Overnight Open Thread (9-17-2015)

Quote of the Day I

The 10-month, $500 million U.S. effort to train and equip moderate Syria had yielded a "small number" of fighters, Austin said, far short of the 15,000 planned over a three-year period.

"The ones that are in the fight, we are talking four or five," Austin told the stunned committee.

The U.S. military has spent $43 million of the $500 million allotted by Congress, or roughly $9 million per fighter. (The U.S. had originally planned to have 5,400 fighters trained by now.) Wormuth said the U.S. military was considering alternative plans but refused to say what those plans were or when they may be rolled out.

"The new Syrian Force Program has gotten off to slow start," Austin deadpanned, in response to the 5,395-man deficit in the number of fighters the U.S. hoped to train this year.

-- From Army Gen. Lloyd Austin's testimony before Congress this week

Quote of the Day II

"Germany isn't just the country of milk and honey, where everything you would want flies into your mouth like a fried pigeon," German Foreign Ministry spokesman Martin Shaefer said last week.

EU rules require member states to ensure "a dignified standard of living" for asylum-seekers. That includes housing, food, clothing, a daily allowance, and access to public health care, education and the job market while their claim is processed, which can take up to a year or more.

Quote of the Day III

Brock explains how his conversations with Blumenthal, a man of "surpassing intellect and fervent devotion to the Clintons," were the inspiration for Hillary Clinton's infamous "vast right-wing conspiracy" comments in response to the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Blumenthal later told Brock he "went straight to Hillary" after one of their phone chats about the Lewinsky story.

Decades later, Brock and Blumenthal are two of the most loyal, if sometimes erratic, members of Hillary Clinton's inner circle of advisers. They have both parlayed this obsessive loyalty into massive personal fortunes. These are the people who will be running the country if Hillary avoids jail time and is elected president.

-- Andrew Stiles in How David Brock Became Sidney Blumenthal

Quote of the Day IV - Inverted Justice Edition

"If there are 10 people who have been accused, and under a reasonable likelihood standard maybe one or two did it, it seems better to get rid of all 10 people," Polis said. "We're not talking about depriving them of life or liberty, we're talking about them being transferred to another university, for crying out loud."

-- U.S. Rep. Jared Polis (D-CO)

Quote of the Day V

We are raising a generation of young writers who are trashing their Google rankings in exchange for $100 and a tweetstorm, who are learning nothing about the craft of reporting except that their musings on incest go viral, who are generating #content without generating anything worthwhile or lasting.

Anyway. You should read that piece and weep for the future or something. Or not. As a wise man once said, my strong suspicion is we get the world we deserve. And we probably deserve endless rivers of first person pieces about the horrible things we have done and had done to us. Selfie culture is all-consuming.

-- Sonny Bunch in First Person Essays Are Both Boring and Also Exploitative

John Hinderaker: More Bullshit From Bernie

He's had just about enough of Bernie Sanders' ignorant and dishonest radicalism and fisks his speech from earlier this week at Liberty University paragraph by paragraph. And it's a beautiful thing.

Bullshit. What does Sanders want to do about the fact that the people who founded Facebook have made a lot of money? Prohibit innovation? Limit the number of people who can access popular web sites? Make it illegal to sell advertising if the owners of the web site are already rich? The only "remedy" he can come up with is higher taxes, but America already has the most progressive income tax regime of any developed country-more progressive than Sweden, Denmark, you name it. And yet Democrats like Sanders keep telling us how awful things are for most Americans. Maybe we should try lower taxes on the "rich," since the world's highest taxes evidently haven't worked. By the way, when Democrats talk about rich people, they always use Mark Zuckerberg-a Democrat, no doubt-as an exemplar, but when I read the fine print, I always find that they mean me.

Nobel Committee Member: On Second Thought We Probably Shouldn't Have Given Obama That Peace Prize

But not for the reason you might think.

The Government Cracks Down on the Menace of Little Free Libraries

Daily Kos Founder Markos Moulitsas Beclowns Himself on Twitter

Breitbart writer arrested for terrorism, for trying to help terrorists build bomb http://t.co/R7ZM19cnSa via @thedailybeast

- Markos Moulitsas (@markos) September 12, 2015

Only it turns out that Joshua Goldberg never wrote for Breitbart. He did however write for a little left-wing blog called Daily Kos.

Detroit Neighborhoods Now Recruiting Squatters For Empty Homes

It's no joke. In a remote pocket of northwest Detroit along the Rouge River, neighbors are so desperate to stop a cycle of abandonment and blight they're recruiting a squatter to occupy a home whose longtime owners left last weekend.

That's because neighbors fear the onetime farmhouse on Puritan and Hazelton will be stripped and torched if it remains empty for long. Eight nearby houses burned in the past two years. A few blocks away, there are more weedy lots than homes.

..."You want someone in the house when it's still functioning. Otherwise, it will be destroyed in 24 hours."

New British Carrier To Deploy With USMC Air Wing For Protection

Suppose you have a brand-new aircraft carrier, but the jets that will operate from that ship won't be available in sufficient quantities for another five years.  How do you utilize that platform to its full capabilities in the interim, without its primary strike asset?

For Britain's Royal Navy, that is the near-term challenge: their new fleet carrier, the HMS Queen Elizabeth, is in the final stages of construction and will begin sea trials next summer, with initial flight training in 2017-2018.  But with the RN's first F-35 squadrons not scheduled to achieve their initial operating capability until 2020 (at the earliest), the Brits are looking for aircraft that can embark earlier and provide a combat punch before their own Lightning IIs are ready for action.

The solution is a lesson in creativity and coalition warfare.  According to the U.S. Naval Institute, the RN has reached agreement with the U.S. Marine Corps to deploy F-35 squadrons on the Queen Elizabeth until British units achieve their IOC in the jet

Leftwing Pacifica Radio Network Entering Final Stages of Death Spiral

Just five radio stations is a pretty small network.

The allegations were the latest convulsion in a simmering crisis at Pacifica Radio, a network of five independently operated, listener-supported radio stations, including New York's WBAI, which are known for liberal views.

Founded in 1946 by conscientious objectors from the second world war, the network was an influential outlet for Beat poets, Bob Dylan and Vietnam war protesters but has in recent times suffered from dwindling ratings, in-fighting and financial hemorrhage.

The network's biggest star - Amy Goodman, host of the independently produced Democracy Now! - is also its biggest creditor. She is owed an estimated $2.1m in unpaid broadcast fees.

Strong Evidence For Cause of the Permian Extinction

A 252 million year old whodunnit may finally be solved.

The extinction at the end of the Permian is a major event in Earth's history. We define it as the boundary between two Eras, the second largest division in the geologic timeline.

At that boundary, over 90% of all marine species went extinct. Some familiar life forms including the trilobites disappeared forever while other ecosystems shifted permanently; such as bivalves like clams suddenly becoming much more common in the oceans than the brachiopods that dominated the Paleozoic.

Since the scale of this mass extinction was realized in the 20th century, one of the enduring mysteries of geology has been its cause. Scientists have proposed impacts of asteroids, chemical catastrophes in the ocean or the atmosphere, and impacts from massive volcanic eruptions now called the Siberian traps.

For those who can't be bothered to read the article the killer was: The Jews....in the form of volcanoes. They're very crafty like that.

volcanoes

Film Footage of a Person Born in the 1700s

Maybe.

Being 114 in 1905 would place Despina's year of birth at around 1791, only a few years after the formation of the United States. There's no independent confirmation of her age outside of the film's original title and Milton Manaki's memoirs (published in Romanian), but even if she were only 102 at the time, she would best Clark's 1804 birth year

The Cocaine-Based Advertising of the Late 70s

Back when it was common enough to be effectively semi-legal which meant there was $$$ in coke and coke accessories.

Man Taking 35 Viagra Pills 'For Laughs' = Medical Emergency, 5 Day Erection, Laughs For the Rest of Us

But after pill number 35, laughter gave way to concern. After his vision turned green-a Viagra side effect known as cyanopsia-and he experienced what he described to The Sun as "a massive erection that would not go away," Medforth went home to his wife, who promptly redirected him to the hospital where he belonged. And there he stayed there for the next 36 hours-one hour for every year of his life that he almost threw away.

He told The Daily Beast that his wife was "a little mad" at him, which, one would hope, is an understatement.

Yahoo group. That is all.

Come on be a smartie and join the yahoo group party! For the children. Why do you hate children?

And my lo-fi Twitter spew.

Tonight's post brought to you by 1982:

Notice: Posted by permission of AceCorp LLC. Send your scraps to Dave in Texas. He knows what to do with them. Happy-fun ball is neither happy nor fun nor a ball. Discuss.

posted by Maetenloch at 11:18 PM

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