Monthly Archives: October 2019

Mostly in the News…..

Posted on by
Reply

Turkey has limitations. Linking to it mostly because it is from one of the more astute bloggers around: Turkey’s border offensive against the Kurds, far from being a blitzkrieg, is limited by the resources available to Ankara’s forces. According to DW, its goal is to bring a 15,360- square kilometer swath under its control. “Turkey wants to create a 32-kilometer-deep, 480-kilometer-long corridor (20 miles deep, 300 miles long) inside Syria along the border to protect its security… it plans to resettle nearly 1 million of its 3.6 million Syrian refugees who hail from other parts of Syria inside the ‘safe zone.'” But it must do so by installment and on a shoestring.

A Russian sponsored look at Trump’s decision to get out of the way of the Turks.

A collection of links on power black outs in California and the problems they represent: Unsustainable California: No Easy Remedy for PG&E Blackouts, Fire Risks

Controlling the price has never before in the history of the world increased supply but it might be different this time: California governor signs statewide rent-control law

For what it is worth, here is an overview of the polls: Do Americans Support Impeaching Trump?

Sad World Links

Posted on by
1

I had never heard of this either but I can’t say I am suprised. Eric A. Fong’s manuscript had been conditionally accepted. The editor said Fong needed to ensure it conformed with the journal’s style and to shorten it to meet the word limit. That was easy enough. But the third condition gave Fong pause.He’d cited only one source from the journal he’d submitted the article to. The editor wrote in an email that that was “unacceptable,” and told him to “please add at least five more.”Adding citations to articles in the same journal, as the editor had requested, would inflate the journal’s impact factor, which often dictates a journal’s importance. It’s a phenomenon some scholars call “coercive citation,” but Fong, then an assistant professor of management at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, had never heard that term.

Just in case it is of interest: In the wake of Blizzard’s shameful cowardice, designer, fellow gamer, and former Blizzard team lead Mark Kern is taking a stand

A reminder of data that is not talked about: More than 100 more people were killed with hammers and clubs in 2018 than were killed by rifles. There were 443 people killed with hammers, clubs, or other “blunt objects”.

Something you already know: The FBI’s use of the database – which, again, is specifically defined in law as only being allowed to be used for foreign intelligence matters – was completely routine. And a result, agents started using it all the time for anything connected to their work, and sometimes their personal lives.

Not in the News…..

Posted on by
Reply

The wages of being PC is that nobody can figure out what to do about a situation like this: Mickaël Harpon, who stabbed three police officers and a woman civil servant to death before he was killed at Paris police headquarters on October 3rd, was a radical Islamist with a top secret security clearance and access to all computers in the police prefecture’s directorate of intelligence, known as the DRPP.

Just a reminder of how little they know: According to the authority, the importance of the finding is that it will change everything scholars know about the urbanization process in the Land of Israel.

People who talk the most about pollution being a serious problem are the least likely to know where most of it comes from. This study surprises only the blind. Researchers from Canada and South Africa studied waste washed up on the beaches of Inaccessible Island, an island in the heart of the southern Atlantic Ocean, on a series of trips that began in 1984. Nearly three-quarters of the trash they sifted through originated in Asia, produced by China. The research challenges long assumptions that plastic debris at sea primarily originates on land.

This is what hysteria gets you: President Trump is gaining among independent voters in head-to-head matchups with the Democratic presidential front-runners, according to a new IBD-TIPP poll.

They wanted a power company that was more careful about fires. Not sure if they realized this would be the result: In the Bay Area, portions of Alameda, Contra Costa, Napa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma counties could suffer power shutoffs.

It is the same logic that causes smaller companies to endlessly strive to be suppliers of Wall-Mart even though everyone knows how Wall-Mart treats their suppliers: There was this consistently weird disconnect in the comments from American business leaders, as they kept saying their Chinese competitors were overtly or secretly state-subsided, or would complain about corruption . . . but no one wanted to stop putting more resources there.

Today’s Links

Posted on by
Reply

Coming soon to a State near you: A “zombie” disease which makes deer become emaciated and more aggressive may sound like the opening to a horror film. But experts have warned the deadly disease has already affected 24 US states – and could spread to humans next. We all know what experts are worth. On the other paw, Lyme disease was a rare thing when I was young.

Sanctions having an effect on Venezuela: Sending oil to Cuba to free up storage space makes sense from an operational point of view, said Piñón, because it allows Venezuela to preserve its output capacity and keeps wells pumping.“Whenever you have to shut down an oil well you have problems, because it is extremely hard to get it going again, given that you will lose the original pressure of the reservoir,” Piñón said.

If you want to be informed, you should read the short essay “Population Immiseration in America” just so you know the ideas that are being talked about and it has data that is not commonly brought up. That said, I see a lot of issues with the ideas being presented. For example, Japan suffers from a lot of the same issues laid out in this essay without having the same amount of immigration that author calls out as being a major contributor. Another issues would be the fact that it fails to address the role the cult of higher education has on many of the issues being discussed. These and many other issues keep me from agreeing with the general thrust of the essay, but the essay is still generating more discussion then most of the fluff out there.

Short Version: Hand held missiles are getting better and better and that has strategic consequences when they are used intelligently. Long Version: A Hyper-Mobile Defense: Iran’s Novel Strategy to Sustain Proxy Conflicts in the Middle East

Coming soon to a country near you: According to the Register, a total of 2,500 Londoners have been arrested over the past five years for allegedly sending “offensive” messages via social media. In 2015, 857 people were detained, up 37 per cent increase since 2010.The Communications Act 2003 defines illegal communication as “using public electronic communications network in order to cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety”. Breaking the law carries a six-month prison term or fine of up to £5,000.The figures, obtained from the Metropolitan police via a Freedom of Information request, only apply to the London area. I got the link to the above from this rant.

Did an Inuit (Eskimo) woman kill a polar bear with a 22?

Posted on by
3

I recently told some people that smallest cartridge documented to have been used to killed a polar bear was a 22 but now I can’t find any proof of that fact. I had a clear memory of reading an article in a print magazine that documented such a thing, but I will be danged if I can find it now. Apparently I am not the only person with this memory as I did find this quote from a forum….

I read an article where an Inuit woman killed one of the largest polar bears ever killed with a .22 rifle. Hid behind a door in the kitchen, when the bear poked its head in the kitchen, she put the muzzle of the rifle in it’s ear and shot; dropped like a rock. They reported it was very difficult getting the bear out of the house.

This report was greeted with considerable skepticism on the forum and I don’t blame them for the skepticism in the absence of proof. All I can say is that I remember reading a similar article a long time ago. But I will be danged if I can find that article now so either I am totally mis-remembering or the all encompassing internet failed to preserve any kind of documentation. Best I can come up with something semi-official looking is the off hand comment in this article that references what my dubious memory recalls saying….

Marauding bears have been killed by .22 rimfire pocket pistols; not very often, but it has been done by an Eskimo woman I happen to know about.

But the article offers no documentation to support that claim so it might be a commonly repeated tall tale. All I can offer in defense of my memory and the undocumented hearsay found on the internet is that it is well documented that a 22 in the hands of native American woman can kill a very large bear. But the bear is question was a very large grizzly and the woman in question was Cree and not Inuit. Her name was Bella Twin and she got into the record books for that particular bit of daring.

Mostly Not In the News

Posted on by
Reply

The following article is a good test of whether you are following real news or fake news. If you already know what this article says, you are following real news. If it is news to you, you are following fake news. There is no impeachment inquiry. There are no subpoenas.

I have seen a lot of leftists Italians on-line say that this a article that does a good job of explaining what is going on politically in Italy. From what I can see, it gets the facts right but some of its claims are questionable (for example, the idea that the EU is responsible for Italian political instability is laughable as it would imply that Italy had stable governments before joining the EU). The revenge of the elites

This article is in the New York Times so everyone and their Grandma (especially their Grandma) will be sending them this article. This is your fair warning. Australia Just Had a Bad Flu Season. That May Be a Warning for the U.S. In 2017, a terrible flu season in Australia presaged an American outbreak in which 79,000 died.

Not in the American News

Posted on by
Reply

A German View On Brexit: Europe Can No Longer Afford the Brexit Insanity

Coming soon to a country near you? Several unexplained cases of a disease with Ebola-like symptoms in Tanzania have prompted an extraordinary statement from the World Health Organization questioning the response of the country’s health authorities.

The Science Was Settled: The practical upshot of all this is that some of the things you are reading in your science textbooks are wrong.

Maybe In The News?

Posted on by
Reply

Letter from a Pakistani Homeschooler: “He told me you have homeschooled your own children, which came as a shock to me because we Pakistanis consider US schools the epitome of education.” Well, if you grade on a curve, the US might very well be close to the top. But should you grade on a curve?

Nothing to worry about: “France says the ID system won’t be used to keep tabs on residents. Unlike in China and Singapore, the country won’t be integrating the facial recognition biometric into citizens’ identity databases. In fact, the interior ministry, which developed the Alicem app, says the facial recognition data collected will be deleted when the enrollment process is over.”

New Studies Warn of Cataclysmic Solar Superstorms. They be saying this for awhile now. Then again, they were saying for awhile that New Orleans was at risk for going under in a big storm. Eventually they were right.

May be in the news? In the case of the Georgian man shot to death in late August in a Berlin park, evidence is mounting that the crime may have been a hit contracted by the Russian state.