HOW TO REDUCE BURGLARIES: Family becomes firing squad as intruder is shot by almost every member of the household.
OBAMA’S ON VACATION, BUT THESE GUYS ARE STEPPING UP: “Cajun Navy” of Privately-Owned Boats Patrolling Flood-Stricken Louisiana to Save People and Animals.
Flashback: American Dunkirk. More on that here.
LONG-TERM TEST: 2016 Chevrolet Camaro SS Coupe. Oil consumption?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Every joke from Airplane!, ranked.
IS THERE ANYTHING IT CAN’T DO? How Alcohol Shaped Our Civilization, According to a Beer Archaeologist.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Rational improvement of DNA nanodevice function.
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IF ONLY THERE WERE SOME WAY TO KILL MOSQUITOES IN LARGE NUMBERS, INEXPENSIVELY: A Better (Smelly) Mosquito Trap, but With Caveats.
THEY SHOULD COME WITH A FREE “INTEL INSIDE” TATTOO: Putting a computer in your brain is no longer science fiction.
FORGIVE THEM, FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO: ‘Ben-Hur’ Remake May Become Summer’s Biggest Box Office Bomb:
Paramount and MGM’s big-budget biblical-era epic “Ben-Hur” is expected to land in theaters this weekend with a Roman armor-plated thud.
Produced for a reported $100 million (which doesn’t count the presumed tens of millions of dollars spent on marketing), multiple trackers are currently setting its opening weekend gross at a paltry $12 million on average.
The studio has more faith, saying its estimates are closer to $20 million — still not great.
Timur Bekmambetov‘s remake of the 1959 hit starring Charlton Heston is the latest in a perplexingly large number of decades-old stories getting dusted off, repackaged and unleashed by Hollywood.
The “perplexingly” is a nice touch, as Fox Butterfield dons his Wayfarers and goes Full Hollywood.
WHEN HISTORIANS WONDER WHAT HAPPENED TO AMERICA IN THE 21ST CENTURY, they should start here.
NEO-NEOCON: TRUMP’S DICHOTOMY—A BRIDGE TOO FAR?
I am assuming many many other people see something similar, and they don’t need the MSM to tell them about it. Trump himself gives them reason to feel that way and very little reason to feel otherwise, and he has no political history that would tell us otherwise, either.
Not to mention his many other character flaws: he defames people (and lies about them into the bargain), and he is impulsive, mercurial, and really does act at times as though he is somewhat unbalanced. He’s not crazy, but he has demonstrated many character traits—even during this campaign season itself—that frighten people and make them not trust him in terms of his basic character as a human being in addition to his character as a political candidate. You may think that shouldn’t matter, but it does matter, and it has always mattered.
Now, you can certainly counter with the idea that Hillary Clinton is a liar and extremely untrustworthy, too. And indeed, she is. And I’m not voting for her, but if I were a liberal in tune with her policy positions, I would actually consider her quite trustworthy in terms of her politics, on which she is consistently liberal/leftist. With Hillary, politically, what you see if what you get, and if you like what you see, you might vote for it despite her flaws. She also has a surface manner (as does Obama) that seems relatively steady and statesmanlike (albeit she is a bit older and more unsteady than before), certainly relevant to Trump, and people care about that sort of thing.
Read the whole thing.
TO BE FAIR, WHAT ELSE DID YOU EXPECT HIM TO SAY? Clinton Campaign Manager Mook: Trump’s Bannon Move Could Push More GOPs to Hillary.
THE REVOLUTION ALWAYS EATS ITS OWN: SJWs Target Ellen DeGeneres Over ‘Racist’ Usain Bolt Tweet.
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IS THE NRC ABOUT TO ENABLE AN AMERICAN CHERNOBYL BY TERRORISTS? Dozens of people died when the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant malfunctioned, melted down and spewed radioactivity over a broad swath of the Ukraine’s geography. A new Inspector General report includes a terrifying peek at what could happen here.
The problem is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s bureaucracy doesn’t know how many digital information systems it has that handle classified information and thus cannot ensure their security, according to the IG, reports the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.
“Failing to assess a system’s risks appropriately before using it could enable hackers to gain access to classified information, although the IG didn’t find any instances of that happening,” at least not yet, Watson reports. It is possible, of course, for hackers to leave no evidence of their presence.
“If a hard drive with classified information is put into a computer only authorized for unclassified information, there could be an information spill and the information may be vulnerable because the computer does not have the proper protections in place,” the IG said.
Could such an event enable hackers working for ISIS or other terrorist groups gaining sufficient access to a U.S. nuclear plant’s controls to cause it to malfunction? Chernobyl was caused by an unexplained power surge.
COMING TO AUDI: Traffic Light Information Systems.
THE BIGGEST PROBLEM FOR ASTEROID MINERS ISN’T TECHNICAL, it’s legal. This legal analysis, however, is just wrong. You can find a better analysis here — in the same magazine.
STREISAND EFFECT SOON TO WORK OVERTIME IN MINNESOTA: College Democrat Threatens Reporter to Demand Apology for Story.
ANJEM CHOUDARY VERDICT: YOUTUBE AND TWITTER REFUSED TO DELETE RADICAL PREACHER’S EXTREMIST POSTS, COURT HEARS.
To the best of my knowledge, Choudary expressed no negative concerns regarding the new Ghostbusters remake, which may explain why Twitter was so willing to give him a pass.
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TEACH WOMEN NOT TO RAPE! (CONT’D): “A female substitute teacher is facing rape charges after being accused of having sex with two male students, police said.”
BY THE NUMBERS: China (or Mexico) probably didn’t take your job.
At the high water mark in 1999, import competition was responsible for 2.3 percent of total annual job separations. In 2011, the last year of available data, only 0.1 percent of total separations were due to import competition. As a comparison, government regulation accounted for 1,500 separations (0.1 percent) and the end of seasonal work accounted for 393,000 (35.3 percent) in 2011.
Critics also worry that globalization incentivizes American companies to move overseas. This issue has been raised repeatedly during the election season. Donald Trump has repeatedly condemned U.S. firms like Ford and Carrier for opening production facilities in Mexico, while Hilary Clinton has criticized Trump for offshoring the production of his suits and ties. However, similar to import competition, offshoring does not have a large effect on overall job displacement.
Data in the above table was also taken from BLS’s Extended Mass Layoff Reports. Because BLS stopped collecting information on overseas job relocations in 2004, data is only available until 2003. However, the pattern is clear: overseas relocation is not a giant job killer. Even in the aftermath of NAFTA, which took effect in 1994, offshoring never displaced more than 20,000 workers annually. Furthermore, it only triggers around 1 percent of annual job separations.
Lots of data to soak up from Jacqueline Varas at the American Action Forum, although I’d have more confidence in the numbers if BLS hadn’t stopped collecting overseas relocations in 2004.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is Michelle Jenneke The Anna Kournikova of The Rio Olympics 2016?
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 4 Things Every Man Wants In A Woman. I dunno, “boobies” isn’t on this list.
JOHN SCHINDLER: NSA ‘Shadow Brokers’ Hack Shows SpyWar with Kremlin Is Turning Hot.
For more than three years NSA has been subjected to an unprecedented stream of leaks about myriad Top Secret intelligence programs. Although Snowden claimed his motivation was to protect the civil liberties of fellow Americans by exposing secrets, it’s impossible to miss that well over 95 percent of the programs he’s compromised are purely involved with foreign intelligence. The impact of all this on agency morale has been devastating and NSA is in a state of crisis thanks to Snowden.
This week things took a marked turn for the worse, however, with the exposure of highly sensitive NSA hacking tools on the Internet by a murky group calling itself “The Shadow Brokers” which announced it planned to sell programs purloined from the agency. Like clockwork, NSA’s public website crashed and stayed down for almost a full day. Although there’s no indication this was linked to The Shadow Brokers, the optics for NSA were terrible.
First, some explanation is needed of what’s been compromised. The crown jewel here is a 300-megabyte file containing “exploits”—that is, specialized sophisticated cyber tools designed to burrow through firewalls to steal data. What The Shadow Brokers has, which it claims it stole from an alleged NSA front organization termed the Equation Group, appears to be legitimate.
We don’t appear to have so much as a fox guarding the henhouse.
I’VE GOT AN AMICUS BRIEF WITH ERWIN CHEMERINSKY AND ILYA SOMIN IN THE SEVENTH CIRCUIT, in a case involving prosecutorial misconduct and the “John Doe” investigations of Scott Walker supporters. A press account is here. The brief — which, unsurprisingly, cites my Ham Sandwich Nation piece — can be found here.
OCEANIA HAS NEVER BEEN AT WAR WITH EAST ARKANSAS. Kaine in 2002: Bill Clinton should have resigned in disgrace.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Denounce anti-Semitic posts or we’ll threaten your funding, Jewish group tells U. of Tennessee. It’s nice to see a university stand up for free expression by students, though apparently it helps to be a Muslim student if you want to get that sort of protection. . . .
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Man Without A Country. “The national myth of the 1950s was that America could be different from the old country. But by the looks of it the convenience store operator doesn’t trust either the police, Al Sharpton or Eric Holder. Shop owners appeared later in the day armed to the teeth. Further photos of this shop owner depict him being reinforced by people who look like his cousin, brother or near relation similarly equipped.”
Fundamentally transformed.
DISPATCHES FROM OCEANIA: Ellen DeGeneres Chastised; Forced to Deny She’s Racist After Usain Bolt Meme Controversy.
In Orwellian America, anybody can be declared a thought criminal. But why is DeGeneres even accepting the ridiculous premise of the fellow leftists who are attacking her?
IN THE MAIL: Raising Human Beings: Creating a Collaborative Partnership with Your Child.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 1196.
FASTER, PLEASE: Game Changer? Trump Makes a Play for the Black Vote, Roger Simon writes.
AN OPEN LETTER TO AMERICA’S FIRST FEMINIST PRESIDENT:
Dear President Obama,
Last week you became the first commander-in-chief to declare yourself a feminist. Using Glamour as a podium, you called on all Americans — men in particular — to become feminists, and even boasted about having taught your daughters to expect the men they love to be feminists.
You’re free to call yourself anything you like. But you’re not free to lie to the American people.
Over the past eight years, Obama has also been declared the first black president (or second!, as Bill Clinton’s zanier supporters might argue), the first Jewish president, first Asian-American president, first Hispanic president, even the first “Our first female president,” by Sarah Palin’s bête noire, Kathleen Parker. Our semi-retired president really is the Peter Lemon Moodring of Washington, isn’t he?
MICHAEL WALSH: “Under the administration of President Barack Hussein Obama, guess which group seems to rate most-favored status? One guess.”
TRAIN-WRECK UPDATE: Aetna’s Retreat From Obamacare Is More Than It Seems.
Bigger insurers gain more pricing power against rapidly consolidating provider networks. They also gain more pricing power with customers. Industries dominated by a few major players are not, in general, known for their high quality and low costs. Allowing the mergers to go through could stave off the immediate problem with the Obamacare exchanges at the cost of raising insurance costs for everyone else — and giving Democrats big headaches in 2018 and 2020.
The calculation is further complicated by the fact that the exchanges and the mergers are regulated by different agencies. Health and Human Services ultimately oversees exchange operations, while the attorney general is the one trying to block the mergers. They both work for the same president, of course. But it would not be the first time that internecine battles between different parts of the same government further complicated an already complicated game.
Whatever the truth of the matter, and whatever the outcome, we can expect to see a lot of such quandaries going forward. The exchanges do not seem to be stabilizing; instead, they seem to be growing more unstable over time, particularly outside large urban areas where there are enough providers and slack capacity in the health-care system to provide some check on the problems that have plagued insurers elsewhere.
Insurers cannot simply go on eating those losses forever. They certainly won’t do so for free. Unless the exchanges get a rapid infusion of healthier customers who pay substantial premiums without using much care, insurers are going to keep pulling out of the areas where they are losing money. Or at the very least, they will demand benefits from the government to make it worth their while to stay.
Well, ObamaCare was always meant to fail and lead to single-payer government healthcare. Related: Colorado’s Single-Payer Health Care Would Die a Fiery Death.
QUESTION ASKED: Will Nick Denton have the last laugh?
A Fortune investigation into Gawker Media’s finances reveals that though Denton is down, he is not out. As the company’s websites assailed tech giants like Alphabet GOOGL -0.59% , Apple AAPL -0.26% , and Facebook FB -0.47% for byzantine schemes meant to reduce their tax burden, Gawker Media quietly played the same game. Our investigation reveals that Denton is as much a creature of the tech industry as he is a critic—and that Gawker’s slippery but legal tactics may, in the end, help Denton survive Thiel’s crusade with funds to spare.
Read the whole thing.
DOING MORE THAN THE VACATIONING OBAMA: Taylor Swift Writes Million-Dollar Check To Louisiana After Devastating Floods.
I REMEMBER WHEN DEMS TALKED SECESSION AFTER 2004: Will Texas Stick Around for a Hillary Clinton Presidency? Three out of five Trump voters in the Lone Star State would back secession if the Democrat wins, a new poll finds.
Nobody imagined that the EU would use military force to stop Brexit. Why should secession in America be different. Sure, there was that whole Civil War thing. But we live in a milder, more civilized age in which the self-determination of peoples is regarded as a right. And, anyway, we have to regard the Constitution as a living, evolving document, one that can change to suit the needs of the times. Right?
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IT’S COME TO THIS: Even Jill Stein is spending more on advertising than Donald Trump.
TWO MORE DETAILS on this morning’s Trump campaign reshuffle:
“I want to win,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal. “That’s why I’m bringing on fantastic people who know how to win and love to win.”
“Buckle up,” wrote a Trump strategist in a text message Wednesday to The Washington Post.
If this is the start of some professional, traditional campaigning, then that would be a welcome change.
“YOU’RE NOT DONE WITH AL SHARPTON YET,” insists self-admitted JournoList member Ben Smith of BuzzFeed.
Actually, I’ve been done with Sharpton for nearly 30 years now. But apparently, Comcast and NBC, for whom Sharpton remains a highly paid spokesman isn’t done with him yet, but I guess you can’t fault them for continuing to pay his protection money and leave the two intertwined giant corporations alone.
Related: Heather Mac Donald on Why Milwaukee Burns.
CYBER SECURITY: U.S. government offers states help to fight voter fraud.
The government is offering to help states protect the Nov. 8 U.S. election from hacking or other tampering, in the face of allegations by Republican Party presidential candidate Donald Trump that the system is open to fraud.
Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson told state officials in a phone call on Monday that federal cyber security experts could scan for vulnerabilities in voting systems and provide other resources to help protect against infiltration, his office said in a statement.
Paper ballots, anyone?
BECAUSE THEIR GOAL IS TO ENSURE HIGH BLACK TURNOUT FOR THE DEMOCRATS: Why must the media mislead on police shootings?
Why can’t the media just accurately report what is going on when a police shooting occurs?
The latest example comes out of Milwaukee, Wisc., in which a black police officer shot and killed Sylville Smith, who refused to put down his gun.
This was not another case of a white officer shooting an unarmed black man. It was a black officer, and more importantly the man he shot was armed. Riots and violence broke out in Smith’s neighborhood anyway.
Beyond trying to downplay the race of the officer and the firearm status of the slain man, CNN went a step further by selectively editing what Smith’s sister Sherelle said to reporters.
“Burnin’ down s*** ain’t going to help nothin! Y’all burnin’ down s*** we need in our community,” Sherelle told reporters. “Take that s*** to the suburbs. Burn that s*** down! We need our s***! We need our weaves. I don’t wear it. But we need it.”
CNN stopped rolling the clip after Sherelle’s comments about her own community. They framed her comments as “calling for peace.” Not exactly.
Think of them as Democratic Party operatives with bylines and you won’t go far wrong.
ASHE SCHOW: Pointless Olympics outrage over female athletes and headlines.
Those looking for sexism everywhere have found it again, at least according to them.
A headline in the Greeley (Colo.) Tribune for an Associated Press story read in large bold print: “Phelps ties for silver in 100 fly.” It then read in smaller print right underneath: “Ledecky sets world record in women’s 800 freestyle.”
Cue the outrage.
I mean, how dare a newspaper try to sell newspapers by leading with the more recognizable name? It was a surprise that most-decorated Olympic athlete of all time, Michael Phelps, only took the silver in the 100m butterfly event. And if you’re wondering why a silver from Phelps leads a gold from swimmer Katie Ledecky, just read that last sentence. Phelps is the most-decorated Olympic athlete of all time. He is a household name.
That’s not saying no one has heard of Ledecky. After her performance in these Olympics, she will no doubt get sponsorship deals and become one of the most well-known athletes in the world. But this is her second Olympics. It is Phelps’ fifth. Ledecky will become a household name after only her second Olympics showing. Phelps didn’t become well known until after his third Olympics in 2008, when he broke the record for most gold medals won in a single Olympics.
The point is to keep women agitated and ready to turn out for Hillary. Likewise, similar treatment for other Democratic constituency groups.
YOU NEVER WANT A SERIOUS CRISIS TO GO TO WASTE: Leaked Soros Memo: Refugee Crisis ‘New Normal,’ Gives ‘New Opportunities’ For Global Influence.
(Classical reference in headline.)
AMERICA FIRST: Manafort tied to undisclosed foreign lobbying.
Donald Trump’s campaign chairman helped a pro-Russian governing party in Ukraine secretly route at least $2.2 million in payments to two prominent Washington lobbying firms in 2012, and did so in a way that effectively obscured the foreign political party’s efforts to influence U.S. policy.
The revelation, provided to The Associated Press by people directly knowledgeable about the effort, comes at a time when Trump has faced criticism for his friendly overtures to Russian President Vladimir Putin. It also casts new light on the business practices of campaign chairman Paul Manafort.
Under federal law, U.S. lobbyists must declare publicly if they represent foreign leaders or their political parties and provide detailed reports about their actions to the Justice Department. A violation is a felony and can result in up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.
This may have something to do with Manafort’s de facto demotion earlier today.
WE’RE GOING TO TAKE THINGS AWAY FROM YOU ON BEHALF OF THE COMMON GOOD: Clinton comes after the rich: ‘We’re going where the money is.’
She’s been channeling the spirit of Willie Sutton throughout her entire career (hence our headline), but it’s nice to see her finally make it official. Of course, once your business reaches the too big to fail level and you’re prepared to partake in what Iowahawk calls “bribery dinner theater” with the Clintons, Hillary’s statement is merely so much corporatist kabuki.
RESET: Russian Military Forces Staging Near Ukraine.
As many as 40,000 Russian troops, including tanks, armored vehicles, and air force units, are now arrayed along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia.
Additionally, large numbers of Russian military forces will conduct exercises in the coming days that Pentagon officials say could be used as cover for an attack on Ukraine.
“Russian units will likely practice reinforcing the [Crimean] peninsula through such activities as amphibious landings and air defense exercises, and this may involve the change out of equipment and long convoys of military vehicles,” one defense official said.
The military exercises are an ominous sign. Similar large-scale Russian exercises were conducted near Ukraine a month before Moscow carried out the covert military operation to take over the strategic Black Sea peninsula in March 2014.
Moving that many units around is expensive, even without a fight. Clearly Putin expects to get something out of the effort.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Arizona State Law School Opens New $129 Million Building Today In Downtown Phoenix.
Well, to be fair, their old building — where I spent a fair amount of time some years ago — was a 1970s relic that looked like a UFO. On the other hand, while the downtown location may be better for getting students part-time employment, the ASU campus is really nice.
OUTLAW AIR CONDITIONERS, AND ONLY OUTLAWS WILL HAVE THEM! Why does the New York Times Consider Air Conditioning Vital for Prisoners, Bad for Planet?
MEGAN MCARDLE: Aetna’s Retreat From Obamacare Is More Than It Seems.
The question is: What matters to regulators more? Blocking the mergers, or keeping the exchanges healthy? That’s not an easy question. As of this writing, it looks as if Aetna’s withdrawal will leave at least one county — Pinal, in Arizona — with no insurers at all selling exchange policies. And it seems unlikely that Pinal County will be the last to lose all its insurers unless something pretty drastic changes in these markets.
The state regulator has made hopeful noises about persuading someone to pick up the business. (Remember the regulatory goodwill we mentioned above?) But regulators in relatively small states don’t necessarily have that much clout with big insurers who can afford to keep taking these losses for years. California can plausibly say “Play ball with us or get ready to lose our nearly 40 million citizens as potential customers,” but a big corporation probably does not tremble in fear of the mighty market-shaking powers of the Vermont Department of Financial Regulation. And more locally concentrated firms cannot simply keep eating large losses for an indefinite period. It is obviously a problem — for politicians, as well as customers — if a growing number of people have a theoretical right to buy health insurance but cannot actually buy any.
People no longer have a “right” to buy health insurance; we have a legal obligation to do so. That’s going to be an increasingly difficult obligation to fulfill as insurers abandon one ObamaCare market after another.
SOME PEOPLE CERTAINLY SEEM HAPPY ABOUT IT: Michael Barone: Is the end of white Christian America a good thing? “Sides’s questions and Jones’s answers are pretty much neutral in tone, but many readers will detect a tone of triumphalism in the book’s title and in the thrust of its argument. You white Christians have been the majority for a long time, but it’s not going to be your country any more — or so they seem to be saying.”
TRANSPARENCY: Congress receives FBI material on Hillary Clinton emails.
In a statement, the FBI said the materials were provided to Congress consistent with the agency’s “commitment to transparency” in the Clinton case. The material contains classified information and was provided “with the expectation it will not be disseminated or disclosed” without the FBI’s agreement, the agency said Tuesday.
Furious the FBI didn’t press charges against their political rival, House Republicans pressed the agency to release notes from its agents’ July interview with Clinton. They claim the FBI notes, which are typically kept confidential after an investigation is closed, may show Clinton provided inconsistent answers to questions about her handling of emails containing classified information during testimony last year before the House Benghazi panel.
Republicans are also demanding that the Justice Department open a new investigation into whether Clinton lied to Congress.
That doesn’t really require an investigation, does it?
FILE IT AWAY: “Remember in the olden days when the campaigns didn’t really start until after Labor Day and pundits told us not to pay attention to anything that happened before then?,” Betsy Newmark asks. “That changed when opponents succeeded in defining candidates with advertising in the summer. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth did that with Kerry and Obama did that with Romney in 2012. So now, in August, we can basically see how the campaign is going to be going forward. Barring some black swan sort of event, we’re looking at a Trump loss with the possibility of losing some of the states that McCain and Romney won. It only makes sense for the GOP to focus on keeping the House and Senate and the state legislatures and governorships.”
PRIORITIES: Turkey to Free 38,000 Prisoners as Coup Arrests Crowd Jails.
A government decree published in the Official Gazette on Wednesday allows the conditional release of prisoners with less than two years to parole. Justice Minister Bekir Bozdag said about 38,000 people will be set free “initially.”
As of last week, Turkey had formally arrested more than 17,000 people and was holding about 6,000 others suspected of links to the botched takeover.
It wasn’t a failed coup; it’s a successful purge.
Prisoners not being released include “those convicted of terrorist acts, sexual offenses and murder.”
BREAKING NEWS FROM 1933: Berlin goes vegan.
I’m sure it all work out fine this time around.
CHANGE: Trump shakes up campaign, demotes top adviser.
Stephen Bannon, a former banker who runs the influential conservative outlet Breitbart News and is known for his fiercely anti-establishment politics, has been named the Trump campaign’s chief executive. Kellyanne Conway, a veteran Republican pollster who has been close to Trump for years, will assume the role of campaign manager.
Two Trump campaign aides confirmed the staff’s reshuffle early Wednesday, requesting anonymity to discuss personnel changes without permission.
The campaign also announced that “the first major TV ad buy of the general election [is] slated to start later this week.”
ESCAPE: Senior North Korean Diplomat Defects In London.
South Korea’s JoongAng Ilbo newspaper reported on Tuesday that a high-profile diplomat in the UK defected with his wife and son to a “third country”. The BBC named the defector as veteran diplomat Thae Yong Ho, a counselor at the North Korean embassy and deputy to the ambassador.
Quoting an unnamed source, JoongAng Ilbo said the diplomat embarked on a defection journey “following a scrupulous plan” and was in the process of “landing in a third country as an asylum seeker.”
It was not clear from the newspaper report whether the third country was the UK. The term is usually used in South Korean media to refer to a country which is neither North nor South Korea.
An official at the North Korean embassy in London would not confirm the defection, describing reports of the event as “quite sudden”.
Predicting the end of the Kim regime has been a fool’s game since 1950, but this has been a bad year for Kim Jong-un.
EXCUSE ME, ALL I WANT TO KNOW IS “IS THERE A TOWN WHO IS KNOWN FOR THESE THINGS?”: Tiny Insjön in central Sweden isn’t known for pig mask-wearing couples shooting lasers at Pokémon hunters before having sex by a waterwheel. But that could be about to change.
UNTHINKING IS CRAZY UNCLE JOE’S SPECIALTY! Biden Does The UNTHINKABLE With Nuke Codes At Hillary Rally.
OF COURSE HE DID: ISIS fighter received welfare in Maine while being radicalized.
IT WAS ALWAYS A CON GAME: Why the Democrats Don’t Mind Obamacare’s Collapse.
THESE DAYS CHARACTER IS CONFLATED WITH PARTY AFFILIATION: Why Character No Longer Counts in Presidential Biographies for Children.
GETTING PAID IS THE BEST ACCOLADE: I dreamed of being Hemingway, but ended up a pulp fiction writer.
USING TRUMP TO TAR US: There’s Nothing Wrong with Carefully Screening Immigrants.
WE COULD JUST BAN SELFIES. ALSO, GET OFF MY LAWN: Those ballot selfies could get you in major legal trouble.
NOTHING SURPRISING HERE: Writing instruction in our schools is terrible. We need to fix it.
WHY THE SHUTTLE WAS A MISTAKE: A Few Observations on Reusable Space Hardware,
or Why the Space Shuttle was an engineering masterpiece and a logistical nightmare.
August 16, 2016
ANN ALTHOUSE FORCES CORRECTION FROM THE NEW YORKER.
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I CAN SEE GOG AND MAGOG FROM MY HOUSE! Russia uses Iran as base to bomb Syrian militants for first time.
MORE SUPPORT FOR MICKEY KAUS’S TERRORISM-WELFARE HYPOTHESIS, BUT IS ANYBODY PAYING ATTENTION? ISIS fighter received welfare in Maine while being radicalized.
Make ’em work for a living and they’ll have less time for that crap. I mean, Kaus was writing about this in 2001, but has the lesson sunk in? No. Wrote Mickey:
In fact, there’s a good argument that “welfare benefits + ethnic antagonism” is the universal recipe for an underclass with an angry, oppositional culture. The social logic is simple: Ethnic differences make it easy for those outside of, for example, French Arab neighborhoods to discriminate against those inside, and easy for those inside to resent the mainstream culture around them. Meanwhile, relatively generous welfare benefits enable those in the ethnic ghetto to stay there, stay unemployed, and seethe. Without government subsidies, they would have to overcome the prejudice against them and integrate into the mainstream working culture. Work, in this sense, is anti-terrorist medicine. (And if you work all day, there’s less time to dream up ways and reasons to kill infidels.)
Still true, still an important consideration for policy. Still ignored.
HMM: China launches world’s first quantum communications satellite. “China has just launched the world’s first quantum communications satellite. The 600 kg spacecraft blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Center in the Gobi Desert at 0140 local time. The satellite is both an extreme test of the weird properties of quantum mechanics, and a technology testbed for what could be the start of a global, unhackable communications network.”
COMING SOON, PROBABLY: Trump caused Sabra and Shatila.
THIS IS KNOWN AS LEVEL-FIVE AUTONOMOUS DRIVING: Ford Promises Cars With No Steering Wheel or Pedals by 2021. I prefer level four, where the car drives itself, but can still be driven manually.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Legions of nanorobots target cancerous tumours with precision. Faster, please.
BARACK OBAMA DOESN’T CARE ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE. Shot: First Family spending afternoon with friends at private beach. 81° & partly cloudy. 3rd beach outing of their vacation.
Chaser: Worse than Katrina, official says; tens of thousands rescued in Louisiana floods.
CHANGE: Sweden’s first Muslim minister quits over drink-driving scandal.
Funny, but this story didn’t mention she was Muslim, but it did tell us this:
She is not the only politician to have to drop out since Sweden’s political left returned to power two years ago.
Deputy premier and environment minister Asa Romson from the Green party resigned in May after a series of gaffes, the last being to describe the 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States as “the accidents of September 11”.
Housing minister Mehmet Kaplan, of Turkish origin, had to step down in April after comparing Israelis to the Nazis, and Mona Sahlin, the national coordinator for protecting democracy against violent extremism, was forced to resign in May after media revealed that she had made false income declarations for her bodyguard to help him obtain bank loans.
Hmm.
STATE DEPARTMENT EXPLORED A NIGERIAN LAND DEAL CONNECTED TO A CLINTON FOUNDATION DONOR: It’s complicated, so read the whole thing. But once again the smoke of corruption. Will the FBI look for the fire?
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): As somebody said on Twitter, the difference between Hillary and normal people is that when she gets an email from a rich Nigerian proposing a deal, it’s actually from a rich Nigerian, proposing a deal.
AT AMAZON, savings in Industrial and Scientific. I find this category kind of fun to browse.
WHEN OBAMA-ERA LEFTWING MEMES COLLIDE:
Shot: Juries have no place at rape trials – victims deserve unprejudiced justice.
—Headline, the Guardian, Friday.
Double Shot: Well ain’t SHE Ms. Suzy Sunshine? Angry feminist Julie Bindel: All men are rapists and should be shot.
—Headline, Twitchy, Friday.
Chaser: Nate Parker’s College Rape Trial Raises Questions for ‘The Birth of a Nation’ Release.
—Headline, Variety, yesterday.
Hangover: Nate Parker’s Rape Accuser Committed Suicide in 2012, Her Brother Speaks Out (Exclusive).
—Headline, Variety, today.
As Sonny Bunch of the Washington Free Beacon warned yesterday on Twitter, “The fights over BIRTH OF A NATION are going to be a.) amazing and b.) wholly removed from the film as a work of art. They’re gonna be epic.”
ANSWERING THE STUPID QUESTIONS: Would racism exist if there had been no US slavery?
The answer, of course, is yes. When Gunnar Myrdal wrote about racism in his An American Dilemma, it wasn’t the racism that made Jim Crow an American dilemma — it was the racism set against a founding document that declared that all men are created equal.
Racism is everywhere, and anyone who has traveled abroad and paid attention knows that it’s worse most other places than it is here in the United States. (And that includes Africa itself, of course, where ethnic differences that untutored Americans can’t even see — it’s like some ancient Star Trek episode — are of burning importance).
But the reason why so many commentators have to pretend that America is uniquely bad — and even teach college students that slavery was a uniquely American institution, invented by the Founders — is that otherwise they’d lose out on a lucrative hustle.
IT’S ALWAYS FAIR WHEN THE TARGET IS A REPUBLICAN RUNNING FOR PRESIDENT: The Psychiatric Question: Is It Fair to Analyze Donald Trump From Afar?
In the midst of a deeply divisive presidential campaign, more than 1,000 psychiatrists declared the Republican candidate unfit for the office, citing severe personality defects, including paranoia, a grandiose manner and a Godlike self-image. One doctor called him “a dangerous lunatic.”
The year was 1964, and after losing in a landslide, the candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, sued the publisher of Fact magazine, which had published the survey, winning $75,000 in damages.
But doctors attacked the survey, too, for its unsupported clinical language and obvious partisanship. In 1973, the American Psychiatric Association adopted what became known as the Goldwater Rule, declaring it unethical for any psychiatrist to diagnose a public figure’s condition “unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement.”
Enter Donald J. Trump.
The 2016 Republican nominee’s incendiary, stream-of-consciousness pronouncements have strained that agreement to the breaking point, exposing divisions in the field over whether such restraint is appropriate today.
Restraint is never appropriate, if it might lead to the wrong party winning. Duh.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: Sex pigs halt traffic after laser attack on Pokémon teens.
CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR. “How Jon Stewart’s Culture of Ridicule Left America Unprepared for Donald Trump,” as explained by Jesse Bernstein of the left-leaning Jewish-themed Tablet magazine:
The process went something like this: Someone said something on Fox News that mainstream liberalism didn’t like; Stewart and/or Colbert aired a sustained critique of the idea and the thinking behind it; liberal internet publications hailed it as the greatest rhetorical victory since Darrow argued for Scopes; liberals’ Facebook feeds full of liberal friends filled up with clips of the takedown. No one learned anything, no one engaged with an idea, and nothing outside of a very specific set of ideas was given any real credence. As Emmet Rensin so perfectly put it:
Finding comfort in the notion that their former allies were disdainful, hapless rubes, smug liberals created a culture animated by that contempt. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy. … Over 20 years, an industry arose to cater to the smug style … and culminated for a time in The Daily Show, a program that more than any other thing advanced the idea that liberal orthodoxy was a kind of educated savvy and that is opponents were, before anything else, stupid.
As Rensin deftly discerns, this sort of intellectual elitism is probably part of the reason that the Democratic Party went from getting 66 percent of the manual laborer vote in 1948 to outpolling the GOP by just 2 points in 2012. It’s the inevitable consequence of eight years of reducing George W. Bush and all of his supporters to dumbass hicks, and choosing to denigrate the poor and uneducated (if only they read The Atlantic!), rather than doing real outreach to them.
But having won WWII, the aging New Dealers of 1948 could at least look to a world-changing accomplishment with pride. (The New Deal itself, on the other hand…) In contrast, as Richard Fernandez writes, the only thing that today’s left can offer middle America is smug itself:
But to anyone outside the echo chamber the joke was on Stewart and his cronies. The average person could see the invidious contrast; how easily the email accounts of 100 Democratic bigwigs could be hacked, with what contemptuous ease someone could make off with the DNC’s emails, steal all the OPM records. They watched as time after time suspects “well known to the police” executed successful terror attacks in Western cities despite the assurances of the laughing men.
They saw ISIS run off with billions of dollars of foreign military aid; saw the “smartest people” in history rolled. They were regaled by the spectacle of Putin booting Obama out of the Middle East with a midget air force and a rustbucket navy. They witnessed a bunch of armed thugs torch a US consulate in Benghazi without the dying ambassador even able to make that 3 am call to Hillary Clinton. They watched Turkey wobble and Europe overrun by migrant tides.
It hit them: it was these ineffably superior people who were the jokers, the clowns whose only tangible skill was to make fun of everybody so nobody would notice that’s all they were good for. In fact the only person they could stop with any probability of success and only if they ganged up on him was Donald Trump. That was it. They can’t see the audience in darkness beyond the footlights heading for the exits.
And with Stewart and Colbert having departed their spawning grounds, “Donald Trump Is Jon Stewart’s True Successor,” Robert Tracinski adds at the Federalist:
The real giveaway is Trump’s employment of a classic Jon Stewart trope: Clown Nose On, Clown Nose Off.
This approach dates back to Stewart’s famous, or infamous, appearance on “Crossfire” in 2004, when “The Daily Show” was still fairly new and “Crossfire” was very, very old. In a fit of insufferable self-righteousness, Stewart denounced the hosts for “hurting America,” I guess because of the way they promoted bitter partisan bickering as a form of entertainment. Because Stewart is all about Democrats being nice to Republicans, don’t you know.
Yes, there was something to this. I did my first TV appearances about this time, and the big revelation to me was that it’s no accident that people always shout each other down on today’s cable news shows. Producers deliberately induce this style because they think it makes the show more exciting than if everybody just waited his turn to engage in some kind of Dullsville substantive discussion.
But in retrospect, I think we can tell which show “hurt America” more. One was just another fairly forgettable cable TV shoutfest. The other had a transformative effect, convincing a whole generation of millennials to get their news and political opinions from one-sided fake news shows run by blatantly partisan comedians. There are now about a dozen of these, all imitating Stewart. If the sin of “Crossfire” was its attempt to turn political debate into entertainment, it had nothing on “The Daily Show,” which replaced political debate with entertainment.
But for a rather limited audience — the Northeast Corridor ruling class, and those who aspired to be, as Thomas Sowell would say, their mascots.
WELL, IF YOU’RE GOING TO STEAL SOMEONE’S CAR, YOU SHOULD LEAVE THEM A GIFT: Knoxville Couple Find Guns, Condoms In Recovered Vehicle.
AT AMAZON, Collectible Coins.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF HOMOPHOBIA? Protesters Yell Gay Slurs at Cops in Milwaukee. (Video at link.)
ON ELVIS PRESLEY’S DEATHDAY, here’s something I wrote a while back.
THE SUBWAY POLE-DANCING MAKES ME A BIT SUSPICIOUS: This Insanely Fit Grandpa Is Taking the Internet by Storm.
NICK GILLESPIE IS UNHAPPY, but the truth is that Gary Johnson and William Weld look more like moderate Republicans than Libertarians.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF RACISM? Milwaukee Congresswoman: Black Incarceration Rates Created ‘Powder Keg’ in City.
Reminder: Milwaukee hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1908.
DEM CANDIDATE CAN’T SAY HILLARY IS HONEST: “Democratic New Hampshire Gov. Maggie Hassan declined three separate times to answer whether she believes Hillary Clinton is “honest” during an interview Monday on CNN.” Hillary is a presidential candidate. When Trump shoots his mouth and angers Repubs it’s big time mainstream news.