Hyperloop One has tested a pod at 200 mph.
Why Everyone Hates The Press
Mary Katherine Ham explains:
The article ends as if to purposely reiterate how little the industry is interested in learning: “In a recent exchange with the White House press corps, then deputy press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made hay over the retraction of a Trump-related story by CNN—an example of a news organization owning up to a mistake, as it should—and urged reporters to focus instead on a video by James O’Keefe, a right-wing provocateur whose work has been widely discredited.”
This paragraph embodies the problem. How is it that the media doesn’t realize it, too, has credibility to lose? It, too, has been repeatedly discredited—not just for one story, and not just in the eyes of angry Trump supporters. It should want to rectify that. But Warren ignores these mistakes just as the press itself often does. He gives them a giant pass on the job of understanding America in 2016 and a glancing mention of fabulist Jayson Blair. He congratulates them for doing the basics to correct a mistake, and then expects all Americans to laud the Redfords and Hoffmans while condemning the O’Keefes of the world.
The press is constantly saying this president is losing credibility without recognizing it is in the exact same predicament. New York Times editor Dean Baquet sits in his office adorned with “mock front pages…parting gifts from colleagues at the many papers where he has worked” while Trump roams his golf course properties admiring his mock Time magazine covers. These guys, and the institutions they head, have much more in common than they’d like to think. Stop admiring yourselves and deal with your problems.
I would also note that Donald Trump and Barack Obama also have a lot more in common than their admirers (and particularly the admirers of the latter) would like to admit.
The Fashion Industry
Megan Fox discusses what I’ve been ranting about for years: Why do women let gay men dictate what an attractive woman looks like?
Today’s definition of “fat” is what’s abnormal. The modern idea of feminine beauty is what is abnormal. Have you ever been to an art museum? For our entire human history men have been painting and sculpting women they found beautiful. Renoir sure liked his bigger models.
Absolutely none of them look like Kate Moss. All of them look like the normal, average woman that Hookstead doesn’t want to see in his magazines. Just admit already that your ideas of feminine beauty have been manipulated for decades by gay dudes who run fashion houses. Uncomfortable thought, isn’t it? But how else do you explain that men used to find this attractive and desirable and now it’s “fat”? Could it be that the gay kings of the fashion world remolded women into what they themselves find attractive, i.e. wide shoulders, small hips, long muscular arms — or in other words…young men?
I wonder if this is also why womens’ clothes don’t have pockets?
Venezuela
Remember all those left-wing pundits who drooled over Chavez?
Chavez’s untimely death from cancer in 2013 saw an outpouring of grief from the global left. The caudillo “demonstrated that it is possible to resist the neo-liberal dogma that holds sway over much of humanity,” wrote British journalist Owen Jones. “I mourn a great hero to the majority of his people,” said Oliver Stone, who would go on to replace Chavez with Vladimir Putin as the object of his twisted affection.
On the Venezuelan regime’s international propaganda channel, Telesur, American host Abby Martin — who used to ply her duplicitous trade at Russia Today — takes credulous viewers on Potemkin tours of supermarkets fully stocked with goods. It would be inaccurate to label the thoroughly unconvincing Martin, who combines the journalistic ethics of Walter Duranty with the charm of Ulrike Meinhof, a useful idiot. She’s just an idiot.
Brutal, but fair.
[Update a few minutes later]
Venezuela’s slide toward civil war. Unfortunately, the government confiscated the weapons (which many on the Left would love to do here, if they could pull it off). So unless we smuggle some in to them, the war won’t end well for freedom.
[Update a while later]
An AP reporter finally leaves the country:
In the early days, the shortages seemed almost whimsical. My Venezuelan friends were used to going on Miami shopping sprees. When I made trips home, they asked me to bring back perfume, leather jackets, iPhones and condoms. I usually took two near-empty suitcases to carry back the requests, plus food and toiletries for myself. As the crisis deepened, the requests became harder to fill, and traced the outlines of darker personal dramas: Medication for heart failure. Pediatric epilepsy drugs. Pills to trigger an abortion. Gas masks.
And things were still somehow getting worse. The first time I saw people line up outside the bakery near my apartment, I stopped to take photos. How crazy: A literal bread line.
Then true hunger crept into where I lived. People started digging through the trash at all hours, pulling out vegetable peelings and soggy pizza crusts and eating them on the spot. That seemed like rock bottom. Until my local bakery started organizing lines each morning, not to buy bread but to eat trash.
This is the end state of socialism. They ran out of other peoples’ money.
Demonizing School Choice
…it’s certainly fair to note that people opposed to desegregation decided that one way to solve the problem was to get rid of public schools, allowing racists to choose a lily-white educational environment for their children. Maintaining Jim Crow is a vile motive, and it can’t be denied that that was one historical reason some people had for supporting school choice.
Only the proper answer to this is, So what? You cannot stop terrible people from promoting sound ideas for bad reasons. Liberals who think that ad hominem is a sufficient rebuttal to a policy proposal should first stop to consider the role of Hitler’s Germany in spreading national health insurance programs to the countries they invaded. If you think “But Hitler” does not really constitute a useful argument about universal health coverage, then you should probably not resort to “But Jim Crow” in a disagreement over school funding.
If you think we can’t allow school choice because Jim Crow, then it would be just as logical to oppose minimum wage and gun control, because historically, their purpose has been to control blacks.
A 21st-Century Space Policy
Dennis Wingo says we need a courageous one. It’s a long read, that I haven’t read yet, but it looks interesting.
The New Pentagon Procurement Structure
Aaron Mehta breaks it down. Not sure whether or not burying DARPA in the organization is a good idea.
NASA needs a reorganization, too, but space isn’t important enough to justify the political capital it would take to force it through Congress.
“Progressives”
I’m always amused at the lack of historical awareness of people who fantasize that fascist “progressives” haven’t always “embraced hate.” Particularly the clueless ones who preach “peace” while wearing a Che teeshirt.
The Administrative State
The federal government seems to have accumulated a lot of parasites who are indifferent, or hostile to the Constitution. It may be necessary to hire some outside people to properly prosecute the criminals from the previous administration. It’s time to clean house in general, but if Trump was the man to do it, he would have started a long time ago. He’s too busy getting involved in Twitter wars to care, apparently.
[Update a few minutes later]
Speaking of the Constitution, no Mr. President, the Senate doesn’t report to you, and neither do Republicans. I had this crazy idea last year that the Republicans should have nominated someone who’s read the Constitution, but they had different ideas, apparently. But it will be nice if one effect of Trump is to restore Congress’s will to enforce its own prerogatives.
I do like this idea, though: “On my short-list for potential constitutional amendments is a ban on Senators becoming President. It would probably improve the presidency, and it would definitely improve the Senate.”
It would have saved us from Barack Obama, John McCain, John Kerry, and Bob Dole, among others.
Universal Basic Income
Finland’s experiment doesn’t bode well for it.