My favorite classical (as opposed to “realistic”) martial arts fight is the one below. Posting two version of it. The first is the high quality one and one with sub-titles and a little bit more of the context.
The Real Reason Your City Has No Money. There are a lot of things wrong with this article. For one thing, there is no mention of the word pension. But the general point that there is a lot of pressure to build and build (both because that is what the feds and the states typically subsidize and because that is what creates the most short term jobs) regardless of the long term maintenance costs is a point that should be made more often.
Entertainment of the Day
Starts out boring but I got more interested as it went along.
Dirty Money. Ever heard of door knobs? Hand shakes? Money is the not the primary victor of disease and nobody sane claims it is. But people who want to bring us into the brave new world will grasp at any straws.
Not the best production values, but a reasonable reconstruction of the 1986 Miami FBI Shoot Out. Note how different it is from a normal movie shoot out.
A lot of people would argue that the below clip is great journalism and not a bogus news story. It certainly speaks the truth so it does have that going for it. But the truth that it speaks is all things we already know, such as the Iraqi army is not the most competent or that journalists are the stupidest class of people on the planet. That truth was not worth the production of a video that contained this much shear stupidity. I was groaning before it had hardly got started and my blood pressure only went up as it went along.
Spare a thought for the soldiers though.They might not be the best in the world, but they are the only unit in the Iraqi army that will fight and so rumor has it they have been made combat ineffective by the amount of casualties they have taken in the fight against ISIS. Supposedly, this is one of the reasons the advance has stalled since this video was taken.
In The News
Liberal churches are dying. But conservative churches are thriving. Take the labels with a large pinch of salt. But it is true that when people talk about the massive drop off in church attendance, they are really talking about the old (and now liberal) mainline churches. To be sure, the “growth” of conservative churches is not enough to off set this and so America is becoming a country that by and large does not go to church. But you have to remember that this article is appearing in the Washington Post. So for that readership, it is a revelation that there is no benefit for a church to be “liberal.”
Ukraine Hates Its New Donated American Drones. The problems are being blamed on the fact that they are old and outdated. But drones are only useful against a technological competent foe if they don’t have to phone home. We have forgotten what it is like to fight people who are not goat herders.
How Did the Houthis Manage to Lob a Ballistic Missile at Mecca? I personally think that while the missiles were not supplied by Iran (being in country before the current conflict), they had to be the ones supplying the engineering to modify them to fly further. I don’t think that is something the Houthis could have manged on their own.
