Ri Sol Ju

Thursday, Mar 29,  2018

U.S. graphics processing unit producer Nvidia suspends all its tests of self-driving cars. (The Verge)

Uber reaches a lawsuit settlement with the victim’s family of an autonomous vehicle. (Reuters)

Claims emerge that Uber had disabled Volvo’s collision avoidance technology in the self-driving car involved in a fatal accident in Arizona. (Bloomberg)

The United States National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) launches a probe into a Tesla electric car crash and fire in California. The NTSB says it will investigate issues firefighters had trying to determine how to respond. (Bloomberg)

Date set for meeting between leaders of North and South Korea South Korean President Moon Jae-in and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un will hold a summit on April 27, South Korea announced Thursday. High-level officials from both countries set up the meeting during talks in the border village of Panmunjom, and the Koreas plan to hold a second preparatory meeting on April 4. South Korean Unification Minister Cho Myoung-gyon said there was a “sufficient exchange of opinions” on the agendas of the April 27 summit, but didn’t provide a clear answer on whether Pyongyang’s nuclear program will be among the items Kim and Moon discuss. The leaders of South and North Korea have only held talks twice since the 1950-53 Korean War — once in 2000 and again in 2007. Source: Bloomberg, The Associated Press

Trump ousts VA Secretary David Shulkin President Trump announced Wednesday on Twitter that he has ousted Veterans Affairs Secretary David Shulkin. Shulkin had been widely rumored to be on the outs, as his department has been consumed by internecine fighting and lack of direction. “I appreciate the work of Dr. David Shulkin and the many great things we did together at Veterans Affairs,” Trump said in a statement accompanying his tweet. Trump announced he would nominate Rear Adm. Ronny Jackson, who currently serves as the presidential physician, as Shulkin’s replacement; Robert Wilkie, an undersecretary in the Department of Defense, will serve until Jackson receives Senate confirmation. Source: NBC News, The Washington Post

Baseball returns with historic all-team opening day Baseball returns Thursday with an all-team opening day, the first of its kind since 1968, when there were just 20 Major League Baseball franchises. Although 15 games were scheduled for Thursday as to make for an appearance of all 30 teams, the Cincinnati Reds and the Washington Nationals have preemptively postponed their game until Friday due to “impending inclement weather” in Ohio, so only 28 baseball teams will ultimately play. The marathon otherwise kicks off at 12:30 p.m. ET when the Chicago Cubs face the Miami Marlins. The 2017 World Series Champions, the Houston Astros, will play the Texas Rangers at 3:30 p.m. ET in Arlington, and games will continue on through 10:10 p.m. ET when the last, between the Colorado Rockies and the Arizona Diamondbacks, begins in Phoenix. Source: The Ringer, SB Nation

 

Wednesday,  Mar 28,  2018

Mubarak al-Ajji, named on a Qatari official list of wanted terrorists, wins second place at a government-sponsored triathlon and is photographed at the medal ceremony. (The Week)

 The United Arab Emirates, with help from Korea Electric Power Corp., completes construction of the first reactor complex at the Barakah nuclear power plant 50 km west of Ruwais. The complex is the first Arab nuclear power plant. (The Mercury News)

The governments of China and North Korea both confirm that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un met with Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing during the past four days. China states that North Korea is “committed to denuclearization” and willing to hold a summit with the United States. (Reuters)

More After The Fold

Moral Vacuum

Freedom for the Speech We Hate
ANDREW NAPOLITANO • AUGUST 17, 2017 • 1,000 WORDS

 

Hate is the New Sex
by John Michael Greer

If you have any doubts concerning this, dear reader, observe the way that the same people who were sporting LOVE TRUMPS HATE bumper stickers a year ago talk about Donald Trump and his supporters today. Back in January of 2016, when I first predicted Trump’s victory, I pointed out that if you wanted to hear really over-the-top hate speech, all you had to do was listen to a group of comfortably well-to-do Americans in the bicoastal urban bubble talk about white working class Americans in the flyover states. That’s become even more true now than it was then. Take the rhetoric currently being flung by well-off Democratic voters at Trump supporters, swap out the ethnic labels for any other set you choose, and you’ll have a hard time telling it apart from the rantings of any other group of bigots.

 

Ann Coulter: When Liberals Club People, It’s with Love in Their Hearts

And let’s recall the response of Hillary Clinton to the horrifying murder of five Dallas cops last year. The woman who ran against Trump displayed all the moral blindness currently being slanderously imputed to him.

In an interview on CNN about the slaughter that had taken place roughly 12 hours earlier, Hillary barely paused to acknowledge the five dead officers — much less condemn the shooting — before criticizing police for their “implicit bias” six times in about as many minutes.

 

If We’re Tearing Down White Supremacy, Start With Planned Parenthood
AUGUST 15, 2017
By Daniel Payne

It is also in killing black people that Planned Parenthood really shines. Around 941 black babies are aborted in this country every day. Planned Parenthood, netting more than a third of the abortion market in the country, is responsible for 329 of those daily deaths. That averages out to a little more than 120,000 black abortions at Planned Parenthood per year, or around a third of the total abortions the organization performs—this from a demographic that makes up about 13 percent of the United States population. According to the Guttmacher Institute, black women get abortions at five times the rate of white women.

If you were a white supremacist who wanted to sharply reduce the black population to make way for more whites, what would you be doing differently than Planned Parenthood?

Nothing, as it turns out. Spencer, the lily-white organizer of the infamous tiki-torch protest in Charlottesville last week, is a proponent of legalized abortion, precisely because it does very well the thing Spencer is most enthusiastic about, i.e. reducing the number of black people in the United States. “I would say that it is the unintelligent and blacks and Hispanics who use abortion as birth control,” Spencer says, favorably, while also speaking poorly of “people who think in terms of human rights,” i.e. pro-lifers.

 

Smoke and Fire
Clusterfuck Nation
by James Howard Kunstler
08.14.2017

The “Antifa” movement would be funny if it wasn’t itself prone to violence, since it espouses exactly the same kind of despotism against free thought that it pretends to fight against. It wants to shut down and stamp out debate in the public arena and trample over principles that make it uncomfortable, for instance, the First Amendment asserting the right to free speech. It makes a mockery of the battle cry for “diversity” (diversity only for Antifa-approved ideas). That so many current college students subscribe to the movement ought to make thoughtful people very uneasy about the politics of the coming generation. In their black battle garb and masks, they resemble the very fascist mobs of the 1930s that the name “Antifa” supposedly evokes as its enemy.

 

Al Gore’s Pivot to Idiocy

 

White-On-White Riots: A Theory

They need an absolution of guilt. They need there to be a moral code, so they can perform the appropriate rites and make themselves pure. Without it, there’s no metric at all that allows them to say — even to themselves — whether they’re good people. And there’s a lot of evidence against it. Like those homeless people you keep passing on the street.

The shrill protestations of commitment to the code just speak to how steep the dropoff is. Because behind it, in our society, there is nothing but a moral vacuum.

 

 

 

Corpse Left Hanging from Overpass As Cartel War Rages in Mexico

 

Sacrificing Smart Asians to Keep the Racial Peace
ROBERT WEISSBERG • AUGUST 16, 2017 • 1,500 WORDS

In effect, racial preferences in elite higher education (and beneficiaries includes students, professors and the diversity-managing administrators) separates the top 10% measured in cognitive ability from their more violent down market racial compatriots. While this manufactured caste-like arrangement hardly guarantees racial peace (as the black-on-white crime rate, demonstrates) but it pretty much dampens the possibility of more collective, well-organized related upheavals, the types of disturbances that truly terrify the white establishment. Better to have the handsomely paid Cornel West pontificating about white racism at Princeton where he is a full professor than fulminating at some Ghetto street corner. This status driven divide just reflects human nature. Why would a black Yalie on Wall Street socialize with the bro’s left behind in the Hood? This is the strategy of preventing a large-scale, organized rebellion by decapitating its potential leadership. Violence is now just Chicago or Baltimore-style gang-banger intra-racial mayhem or various lone-wolf criminal attacks on whites.

 

Nuclear-Powered Cars, Tesla, Gore, Solar Power, Elon Musk, and More
A Broad Spectrum Column
FRED REED • AUGUST 10, 2017 • 1,100 WORDS

Humans

Reading Philip K. Dick’s Blade Runner on the train this morning. I want to get pastries in Chinatown so I ride all the way to South Station. During the 5 minutes at about 5 miles an hour between Back Bay Station and South Station I’m considering androids obviously and my mind drifts to robot cars and what I frequently think of on this stretch of track. I think about how in 2017 ( I’ve been having these thoughts since about 2011) with all this technology – still – when one is waiting for the Commuter Rail line train at Back Bay Station at night, after say 10pm or 9pm on weekends, and there is no human in either the Commuter Rail office or the Amtrak window – when the train is late leaving South Station (the source and only 5 minutes and half a mile away) – one literally has no idea and no way of finding out if the train even exists.

This problem comes up the buses and subway, particularly the Green-line, but is more complicated and there are actually reliable apps now that give the excact locations of buses and trolleys. For years the MBTA refused to put GPS transponders on Green-line trains. One time an inspector at the front of a car thought I was a tourist and made some hokey comment like I was a 12-year-old from Idaho and I was like,”actually, I have a question…” When he gave me some canned response I let him have my theory with both barrels in like 30 seconds. No response. I must have been spot on. I don’t go to those community forum things that the MBTA has. I’ll wait and ambush you.

German Village, Dugway Proving Ground

The Commuter Rail line, MBCR (Metropolitan Boston Commuter Rail), is now run by a company called Keolis. It is generally very reliable and I am not going to go into my love for public transportation in Boston here, but the fact is that The Commuter Rail has been dealing with financial and public relations issues for some time and in the last couple years it seems like several times a week if not every weekday Keolis has between 5 and 10 staff standing in everybody’s way at Back Bay Station as we try to hustle to work between 6 and 9am. Try to find an MBTA employee at Copley or Park Street when your pass doesn’t work. The kids know this. Even the foreigners. I’ve seen 10 German college kids piggy-back fare-jump at Copley Saturday at noon in the summer. You could probably get away with murder in an MBTA station. Ostensibly these customer service types are there to answer questions and take comments and feedback on MBCR performance. But at this time and place the commuters have all arrived at their destination and know what they are doing – they don’t need help or information and talking to a customer service know-nothing is the last thing they want to do or have time for.

Yet I have stood on the platform at Back Bay Station at 12:05 am, on Sunday night/Monday morning in February, when the privately run server that tracks the train GPS transponders goes offline like it does every night at midnight, waiting for my 11:25pm train, freezing, not knowing if I was ever going to get home, and not even knowing if the train existed at South Station. No customer service people, no number to call. If I was at South Station I would hunt down the Track Master or whatever-the-hell they are called, but they don’t work for Keolis, so frequently they have no idea what is up. And also, we are not at South Station. I have observed this issue for years along with dozens of other passengers. It is mind-boggling that it still exists in 2017. When you mention these issues to the customer service people they literally have no idea what you are talking about. Because they don’t care and have no incentive to care.

This doesn’t just seem like an easy problem to fix – it is a simple problem to fix. But it won’t be fixed. Because it would involve having a person who was in possession of a brain in a management position. Wouldn’t it be smarter to have one person on duty who knew where all the trains were, in radio contact with the engineers, and the ability to communicate that information to the public – broadcast that information – when people need it – rather than employ an army of customer service rookies to not field complaints because we are trying to get to work?

I’d like to see Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos work on improving and expanding public transportation instead of pushing social media and drone-delivery in the future on Mars.

Have not heard much hype in the news cycle about robot cars recently. At least, I haven’t noticed. More and more I think the “push” for driverless cars is not coming from any particular need for them, to save us from gasoline or ourselves or something (although this is what certain entities want us to believe, I believe). I think it comes from a subtly desperate search for an avenue of economic growth for the corporations. This is an empire in decline. Smart-phones were the last big thing. So they are still the big-thing, I guess is what I’m trying to say. Smart-phones happened in 2007. 10 years. Nothing new since then. Capitalism, the Empire, needs a new toy. Something shiny to distract the slaves from their predicament.

There does not appear to be a product ready. Sure, we hear all the time about the presence of fully autonomous vehicles on the road and the thousands of miles and hours they have logged without being involved in any accidents, etc. And how the only accidents they are involved in are somehow always attributable to human error. But what has always puzzled me is why the corporations have not built a large-scale mock-up of a town/city road system complete with high-speed, highway-like stretches and every conceivable traffic and road-layout scenario incorporated into it. Somewhere out in the Nevada desert. This could be populated with hundreds of fully autonomous vehicles, maybe a couple thousand, and then everybody could observe where the bugs are and if millions of these things on the roads is a good idea right now.

I’m thinking something like the Japanese and German villages Curtis LeMay built at Dugway Proving Grounds. But way bigger. Let the car companies pay for it. Investors would be dying to get involved. Trump could sell this idea. You could make it a reality show. A competition. Anything you want. The Future.

My hunch is that a big reason this hasn’t happened yet is because the corporations know this would shine a light on the reality that the technology is not there yet. The whole Wizard of Oz thing.

***

What If Hitler Had Invaded Britain?

 

DUNKIRK: “People Should be Hung from Lampposts, They Should be Burned Alive, for What They’ve Done to Britain”

 

 

Sour Grapes

05.15.2017

The Russia Hacking Fiasco: No Evidence Required
MIKE WHITNEY • MAY 12, 2017 • 1,100 WORDS

Because Donald Trump had the audacity to win an election that was earmarked for establishment favorite and globalist warmonger-in-chief, Hillary Clinton. That’s what this witch hunt is all about, sour grapes.

But why has Russia been chosen as the target in this deep state-media scam? What has Russia done to deserve all the negative press and unsupported claims of criminal meddling?

That’s easy. Just look at a map. For the last 16 years, the US has been rampaging across North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. Washington intends to control critical oil and natural gas reserves in the ME, establish military bases across Central Asia, and remain the dominant player in an area of that is set to become the most populous and prosperous region of the world. It’s the Great Game all over again, only this time-around, Uncle Sam is in the drivers seat not the Queen of England.

But one country has upset that plan, blocked that plan, derailed that plan.

Russia.

 

My New Book: A Safe and Happy Place
by James Howard Kunstler
May 15th, 2017

 

Indianapolis Man, High on Meth, Cut Off His Genitals and Microwaved Them

 

A major Tesla bull just downgraded the stock and shares are sliding

 

How Social Darwinism Made Modern China
A thousand years of meritocracy shaped the Middle Kingdom.
RON UNZ • THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE • MARCH 11, 2013 • 8,300 WORDS

 

Coal Powered Cars

04.07.2017

Salvation? (or is the New York Times just scrapping the bottom of the barrel for Utopian scams?)

To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old

He and his team at the University of Texas at Austin filed a patent on a new kind of battery that, if it works as promised, would be so cheap, lightweight and safe that it would revolutionize electric cars and kill off petroleum-fueled vehicles. His announcement has caused a stir, in part, because Dr. Goodenough has done it before. In 1980, at age 57, he coinvented the lithium-ion battery that shrunk power into a tiny package.

Lithium-Ion Battery Inventor Introduces New Technology for Fast-Charging, Noncombustible Batteries
Feb. 28, 2017

Transportation?

Coal-Powered Cars

 

 

The Allure of the DC Streetcar
By NATHANIEL KOCH • April 4, 2017

Living Arrangements?

How Tourism Is Killing Venice
By LEWIS MCCRARY • April 3, 2017

Art?

Damien Hirst Is Back With an Underwater Fantasy. Will Collectors Care?

Treason?

Blackwater founder Erik Prince is the latest Trump cutout to parlay with Putin’s men

Armageddon?

The head of the world’s largest investor thinks the stock market is overvalued

“We don’t have the tax reform that we’re expecting,” Fink said. “If we don’t see a true deregulation, I think the markets would have some setbacks there.”

He added that the US economy was slowing down and would probably grow by less than 1.5%. “In fact, I think the first quarter, the US may be the slowest economy in the G-7,” he said.

“If you believe that it would be longer for these to transpire and we have an economy that is slower because of uncertainty, then I would say the market is, the US equity markets are probably higher than they should be,” Fink added.

The Trump Administration Goes Neocon-Crazy
THE SAKER • APRIL 5, 2017 • 2,100 WORDS

Air cover for the US forces in Syria imply either a tacit agreement with the Russians and the Syrians, something like what the Israelis apparently have, or an immense risk for the USAF and USN aircraft. So we are back to negotiating with the Russians and via the Russians, with the Syrians.

In fact, I bet you that this is what the Americans are doing right now. Quietly negotiating with the Russians. Problem: the Neocons hate Russia and everything Russian. And they loathe Putin.

Russia says their air defenses in Syria ‘guarantee the security’ of their airbases

Conspiracy with and Without Conspirators
KAREL VAN WOLFEREN • APRIL 5, 2017 • 3,600 WORDS

Bombs Away!
– JHK

Close your eyes, click your heels three times, and tell me if you actually know what the fuck is happening in Syria. There’s an awful lot about the poison gas attack that doesn’t add up for the casual observer. It was only a week ago that the US enunciated a new policy that we would be content for Bashar al Assad to remain in power presiding over the Syrian government — after years of grousing and threats against him. Apparently Trump Central had concluded that Assad was a better alternative than another failed state in the Middle East with no government at all.

Cash Me Outside How Bow Dah

Since When Is Being a Woman a Liberal Cause?
By SUSAN CHIRA

Clusterfuck Nation – Made For Each Other

There are too many fault lines in the mighty edifice of our accounting fraud for the global banking system to keep limping along, to keep pretending it can meet its obligations. These fault lines run through the bond markets, the stock markets, the banks themselves at all levels, the government offices that pretend to regulate spending, the offices that affect to report economic data, the offices that neglect to regulate criminal misconduct, the corporate boards and C-suites, the insurance companies, the pension funds, the guarantors of mortgages, car loans, and college loans, and the ratings agencies. The pervasive accounting fraud bleeds a criminal ethic into formerly legitimate enterprises like medicine and higher education, which become mere rackets, extracting maximum profits while skimping on delivery of the goods.

Tesla is enjoying an epic stock surge

How Corporate Media Paved the Way for Trump’s Muslim Ban

‘New Atheist’ Islamophobia

Bill Maher is a fan of Bernie Sanders, a huge Obama booster and a frequent subject of write-ups on liberal websites for his latest dig aimed at Republicans. Maher is also a pro-war ideologue with a long history of bigoted statements about Muslims.

On his popular HBO show Real Time, Maher has repeatedly railed against Muslim immigration into Europe and the United States. He once declared that “civilization begins with civilizing the men; talk to women who’ve ever dated an Arab man. The results are not good.” Maher has repeatedly downplayed the killing of Palestinians in Gaza, even once comparing Hamas to a “crazy woman” whose wrists you could only hold “so long before you have to slap her.”