepared for transfer out of the camp, also known as Gitmo, before January 20.
Although the White House has not specified which inmates will be transferred out – or which foreign countries have agreed to accept them – it has indicated that this will be a priority for Obama in his final days in office.
Attention, Dana Milbank: This is “the farewell message Obama wishes he could give” — and he just might.
CIVILIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS:
Shot:
“It is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation. We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion*, just as effectively as by bombs.”
—Kenneth Clark, script for [1969 BBC TV series] Civilisation.
—“Almanac: Kenneth Clark on how civilizations commit suicide,” Terry Teachout, today.
Chaser:
Judge Edwin Torres of the New York State Supreme Court, Twelfth Judicial District described how…“A society that loses its sense of outrage is doomed to extinction.” There is no expectation that this will change, nor any efficacious public insistence that it do so. The crime level has been normalized.
Consider the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. In 1929 in Chicago during Prohibition, four gangsters killed seven gangsters on February 14. The nation was shocked. The event became legend. It merits not one but two entries in the World Book Encyclopedia. I leave it to others to judge, but it would appear that the society in the 1920s was simply not willing to put up with this degree of deviancy. In the end, the Constitution was amended, and Prohibition, which lay behind so much gangster violence, ended.
In recent years, again in the context of illegal traffic controlled substances, this form of murder has returned. But it has done so at a level that induces denial. James Q. Wilson comments that Los Angeles has the equivalent of a St. Valentine’s Day Massacre every weekend. Even the most ghastly re-enactments of such human slaughter produce only moderate responses.**
—Patrick Moynihan, “Defining Deviancy Down,” the American Scholar, Winter 1993.
Hangover: CNN’s Don Lemon: Anti-Trump Violence Against Disabled Man ‘Not Evil.’
—Tyler O’Neil, PJ Media.com, today.
* A look at England in the decades after Clark’s epochal series ran is in its own way proof of that statement as much as Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago.
** Chicago hit the 500+ murder milestone for 2016 in September. It would hit almost 800 before the year was out.
Related: Lemon is far from the only member of the DNC-MSM loathe to examine this story. The Washington Post’s Callum Borchers does a whole lotta throat-clearing (and anti-Trump, anti-GOP virtue signalling) in the lede before laying out the actual details:
Just think of them as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense.
I’D RATHER HAVE JAMES HUDNALL IN CHARGE THAN DISNEY, BUT OKAY: Toyota Concept-i looks weird, will be fun to drive, and comes with a Disneyfied AI.
LESS SHRINKAGE: This is your aging brain on the Mediterranean diet.
In a group of 562 Scots in their 70s, those whose consumption patterns more closely followed the Mediterranean diet experienced, on average, half the brain shrinkage that was normal for the group as a whole over a three-year period.
To glean how diet might influence brain aging, researchers tapped into a large group of Scottish people who were all born in 1936 and had many measures of health status and lifestyle tracked from an early age.
Around the time they reached age 70, 843 members of the “Lothian Birth Cohort” filled out a dietary frequency form that gave researchers a broad look at what foods they ate, which they avoided, and how often they consumed them. At about age 73 and again around age 76, their brains were scanned to gauge the volume of the overall organ and a few of its key components.
The researchers used the food-frequency surveys to divide the group into two — those who at least approximated a Mediterranean-style diet and those who came nowhere close. Even though many in the Med-diet group were far from perfect in their adherence, the average brain-volume loss differed significantly between the two groups.
There may be something to this. I used to be acquainted with a gentleman of Italian descent who credited his good health and longevity to a nightly tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil — and his only other habits were women and booze.
HOW CAN WE MISS HER IF SHE WON’T GO AWAY? Clinton Mulling NYC Mayoral Run.
Hank Sheinkopf, a New York Democratic consultant, told Newsmax, “She is wildly popular among New Yorkers — so much so that were she to file, [Mayor Bill] de Blasio would have to file his retirement papers on the same day.”
“She’s talking about it,” a former elected city official told Newsmax.
De Blasio dragged his feet endorsing Clinton during the election. It took him six months to endorse, and when he finally did on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” in October 2015, Clinton’s campaign emailed reporters saying it was “a sign of the campaign’s continued momentum.”
Haven’t New Yorkers suffered enough self-inflicted wounds?
UPDATE: Former Bush operative Matthew Dowd mulls challenging Cruz for Senate.
Cruz is showing some weakness, but it seems doubtful that Dowd is the man to connect with Texas voters.
BREAKING: Megyn Kelly Being Replaced by Tucker Carlson at Fox.
He’s earned it. And think of how happy this will make Stephen Kruiser.
THESE DAYS DOESN’T EVERYTHING? BBC’s ‘Real Housewives of ISIS’ Skit Causes Liberal Heads to Explode.
Video at the link.
SCOTT ADAMS ON CREATING ECONOMIC ASSETS OUT OF NOTHING.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.
NORTH KOREA BEGINS THE NEW YEAR: It’s the same old belligerence. However, now the dictatorship intends to test an ICBM. My latest Creators Syndicate column. (bumped)
A GERMAN PANZER OUT OF THE FIGHT: The latest in StrategyPage’s Battle of the Bulge retrospective. As commenters have noted, the series has included many photos that are poignant studies of exhausted, suffering and courageous people. This one, however, focuses on vehicles. I think it’s a good example of quality pictorial history. You get an accurate depiction of the battlefield (terrain and environmental conditions) and a strong sense of associated combat action (armored warfare). The photo also stirs memories of the time I spent in (West) Germany very cautiously crunching snow and ice in tanks and personnel carriers.
Note the webmaster thinks the German tank was abandoned.
RELATED: The nice comments by Instapundit readers have been gratifying. Like I said in mid-December, I didn’t know the webmaster was going to do this series until I discovered a couple of photos on StrategyPage. Yes, I have failed to put up several Bulge photos on the day they were posted. I’ve tried to be consistent but, you know, holidays. Eventually I’ll link to the ones I missed. Readers can always go to StrategyPage photo gallery and click through the entire series.
A University of Alberta engineering researcher has developed a new way to treat common surgical masks so they are capable of trapping and killing airborne viruses. . . .
Hyo-Jick Choi, a professor in the University of Alberta Department of Chemical and Materials Engineering, noticed that many people wear a simple surgical-style mask for protection during outbreaks of influenza or other potentially deadly viruses such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) or Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS).
Trouble is, the masks weren’t designed to prevent the spread of viruses.
“Surgical masks were originally designed to protect the wearer from infectious droplets in clinical settings, but it doesn’t help much to prevent the spread of respiratory diseases such as SARS or MERS or influenza,” says Choi.
Airborne pathogens like influenza are transmitted in aerosol droplets when we cough or sneeze. The masks may well trap the virus-laden droplets but the virus is still infectious on the mask. Merely handling the mask opens up new avenues for infection. Even respirators designed to protect individuals from viral aerosols have the same shortcoming—viruses trapped in respirators still pose risks for infection and transmission.
Masks capable of killing viruses would save lives, especially in an epidemic or pandemic situation.
His approach seems quite clever.
NO STATIC AT ALL: Surprise! Monster Burst of Radio Waves Arose in Tiny Galaxy.
For the first time, scientists have directly traced an incredibly intense, blindingly bright burst of radio waves — known as an FRB — back to its home galaxy. Surprisingly, this impressive cosmic radio flasher has somewhat humble origins, according to three new studies detailing the findings.
FRB stands for “fast radio burst.” These flickers of light were just discovered in 2007, and although they last for just a fraction of a second, they release more energy than our entire sun will radiate in 10,000 years. Eighteen FRBs have been detected, but scientists estimate that one of these bursts occurs somewhere in the sky about once every 10 seconds.
What cosmic event could release such an intense burst of radio waves? That’s still a mystery, but narrowing down the precise location of one of these radio blasts is a big step toward cracking the case.
I’m not saying that it’s aliens… but it’s aliens.
HEALTH: Most Kids Should Try Peanuts.
Most kids should get a small taste of peanut protein by the time they are 6 months old, and they should get regular doses if they don’t have an allergic reaction. Those at highest risk should be tested in a specialist’s office.
“We actually want all children to have peanut introduced,” Dr. Matthew Greenhawt, an allergy specialist at Children’s Hospital Of Colorado, told NBC News.
It’s a big change from previous guidelines, which recommended that people keep peanuts and peanut products away from their kids completely until they are 3 years old if there is a risk of allergies.
The new guidelines from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and other groups follow up on findings that giving peanut to kids early enough in life can train their immune systems so they don’t overreact and cause a dangerous allergic reaction.
As a child in the 1970s, I didn’t know or even know of anyone with a peanut allergy, and peanut butter was practically its own food group.
OSAMA BIN LADEN’S SON ON TERRORIST WATCH LIST: His name is Hamza. He is now a “Specially Designated Global Terrorist.”
The United States added Hamza bin Laden, son and heir of the late global jihadist leader Osama bin Laden, to its terrorist blacklist on Thursday.
Hamza, who is in his mid-twenties, has become active as an Al-Qaeda propagandist since his father’s death at the hands of US special forces in 2011.
According to letters found in the Navy SEAL raid on Osama’s hideout in Pakistan, Hamza wrote to the Saudi-born Al-Qaeda leader asking to be trained to follow him.
A CIA analyst who examined the letters told AFP that in July 2009, when Hamza wrote the letter to his father’s Abbottabad hideout, they had not seen each other for eight years.
Read the entire report.
THAT IS IMPRESSIVE: A Coal-Fired Power Plant in India Is Turning Carbon Dioxide Into Baking Soda. But most impressive of all, it’s running without subsidies. A “climate change” project that doesn’t involve taxpayer dollars? Is that even allowed?
IT WAS ACTUALLY TORPEDOED BY A U-BOAT. THE ICEBERG WAS A COVER STORY. New evidence suggests there was something very wrong with the Titanic before the iceberg. This whole “coal fire” thing is just another distraction. I have it on good authority that fire can’t melt steel.
Of course, the U-Boat had to torpedo the ship because it was taken over by BLUE HADES. They couldn’t be allowed to reach land.
THIS WILL END WELL: Democratic lawmakers considering challenge to Trump’s Electoral College victory.
Reps. Ed Perlmutter of Colorado, Bobby Scott of Virginia and Jamie Raskin of Maryland are among a group of Democrats eyeing challenges.
Members have the right to lodge those protests when Congress officially counts the electoral votes on Friday. But for the protests to have any effect on the proceedings, they’ll need to secure the backing of at least one senator, and it’s unclear whether any Senate Democrats are weighing a similar challenge.
Either way, there’s effectively no chance the protests will alter the actual election outcome, given Republican control of Congress. Instead, the effort could give Democrats a new venue to protest Trump’s victory. And if the Democrats can secure a senator’s support, the challenges could delay the certification of Trump’s victory for hours while the House and Senate separately debate the merits of each protested electoral college vote.
It’s a temper tantrum with TV coverage.
ITEXIT?: Steve Forbes says: “Support is growing for an exit, but that option isn’t a solution for Italy’s woes.” His post is short but pithy.
IF IT’S OK FOR CHINA TO COMPLAIN ABOUT TRUMP’S TWITTER DIPLOMACY: Surely Japan gets to gripe about China’s ship diplomacy.
More than 100 Chinese vessels trespassed into Japan’s territorial waters near the Senkaku islands in 2016, and in 2017 incursions have been taking place daily, Japanese newspaper Mainichi Shimbun reported.
A total of 121 vessels sailed near the disputed Senkaku Islands, also known as the Diaoyutai Islands in China. It is the second-largest annual number of Chinese ships entering disputed areas since Japan announced the nationalization of the Senkakus in September 2012.
OUT OF THE OFFICE: New French Law Gives Workers ‘Right to Disconnect’ from Email.
REPORT: Technology To Watch In 2017.
WHY ARE PUBLIC SCHOOLS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL PREDATION? A teacher and his husband were found dead in August. Police say they had sexually abused 8 boys.
POLITICS IS WHERE BAD IDEAS GO TO ACHIEVE ETERNAL LIFE: Basic income is the latest bad political idea that refuses to die.
FASTER, PLEASE: Obama’s Coming Obscurity.
Emmett Tyrrell:
The last time I drew attention to Obama’s lamentable condition some readers scoffed at me and pointed to Obamacare, which has practically wrecked the healthcare system for millions of Americans. Surely that disaster casts a long and dark shadow behind the 44th president, whom they admonished. I remained serene. And what about Obama’s dealings with Israel, our most loyal ally in the Middle East? Just the other day, one of his henchpersons ambushed Israel in the U.N. Security Council. Admittedly, there have been setbacks suffered by the United States while this incompetent was in office, but I believe they will be short-lived. President-elect Donald Trump is coming to town, and he is bringing with him an exceptional Cabinet. Already he is threatening to erase Obama’s foolishness, and he is doing it on Twitter. Wait until he is seated in the Oval Office with the power of the other two branches of government behind him. In the end it will be seen that I was right, as I was right in calling the election. Obama leaves no shadow, not even a legacy — Trump won on Nov. 8.
President Trump will arrive at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue carrying an attache case bulging with executive orders to rescind and agency regulations to nullify. I am sure he is aware that for years the 44th president and his servitors have been promulgating regulations large and small to give the bureaucracy evermore intrusive control over business and the citizenry. Trump will, as he promised, cut the waste, rein in government and drain the swamp.
Read the whole thing — although as I’ve become much more hopeful about the cutting and reining, I’ve become more suspect of the draining. But that particular two outta three would be amazing.
I REMEMBER WHEN A 1 TB HARD DRIVE WAS A BIG DEAL: Enormous 2 TB USB Drive Can Hold Everything You Need and More. Heck, I remember when a 1 GB hard drive was a big deal. Oh, who am I kidding? I remember when a 10MB hard drive was a big deal.
EVEN MORE RETAIL BLUES: Dismal holiday sales at Macy’s, Kohl’s spell gloom for sector.
Shares of other department store operators, including J.C. Penney Co Inc (JCP.N), also fell as the dismal showing came as a shock to investors, given heightened expectations of a bump in holiday spending this year.
“The strength around Thanksgiving and Christmas was insufficient to offset the sales weakness in the balance of the quarter,” Stifel, Nicolaus & Co analyst Richard Jaffe wrote.
“In addition, these peak selling periods were characterized by greater promotions which contributed to weaker than anticipated gross margin as well.”
The National Retail Federation forecast 2016 holiday sales to rise 3.6 percent to $656 billion. A jump in spending in the final stretch of December was seen likely to offset a slow start to the holiday shopping season.
The problem with holiday retail shopping is that the experience is almost uniformly awful.
HEH: China Tells Trump To Cut The Crap With ‘Twitter Diplomacy’
True story:
China has slammed US President-elect Donald Trump over his use of Twitter to conduct international diplomacy in a commentary published by the country’s official news agency Xinhua.
Trump has earned a reputation for making unpredictable statements on Twitter that often depart from long-standing US policies and he’s made several controversial comments about China.
“The obsession with ‘Twitter diplomacy’ is undesirable,” said the bylined commentary, which only appeared on the agency’s Chinese website. Xinhua is the biggest and most influential of China’s state-run media.
I’ve gotten used to it, and I suspect Beijing will, too.
IN THE (LONDON) TIMES HIGHER EDUCATION SUPPLEMENT, a very positive review of my colleague Maurice Stucke’s book (coauthored with Oxford’s Ariel Ezrachi), Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy.
Unravelling the competition (or, to our American friends, antitrust) dimensions of the data-driven economy demands someone of the fearless but measured tenacity of Holmes or, indeed, Vestager. It requires penetrating a wall of rhetoric and myth, and a deep familiarity with competition policy’s objectives and limitations.
This is the task that two of the world’s leading competition law scholars, Ariel Ezrachi and Maurice Stucke, have set themselves in Virtual Competition: The Promise and Perils of the Algorithm-Driven Economy. This highly readable and authoritative account sets out the ways that platforms have replaced the invisible hand with a digitised one – a hand that is human-engineered, subject to corporate control and manipulation, and prone to charges of unlawfulness, on three fronts in particular. First, collusion. Second, behavioural discrimination. And third, asymmetric “frenemy” dynamics, such as that between Uber and the super-platforms Google and Apple, which distort competition through extraction and capture.
Read the whole thing!
CNN’S DON LEMON: Anti-Trump Violence Against Disabled Man ‘Not Evil’
The Daily Caller’s Matt K. Lewis described the event as “evil.” “That’s what this is, it’s evil, it’s brutality, it’s man’s inhumanity to man.”
At that, Lemon disagreed. “I don’t think it’s evil,” he said, repeating the point for emphasis. “I think these are young people and they have bad home training.” Then, he explained, “I have no idea who’s raising these young people, because no one I know on earth, 17 years old or 70 years old, would ever think of treating another person like this.”
Those “young people” partially scalped a special-needs teen. If that isn’t evil, we need a new word.
THIS IS CNN: Don Lemon: Anti-Trump Violence Against Disabled Man ‘Not Evil.’
CNN founder Ted Turner presumably would concur; when faced with an even more enormous crime, he became a “see no evil” man himself.
In contrast, as Anthony Bialy tweets, “Those who believed ‘Hands up, don’t shoot’ right away are unsure if the Chicago assault was a hate crime,” speaking of CNN.
Just think of Lemon and the CNN anchors in the frame capture above as Democrat operatives with bylines, and it all makes sense
LIVE FROM IZMIR: Michael van der Gallien reports from the scene of today’s terror attack in Turkey’s third-largest city.
LAYERS OF EDITORS AND FACT CHECKERS: The Washington Post Uses Male Symbol to Announce Historic Women’s March.
Who over there doesn’t understand exactly what that symbol represents?
IN THE MAIL: Making Social Security Work for You: Advice, Strategies, and Timelines That Can Maximize Your Benefits.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.
GOOD LORD: An engine dropped out of a B-52 bomber during a training flight on Wednesday.
The youngest B-52 was built in 1962.
CHRIS PLANTE TO TUCKER CARLSON: Journalists Exposed By WikiLeaks To Cover Trump White House.
“I was talking to somebody about this earlier: It is almost like the Soviet Union, but worse. At least in the Soviet Union, there was a penalty for not collborating with the state. These guys do it quite voluntarily. They do it because they are on the team. Harwood is far from alone.
“Glenn Thrush of Politico was caught sending emails to the Clinton people for their prior approval. He called himself in his own email a “hack.” he confessed, lamenting perhaps, that he is a hack…
“He was with Politico, and I’ll have you know he’s no longer with Politico. He’s now with the New York Times. The Times saw this and said they liked the cut of his jib. So they hired him away from the Politico… It is considered to be a big promotion…
“The New York Times saw Glenn Thrush collaborating behind the scenes with the Clinton campaign and they hired him away from the Politico.”
Video at the link.
And I won’t ask you to think of Thrush as a Democratic operative with a byline, because that’s simply what he is.
PROCUREMENT: We CAN Build More Virginia-Class Attack Submarines Faster.
In a special exclusive interview with Scout Warrior, former Navy Director of Undersea Warfare said the Navy and its industrial partners to have the ability to build 2 Virginia-class submarines per year once production of the Ohio Replacement Program nuclear-armed submarines begins in the 2020s.
The current status-quo effort to build two Virginia-Class boat per year, however, will drop to one as construction of the Ohio Replacement Program, or ORP, begins in the early 2020s.
Rear Adm. Charles Richard, prior Director of Undersea Warfare, said in an interview with Scout Warrior last year that the Navy has completed a special analysis of strategic imperatives and industrial base capacity on the issue which has been submitted to Congress for review.
“The new news here is that we have industrial base capacity to go to two Virginias as we go to Ohio. In our report (Navy officials specified this as an internal Navy report), we have an analytic underpinning that this is now a choice that is available to the nation,” , said in the interview several months ago in 2016. “We are working very hard and how can we structure this so that it is something that we can go execute,” Richard said.
Richard was clear that Congressional budget approvals and additional developments will need to happen in order for this plan to formally go forward, but he did emphasize for the first time that the ability to accomplish this was there. The acquisition success of the Virgina-class submarine program, he added, was in large measure one of the key reasons why the ability to build more would be possible.
The Virginia-class boats are a real success story for the Navy. They’re coming in under budget, and ahead of schedule — and are effective as hell. But currently they aren’t being built fast enough to replace retiring Los Angeles-class boats, or to keep up with Russian and Chinese shipbuilding.
In their quest for a U.S. education, more Chinese families are sending their children to America—and at younger ages.
The number of Chinese students at elementary schools surged from 500 in 2011 to 2,450 in 2015, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Over the same period, the number of Chinese nationals attending secondary schools in the U.S. jumped from 17,914 to 46,028. Those numbers pale compared with the tens of thousands of Chinese students enrolled at U.S. universities, but are expected to soar in the next few years.“It’s an obvious trend,” said Emily Li, an educational consultant in Irvine, Calif. who specializes in the Chinese market. “When I came in 2004, there were mainly students like me attending graduate school. A few years later, there are college students. Then high-school students. And now there are junior high and elementary school students coming.”
Well, I’m not super-optimistic about China’s medium-term prospects. I hope they’ll manage a transition to a genuinely free country, and without an economic collapse or a civil war. But I don’t actually expect that they’ll manage it smoothly.
RETAIL BLUES: Sears Sells Craftsman Brand, Will Close 150 Stores.
Sears is flipping the Craftsman brand to Stanley Black & Decker Inc., and it will license back the ability to sell Craftsman-branded products royalty-free for 15 years after the deal’s closing. The acquisition gives Stanley the rights to develop, manufacture and sell Craftsman-branded products outside of Sears.
Today just 10% of Craftsman-branded products are sold outside of Sears. Stanley Black & Decker said the deal will help boost Craftsman sales in untapped channels.
“We intend to invest in the brand and rapidly increase sales through these new channels, including retail, industrial, mobile and online,” said Stanley Black & Decker Chief Executive James Loree. Stanley also recently signed a $1.95 billion deal to buy Newell Brands Inc.’s tools business.
A Sears spokesman confirmed the unlimited lifetime warranty on Craftsman hand tools made in the U.S.—“a hallmark of the brand for generations”—will be kept in place.
Craftsman remains what Sears was; I hope Stanley doesn’t mess with it.
HEH: “What we continue to be shocked by is how out of touch the entire Democratic party appears to be. Had we understood just how clueless they were, the election result might not have been so shocking.”
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.
IT’S BEEN A BAD YEAR FOR THE FBI: FBI never examined hacked DNC servers itself. “According to one intelligence official who spoke to the publication, no U.S. intelligence agency has performed its own forensics analysis on the hacked servers. Instead, the official said, the bureau and other agencies have relied on analysis done by the third-party security firm CrowdStrike, which investigated the breach for the DNC.”
SPYWARS: Donald Trump Plans Revamp of Top U.S. Spy Agency.
The move is prompted by his belief that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has become bloated and politicized, these people said.
The planning comes as Mr. Trump has leveled a series of social-media attacks in recent months and the past few days against U.S. intelligence agencies, dismissing and mocking their assessment that Russia stole emails from Democratic groups and individuals and then provided them to WikiLeaks for publication in an effort to help Mr. Trump win the White House.
One of the people familiar with Mr. Trump’s planning said advisers also are working on a plan to restructure the Central Intelligence Agency, cutting back on staffing at its Virginia headquarters and pushing more people out into field posts around the world. The CIA declined to comment.
“The view from the Trump team is the intelligence world has become completely politicized,” said the individual, who is close to the Trump transition. “They all need to be slimmed down. The focus will be on restructuring the agencies and how they interact.”
The pushback against Trump from the intelligence community began weeks ago — or is this Trump’s pushback against the IC?
ANN ALTHOUSE: Why Jeffrey Toobin is wrong about “How to Stop a Trump Supreme Court Nominee.” “I understand that Toobin has to write these essays for The New Yorker, and I assume he has readers who lap this stuff up, but I consider it deliberately obtuse if not perfectly silly.”
ED MORRISSEY: Seven Tests That Can Keep Republicans from Screwing Up. Everyone in Washington should read this piece.
WELL, A CONTRARY CONCLUSION WOULD MESS WITH THE NARRATIVE:
Four people were taken into custody Wednesday in Chicago after a Facebook Live video appeared to show a young man being tied up, assaulted, and threatened as assailants yelled obscenities about Donald Trump.
In the video posted online Tuesday, a young white man is seen restrained, his mouth covered with duct tape as he sits on the ground. A young black man holding a knife cuts his clothing as well as his scalp.
“Fuck Donald Trump, fuck white people,” the man says.
The four people taken into custody are expected to be charged, Chicago police said at a news conference. Police Superintendent Eddie Johnson said the treatment of the young man, who he described as having “mental health challenges,” was disturbing.
Johnson said police were investigating if the incident was a hate crime, but so far he said there was no indication it was motivated by politics or race.
If the races were reversed, there would be near-unanimous media efforts to blame Trump, and they wouldn’t be waiting until all the facts were in to do it.
THIS IS CNN: Study: CNN least trusted among likely voters.
The study, conducted by Rasmussen Reports, said that 75 percent of likely voters tend to watch at least some cable news per week to keep up with politics. Among that group, 42 percent watch Fox News, 35 percent watch CNN, and 19 percent watch MSNBC.
However, the poll said a larger portion of Fox News and MSNBC viewers trust those networks.
Just 33 percent of those who watch CNN said they trusted the information they’re getting, compared to 43 percent for MSNBC. At Fox News, 50 percent said they trust the source.
None of these numbers are super-positive, but then, why should they be?
HACKING: Five things to watch for in Russia hearings.
Here’s one:
What evidence does the IC have that Putin wanted to assist Trump?
The CIA reportedly believes that Russia was explicitly trying to help Trump — raising politically explosive questions about the degree to which it succeeded.
Publicly, the administration has been much more circumspect.
“President Obama and this administration is 100 percent certain in the role that Russia played in trying to sow discord and confusion and getting involved, through the cyber domain, in our electoral process,” State Department spokesman John Kirby told CNN Tuesday.
Reports of the CIA’s stronger assessment are based on anonymous leaks to a number of publications.
The leaks have given ammunition to critics who say the Obama administration is trying to undercut Trump before he takes office on Jan. 20.
“There are real questions about why there have been so many leaks over the last seven or eight weeks from the administration about the motivations or the intentions of Vladimir Putin or other foreign leaders,” Cotton said Tuesday.
While we’re at it, let Senate committee ask about the truth of the information released by Wikileaks, and get that on the record.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA: 4 arrested in beating broadcast on Facebook Live.
The disturbing 30-minute video shows a man tied up and his mouth covered, cowering in the corner of a room. His attackers laugh and shout “f*ck Donald Trump” and “f*ck white people” as they kick and punch him.
The video shows someone cutting into his scalp with a knife leaving a visibly bald patch.
Police said the victim is an 18-year-old with special needs. Officers found the disoriented young man wandering a Chicago street “in crisis” Tuesday afternoon.He was so traumatized that it took most of the night for him to calm down to the point that he was able to talk to police, Captain Steven Sesso said.
The suspects, two men and two women, all 18, are in custody awaiting formal charges.
The victim knew at least one of his accused attackers from school, Commander Kevin Duffin said. Though he may have voluntarily gotten into a van with the group, police are considering kidnapping charges.
Because the victim is white and the people in the video are black, police also are investigating whether hate crime charges are appropriate, Duffin said.
“Although they are adults, they’re 18. Kids make stupid decisions — I shouldn’t call them kids, they’re legally adults, but they’re young adults and they make stupid decisions,” Duffin said.
Where did these “kids” learn such hate?
UPDATE: Analysis from Walter Hudson.
AT AMAZON, Save up to 90% on Textbooks.
CONRAD BLACK: Obama’s Failed Presidency: Trump must try to cope with his predecessor’s disastrous legacy.
The president is correct that the largest issue in the election was the Obama legacy: the 125 percent increase in federal debt while the national work force shrank by 10 percent, the shameful Iran nuclear and sanctions giveaway, the shambles of the “red line” and other flip-flops and miscues all over foreign policy, the haughty disparagement of large sections of the electorate (in which he was almost outdone by Mrs. Clinton), the immigration policy of proudly admitting to the U.S. whomever might be seized by the ambition to enter, and the slavish adherence to the most alarmist versions of the faddish climate apocalypse, whatever the cost in American jobs and the current-account deficit, and without waiting for evidence adequate to justify radical measures.
The president has had a whim of iron, informed by bygone reflexively socialistic pieties, and while he has not been popular and the majority has thought throughout his administration that the fundamental direction of the country was mistaken, about half the people either like him as a public personality or are afraid, because he is not white, to admit that they don’t. He may be, as he often seems, a charming man, but when he has gone and the issue of race is not much involved in assessing his performance, he will be seen to have failed as president, as did, though for somewhat different reasons, and not without some successes, his predecessor, George W. Bush. That is their shared legacy: failure, for four terms. There has never been such a sequence in the country’s history. Which is why, for the first time in the country’s history, a person who has never held a public office or senior military command took over one of the main parties by winning the primaries and went on to win the election: an unprecedented solution to an unprecedentedly prolonged period of presidential failure.
Harsh, but fair.
As I’ve noted for years now, that the bureaucracy is a monoculture of Democratic operatives suggests that the laws intended to produce a nonpartisan professional civil service have failed, and need to be dramatically revised.
YOU KNOW, I AGREE WITH THIS STATEMENT: “Our nuclear weapons themselves must in no way be part of any IP connectivity or network enabled in any way. Full stop.”
I LIKE THE SOUND OF THAT: GOP senator: Let’s cut Obama regulations ‘24/7.
Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) says the Senate should get to work immediately on repealing President Obama’s regulations.
“I said, ‘let’s not waste our precious resource.’ What we have is a limitation of time,” Johnson told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on Wednesday, recounting his swearing-in the day before.
“So I said, ‘the United States Senate, at the appropriate time, for as long as we need to take advantage of the Congressional Review Act, we ought to go 24/7.’ ”
Johnson said he would volunteer to work overnight shifts on the Senate floor to chip away at Obama’s rules.
“It’s a big task. We have such an enormous web of over-regulation. Unwinding this will be difficult,” he said.
“[I’m] willing to pull a night shift. There are plenty of Americans out there working factory shifts. They’re working 24/7, working nights. I’ll preside at 3 o’clock, 4 o’clock if that’s what it’s going to take to overturn and repair the damage done by this over-regulation.”
President-elect Donald Trump vowed last month to gut the Obama administration’s regulations by chipping away at the number of rules on the books.
Chip, slash, blast, whatever.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: What Fuels Trump Derangement Syndrome? Gentry Liberals’ Status Anxiety.
ACADEMIA’S DECLINE (CONT’D): The University of Oregon, Nancy Shurtz, And The Racial Rules That Keep Us Apart.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Law Schools Do Not Adequately Prepare Students For Legal Practice.
If studies of practicing lawyers and recent law graduates matter, it is clear that law schools are failing, even worse than in preparation for bar admission, to adequately prepare their students for legal practice.
A 2012 study by the National Conference of Bar Examiners (NCBE) analyzed the job activities of newly-licensed lawyers to determine which knowledge domains and professional skills and abilities are most significant to their job. Acquisition of professional skills and abilities were deemed significantly more important to newly-licensed lawyers than legal knowledge — 25 skills and abilities were deemed more important than the highest rated knowledge domain. The percentages of lawyers using these 25 skills in their work (all rated between 89% to 100%) also were all greater than the percentage using the highest rated knowledge domain (86%). Yet these skills and abilities generally are not developed in traditional doctrinal law classes but in the experiential and first-year legal writing courses that, under the ABA standards, need only account for ten percent of a student’s legal education.
These important skills and abilities are also a small part of the bar exam, which purports to measure competence to begin the practice of law. Although the NCBE study was promoted as the basis for further development of the exam, since the study’s completion the portion of the exam devoted to testing skills remains the same (the 3-hour Multistate Performance Test). The NCBE’s only apparent response to the study’s dramatic finding that professional skills and abilities are what new lawyers need most for competent practice was to add civil procedure (the study’s highest rated knowledge domain) to the Multistate Bar Exam.
A report released this year by Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers reinforces the disconnect between legal education’s overwhelming focus on legal knowledge and the competencies new lawyers need.
Honestly, two years of law school (one?) and an apprenticeship in a law office is looking better all the time.
HAVE A NICE HELPING OF THOUGHT-CRIME: This anthology has me, John C. Wright, Nick Cole, Larry Correia and Brad Torgersen and a bunch of less-known but equally superversive people. Oh, yeah, and an introduction by Milo Yannopoulos. Just buying it makes you a thought criminal. Go for it. Forbidden Thoughts. 2017’s answer to Dangerous Visions.
AND THERE’S MY SHOCKED FACE AGAIN: Vicious Hate Crime In Chicago Whitewashed By Press.
SOCIAL ENGINEERS WILL BE THE DEATH OF US: Six-Week University Program Will ‘Help’ Men Not Act Like Men.
SELF DETERMINATION MEANS SELF RESPONSIBILITY: Are You Ready For Disaster?