There are more hate crime hoaxes than who thinks? As Jonah writes, you don't need to concoct hate crimes in a truly hate-based society. If you lived in a hate-society the hate crimes would be all around you and the media could afford to skip a claim as suspicious as Smollett's was confident that another one with more credibility would come along any day. Which is related to my bewilderment at the whole "micro-aggressions" thing. You only drone on about that if actual aggression is relatively rare. Can we not celebrate this progress rather than building ever more precise aggression detectors to feed to an ever more hair-trigger Twitter/media mob?
Capitalism isn't the same thing as cronyism or corporatism. Yes, "capitalism" is really shorthand for "free market capitalism" rather than big companies backed by or controlled by the state. Last week I noted that "socialism" is not the same thing as popular spending programs--those are really expansive welfare state programs and not socialism. Socialism is state ownership of the means of production--which is far closer to cronyism or corporatism than capitalism is. This is similar to how "democracy" isn't just free elections, it must include "rule of law" to avoid the tyranny of the majority. If we are to have a debate, understand the terms. As always, check the "definitions" section.
If the EU's Tusk is for "delaying" Brexit, that clearly means a delay is a tool to undermining Brexit. Britain must run from that proto-imperial embrace as fast as they can.
Blockchain technology can be hacked. I am not shocked one bit. It is harder to hack, of course. so it isn't useless. But it is not sufficient alone to be secure. It was devised by people. So people can defeat it.
If air defense missiles are effective against attacking planes and missiles to offer ships serious protection, torpedoes that don't face effective counter-measures will remain an effective anti-ship weapon. The failure of ATTDS (TSW/CAT) makes my case for a missile/rocket-delivered anti-ship torpedo stronger.
Chinese imports of American soybeans have skyrocketed. As I said early in the dispute when China stopped buying them from America, I didn't understand why this was more than a short-term disruption as China bought other nations' soybeans and then the customers who used to buy the soybeans of other nations turned to American soybeans as a replacement. And now apparently it makes sense for a huge buyer like China to buy from a huge producer like America. And doesn't an increase in Chinese purchases over pre-dispute levels just move around the existing trade routes rather than represent an increase in demand for soybeans?
There is no evidence of Trump-Russian collusion to influence the 2016 election. Duh. But will Democrats accept that there was no crime or will they insist that after 2-1/2 years of looking that our counter-intelligence and law enforcement agencies are too incompetent to have found evidence?
The B-52 will get new engines to keep them flying to mid-century as bomb trucks.
I think this analyst over-estimates China's long-term economic strength but one should consider contrary views, eh?
A frightening window into the future? A frightening window into China's present, I'd say.
Tip to the PJ Media Live Blog.
Government at work: First require schools to have equal opportunities for female athletes in female sports programs, which often require cutbacks in male sports programs in order to maintain parity. Second, allow men who have become women to compete in female sporting events, in which female athletes who were born female are at a severe disadvantage in competing. No doubt there will be a third step that requires more government regulation and spending. I have no dog in either fight individually, but the combination is most enlightening, no? Tip to Instapundit.
United States Navy ships transited the Taiwan Strait, annoying China. On the eve of the Vietnam summit between Trump and Kim, I'm sure this was a symbolic statement that America will not throw Taiwan under the bus to get China's cooperation on North Korea.
Some scientists now claim that proof for human-caused global warming has hit the "gold standard" of certainty. I'm confused. Haven't the scientists been claiming for 30 years that there is a "consensus" that the "science is settled?" Were they lying the last three decades about their certainty? Or just wrong? And either way, why is this claim more credible? And even if they are correct about the science (and yes, I could be persuaded on that, although thus far I am not), why are their state-centric solutions the answer?
The Iraqis don't want Shia but Persian Iranian influence in their country. This is good. Shia Arab Iraqis feel more Arab than Shia. But what I don't understand is why this development has taken so long: "the Saudis are building a new border crossing and restoring major access for the first time since 1990[.]" What is wrong with the Saudis? When their objective should be to cultivate Iraq's pan-Arab feelings at the expense of pan-Shia feeling that Iran wants, why has it taken 16 Goddamn years to restore access to build Arab solidarity? Could America get a little bloody help here?
Russian threats are now sadly pathetic. And Kiselyov is a panty-throwing Putin fanboy.
I am actually overjoyed that Trump's talking to Kim has led Democrats to insist on complete and verifiable North Korean denuclearization. Democrats didn't require verification in the 1990s for Clinton's deal with North Korea, for Iraqi WMDs from 1991 to 2003, for Syria (in regard to chemical weapons) in the double-oughts, or for Iran in 2015 when Iran wasn't even required to concede that they ever had a nuclear weapons program. I am an optimist, aren't I?
Preparing to fight the last war: "Colorado Gov. Jared Polis (D) will sign a measure to award his state’s electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote, moving a countrywide coalition one step closer to circumventing the Electoral College." I really hope Trump wins the popular vote in 2020 while Colorado votes for whatever Democrat is tossed out of their socialist pep rally primary knife fight. Honestly, politicians are sometimes shockingly stupid. It will serve them right to negate their own voters' intent. We don't actually know what our popular vote is to any degree of certainty because all we need to know is whether the results in each state are confidently known sufficiently to allocate that state's electoral votes. We don't bother counting every vote. We don't need to. But if popular vote is important, the incentive to cheat and to tie up our election process with post-election legal challenges will skyrocket. This is so mind numbingly stupid that I'm frankly shocked it is taking this long to take off given the generally inferior state of our political class. Still, this is just electoral masturbation until states with 270 electoral votes have passed the same measure.
Personally, I feel that 300,000 dead Union soldiers is all the reparations the US government needs to pay (an idea getting traction in the Democratic party presidential candidate race) for tolerating the evil of slavery. Maybe ending it where it still exists would be a better path for such energies.
Is TDS a real mental health condition (tip to Instapundit)? My term Trump Hysteria Condition didn't catch on. I don't know if TDS/THC is a mental health condition, but I will say that the people who think Trump is a secret Nazi figuratively born in Russia are as alienated from reality as the people who thought Obama was a secret Moslem literally born in Kenya. I'd rather just call it "stupidity" to avoid having to pay for treating it through my tax dollars.
It is interesting that the Army believes Russia's army development will peak in 2028 while China's will peak in about 2030. Russia's rise seems like a "dead cat bounce" given the general decline there. I'll have to keep my eye out for any publicly released study that explains how those dates were calculated. I'm behind on my email notifications, so perhaps I should catch up. Also, I hope we don't have a war between any of the top powers. Reading Antony Beevor's book on World War II reminded me of how horrible World War II was notwithstanding its designation as the "good war." It is easy to forget how unimaginably horrible it was from such a distance in time and a hazy "Band of Brothers" view.
I'm always in favor of narrowing the scope of executive administrative rules authority. I worked on this issue for the state legislature, and while it is a necessary authority to grant it requires effective legislative oversight to avoid the executive simply becoming an independent quasi-legislative body.
Honestly, she deserves to be deported just for stupidity.
Shades of Force Z: European navies are ill-equipped to survive in Asian waters against aerial threats. Why Asia is specified is beyond me. Asian warships with air defense capabilities superior to European ships have no effect on the air threat European ships would face there. Better to look at the threat in the European environment, eh?
Ukraine has lost 3,000 troops since Russia invaded Ukraine 5 years ago. The Ukrainians estimate the enemy has lost about the same amount with Russian losses over half of those casualties. Add about 7,000 dead civilians to the total.
If the enemy knows your tactical rules for "swarming" when command and control communications are cut off, they will exploit those rules to kill you. I find this proposal silly. Although I am not familiar with that particular 2000 monograph (if I ever was I've forgotten it), the highlighted suggestion that the Army create "platoon-like pods joined in company-like clusters" sounds too much like a clusterf**k. And the basis of the article runs counter to a major foundation of the old monograph, which says "swarming clearly depends upon robust information flows." I don't think much of Arquilla's formulation of warfare.
False
A GAO report on China's Confucius Institutes on our campuses. I don't think we should allow them. China will use these to shape acceptable ideas about China inside the United States. This both helps China's foreign policy and lightens the load on their domestic censors by reducing problematic material generated abroad. And as bases for espionage they are convenient.
Ukraine's battle against corruption took a hit. Or perhaps rule of law was actually reinforced. It's hard to say. We'll see if a new law that avoids the problems that led the judiciary to strike it down is enacted.
We walked away from the meeting with Kim Jong Un rather than give in to their demands for sanctions relief. Good. North Korea needs to learn that the old methods don't work any more. Amazingly the story says Trump didn't get a triumph he needs to counter domestic news and developments. WTF? If that is the lens for viewing everything, shouldn't Trump get credit for refusing a bad deal to get a good news story? People, North Korea is a self-contained story and it would be good for America to get a good deal and bad for America to get a bad deal. Honestly, I was happy Obama ignored North Korea because I worried he would accept a bad deal (see Syria or Iran) and I worried that even Bush 43 would be tempted to cave for a bad deal to get the raving loonies here at home off his back.
Collusion and obstruction of justice. In Canada. But the socks! Say it ain't so! Tip to Instapundit. Seriously, that is not how rule of law is supposed to work: "The rules need to be rules—not for the people we despise, but for ourselves. For myself. For you. Or else we have no souls." Americans should certainly take to heart another warning that pre-dates this scandal: "A government that considers the scale of its spending to be proof of its virtue is an easy mark for hucksters and worse.” Indeed.
In the past Juan Williams has sounded more reasonable in his slots on Fox News as a liberal perspective. He has stopped doing that. But I suspect he is just turning up his Team Resistance dial to 11 in order to make what is essentially a (good) entertainment show more compelling viewing by being a foil for the more conservative panelists.
Is it my imagination or did the Democrats in the Cohen hearing treat AOC and Tlaib as the eager cannon fodder so that if this process backfires on the Democrats those new idealistic representatives leading the charge will be the ones who stepped on the mines? And if the attack works they can be put in the shadows while the reps with seniority take over the process. Also, I think the best way to describe the hearing is "Resistance Pornography."
Why Western feminists aren't the most hard core anti-Islamists is beyond me. Tip to the PJM Live Blog.
I have never donated money to a political candidate. But I like the cut of this man's jib and have thought for a while (just elected last year, of course) that he would make a good candidate for my first contribution. Again, tip to the Live Blog.
Well, it took a while for Hugo and Maduro to kill the goose that laid the golden eggs for Venezuela, too.
Turkey will buy Russian S-400 air defense missiles. If this is a "done deal" as the Turks say, our F-35 sale should be a dead deal. I wouldn't eject Turkey from NATO, in the hope that we can coax a post-Erdogan Turkey back. But I would quietly cut Turkey off from critical information and decision-making processes. If we announce a new base that would essentially replace Incirlik, that would be a sign we are doing that. And for God's sake, we already pulled nuclear warheads out of Turkey, right? Erdogan is not to be trusted.
Belarus sits between NATO and Russia, providing Russia with key military installations and a buffer zone in the west. If Russia ever engineers an Anschluss with Belarus, that territory will also be a jumping off point to attack Poland and Lithuania as well as extending Ukraine's flank. And such a union might be a way around term limits for Putin. Which is why I think Belarus could be the most important territory in Europe today.
Apparently, the Saudis have managed to pull Pakistan firmly to the Arab side of the Iran-Arab conflict. You'll need to scroll down to February 18th.
I should say that even allies that have committed troops to theaters where we fight but not allowed them to fight do actually perform useful work in training local forces. But it still is frustrating that our allies often won't fight alongside us.
Twenty-six more "good jihadis" in Somalia, courtesy of the US armed forces.
Could we have a media that reports on war issues that is between our own reflexively anti-American media and India's jingoistic media that wants Pakistani blood? America could use a little more of the latter and India a lot more of the former, I think.
As a follow-up to my post on James Fallows' 2002 and 2004 articles that he cited in defense of his contention that the Iraq War was an "enormous strategic blunder," I will say that in 2002, it was fully justifiable to explore what could go wrong. Any or all of them could have been accurate speculations. And in 2004, we were having serious problems in Iraq. But the post was long enough without adding these issues. While I always had confidence we were following COIN 101 most broadly (pushing locals to carry more of the burden so we could reduce our scope and scale of military power), we did make mistakes--that we eventually overcame. I worried about the outcome only twice--in the spring and summer of 2004 when the Iranian-al Qaeda offensives took place; and from summer 2006 to summer 2007, after the sectarian bloodletting took off and before the early effect of the Surge offensive (and associated Awakening) became initially evident. Really, judging the outcome of the war should require evidence much more recent than 2004, eh?
How much longer will it be before Democratic leadership favors fourth trimester abortion? Reasonable people can disagree on the issue in practice, but shouldn't some things be out of bounds?
At some point we need to restart the full exercises in South Korea rather than let North Korea stall for time. Apparently we aren't at that point yet.
U.S.-backed forces in Syria are taking out the last territory of ISIL there. This is good. It is a victory. But as many people add, this doesn't mean the job is done. I wish more people had agreed with this position after al Qaeda was defeated in Iraq when we left in 2011 rather than defend the victory.
Iran protested Britain's designation of Iran's little proxy fiend Hezbollah as a terrorist organization by arguing the terror group reflects the will of a lot of the Lebanese people. Well, perhaps the will of too many of Lebanon's people is to support terrorism, eh?
India and Pakistan are "the only two rivals in the world to be both neighbors and nuclear states?" What about India and China? Heck, what about China and Russia? Even if you want to assume that today's relationship isn't a weak, fearful Russia appeasing a strengthening China, there was that whole Soviet-China rivalry, with a small border war years after China first detonated a nuclear device. And you don't count America and Russia with the Bering Strait distance between the two not quite 4 kilometers? Not to be mean. I've sometimes overlooked what I damn well knew was true but for whatever reason forgot in a particular moment. Stuff happens. But the record should be clear.
I hope this is sarcasm because if not it is criminally stupid. I have no idea who that guy is.
Unrest continues in France with the "yellow vests." The government says the protests are shrinking--but they'd have an interest in advancing that narrative to shrink the protests. Also, injuries from "non-lethal" weapons. The problem is that "non-lethal" weapons can still injure and kill. The key is to only use them in circumstances that justify live ammo. In that case they are far less lethal. If you use them with a lower threshold than live ammo use, the non-lethal weapons over the long run will cause a bunch of casualties, including deaths. Protesters are using their own form of "non-lethal" weapons that could harm police.
Protests and casualties in Algeria over the planned reelection for a fifth term of a virtual President Abdelaziz Bouteflika, who hasn't been seen in quite a while and who at best is completely crippled and unable to rule. Voting without rule of law is a terrible thing to see.
China's new dystopia spreads its wings: China is now using its horrible "social credit score" system to deny 23 million people the ability to travel. With any luck this has built into it collateral damage on the Chinese Communist Party as corruption undermines the system and people in the cheap seats see how the wealthy and influential get a good score from the people in charge no matter what they do to violate the social credit rules. I'm sure the Green New Deal people who like "lists" of enemies could find a use for this system here to phase in the total ban on air travel, starting with "deniers" I'm sure (the article is satire but the tweet is not). Tips to Instapundit.
Strategypage looks at the F-21--the designation for the latest version of the F-16 being offered to India. As I noted in last week's data dump: "Lockheed Martin (I own a tiny amount of their stock, I should note) is offering India an updated F-16 with a marketing spin by calling it the F-21. In 2011 I called a fighter choice the most important defense decision India will make this decade. We're running out of this decade." India doesn't have much time left to make the most important defense (weapon) decision of this decade in this decade. We'll see if a near-war with Pakistan gives India a sense of urgency. If not, China will continue to smile at India's crippling defense procurement dysfunction. [UPDATE: More on the "wobbly" process.]
Oh please, of course the Labor Party wants a new vote on Brexit--because they lost the first one. So now their demand that the vote be final is non-operative.
