Apparently actually a Su-27 Russian Knights Aerobatic Demonstration Team photo. The missiles are photoshopped in, the plane has been launching flares as a tribute to Flight Leader Igor Talachenko who was killed in a mid-air collision a week earlier.
This image was even more extravagantly photoshopped here.
Blaming the filmmaker offered liberals the chance to affirm that reactionaries and bigots are the source of much of the world’s troubles. Therefore, jailing Mr. Nakoula was loud validation of the Obama Administration’s progressive, multicultural bona fides, and proof that Obama has zero tolerance for such “hate speech.†That narrative became important for practical reasons as well: did the Administration really wish to defend itself from the charge that it had arrested and jailed Nakoula on a trumped up parole violation when his video had nothing to do with violence in Libya? Moreover, by blaming a filmmaker, the administration de facto conceded that some sort of unjustified provocation had occurred, as if reactionary “hate speech†earns retribution that falls on the innocent.
There is an enormous amount of theorizing about what the “real story†behind Benghazi really is. To me it’s always been obvious. The White House was caught off guard — for reasons stemming both from ideology and incompetence — on September 11, 2012. As they have after virtually every other (jihadist) terrorist attack on Americans, they acted as if it had absolutely nothing to do with them. As with the Times Square bomber, the Fort Hood shooter, and other Islamist assaults, there’s always some other reason for the bloodshed, some attempt to claim, at least for a while, that this was an “isolated incident†with no broader implications for the War on Terror or Obama’s foreign policy. Admittedly, even this White House understood that spinning the Benghazi attack as an isolated incident wasn’t going to work (such intense spinning could risk irreparable scrotal torsion). So they went with the story about the video. …
Of course, the White House and its defenders insist that they really believed the video was to blame. This strikes me as a lie, for the most part, if not initially than certainly over time. But even if that’s true, that’s no exoneration. As I said, there was a mix of incompetence and ideology at work. As an ideological matter, that this White House could convince itself for hours — never mind weeks — that this terror attack was all about the video is incredibly damning, if true. And, as I argue in my column today, the fact that the once-proud champions of civil liberties under George W. Bush were perfectly happy to throw the First Amendment under the bus is even more damning.
Given that the Benghazi attack came during the thick of the presidential election, it’s no surprise that the White House’s political and ideological instincts overpowered everything else. It’s no surprise, either, that the press’s instincts pointed in the same direction. It’s really non-surprises for as far as the eye can see.
Obviously there are still some unknowns worth knowing, and they might be surprising — like the exact details of how and why the response was so non-responsive. Just because the White House and State Department were unprepared shouldn’t mean that the professional military was too. The exact nexus between the political screw-up and the military’s failure to “run to the sound of gunfire†hasn’t been established. Ditto, the question of “What the hell was Barack Obama even doing that night?â€
Kristian Niemietz argues that political correctness constitutes what economists call “a positional good,” i.e., one differentiating you from others and defining your place in the social hierarchy.
PC-brigadiers behave exactly like owners of a positional good who panic because wider availability of that good threatens their social status. The PC brigade has been highly successful in creating new social taboos, but their success is their very problem. Moral superiority is a prime example of a positional good, because we cannot all be morally superior to each other. Once you have successfully exorcised a word or an opinion, how do you differentiate yourself from others now? You need new things to be outraged about, new ways of asserting your imagined moral superiority.
You can do that by insisting that the no real progress has been made, that your issue is as real as ever, and just manifests itself in more subtle ways. Many people may imitate your rhetoric, but they do not really mean it, they are faking it, they are poseurs (here’s a nice example). You can also hugely inflate the definition of an existing offense (plenty of nice examples here.) Or you can move on to discover new things to label ‘offensive’, new victim groups, new patterns of dominance and oppression.
If I am right, then Political Correctness is really just a special form of conspicuous consumption, leading to a zero-sum status race. The fact that PC fans are still constantly outraged, despite the fact that PC has never been so pervasive, would then just be a special form of the Easterlin Paradox.
Chinese construction firms can 3-D print 10 low-cost houses a day with machines that add layer after layer of quick-drying cement in a process called “contour crafting”.
A private company in east China recently used a giant printer set to print out ten full-sized houses within just one day.
The stand-alone one-story houses in the Shanghai Hi-Tech Industrial Park look just like ordinary buildings. They were created using an intelligent printing array in east China’s city of Suzhou.
The array consists of four printers that are 10 meters wide and 6.6 meters high and use multi-directional automated sprays. The sprays emit a combination of cement and construction waste that is used to print building walls layer-by-layer.
Ma Yihe, the inventor of the printers, said he and his team are especially proud of their core technology of quick-drying cement. Ma said he hopes his printers can be used to build skyscrapers in the future.
This technology allows for the printed material to dry rapidly. Ma has been cautious not to reveal the secrets of this technology.
1. Given that the film is being directed by Abrams, it’s tempting to say that the director will treat his source material about as gently as he treated Star Trek when he rebooted the franchise. In that case, the dude literally ripped a hole in the space-time continuum and created an alternate timeline that he could fuck around in. Still, the presence of the original cast suggests this probably won’t happen, unless Abrams has brought them back as a red herring to appease fans, giving them cameo appearances (he did this with Leonard Nimoy in Star Trek) before veering wildly off in his own direction, creating an effective but ultimately bland sci-fi action movie that happens to contain elements of the Star Wars universe. The plot to this nonexistent movie would feature a Jedi academy helmed by all of the characters from the original movies and resemble the Harry Potter books crossed with Die Hard 7 or whatever, but in space, with an unnecessary Ewok scene. That would fucking suck and be the final nail in the coffin of a franchise whose coffin already has a healthy number of nails in it. In this version of the new Star Wars, the dude from Girls personally kills every original cast member in the first scene.
2. It’s possible, if not probable, that Abrams will choose to adapt some of the reams of available source material from the Star Wars Expanded Universe, such as The New Jedi Order or Legacy of the Force novels—which are dense, convoluted, and not very fun to read. While pleasing fans nerdy enough to have powered through these books, if Abrams chooses this path Star Wars: Episode VII won’t make much money, as most people are not going to be all “Hell fucking yes! Give me some Ganner Rhysode!” The plot would resemble one of the Star Trek movies that they let William Shatner direct crossed with one of the episodes of The Wire that is devoted to union politics, and will feature a 30-minute scene in which Luke Skywalker, now head of the Jedi Council, debates Bantha domestication policy with Han Solo as well as a character played by the boyfriend on Girls. I would watch the shit out of this movie.
3. The dream scenario: Abrams miraculously doesn’t fuck it up and comes up with an original story that pays homage to the truly great things the Star Wars movies have accomplished and the good parts of Lucas’s legacy while not getting bogged down in the minutiae that tends to plague well-loved franchises with annoying, protective fan bases. This movie would allow each original cast member to have a significant role in the film while also managing a seamless torch-passing between them and the next generation of Star Wars actors. The plot of this film would resemble that of a Kurosawa movie, there would be zero Ewoks or Jedi academies, and the dude from Girls would die in, like, the third scene.
Since this world is deeply unfair, the new Star Wars will probably somehow manage to combine the most disappointing elements of scenarios one and two, causing sadness. Good luck, J. J. Abrams!
The Pentagon plans to destroy more than $1 billion worth of ammunition although some of those bullets and missiles could still be used by troops, according to the Pentagon and congressional sources.
It’s impossible to know what portion of the arsenal slated for destruction — valued at $1.2 billion by the Pentagon — remains viable because the Defense Department’s inventory systems can’t share data effectively, according to a Government Accountability Office report obtained by USA TODAY.
The result: potential waste of unknown value.
“There is a huge opportunity to save millions, if not billions of dollars if the (Pentagon) can make some common-sense improvements to how it manages ammunition,” said Sen. Tom Carper, D-Del., and chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. “Despite years of effort, the Army, Navy and Air Force still don’t have an efficient process for doing something as basic as sharing excess bullets. This Government Accountability Office (GAO) report clearly shows that our military’s antiquated systems lead to millions of dollars in wasteful ammunition purchases.”
The Army and Pentagon, in a statement, acknowledged “the need to automate the process” and will make it a priority in future budgets. In all, the Pentagon manages a stockpile of conventional ammunition worth $70 billion.
I don’t know about missiles, but I seriously doubt that any ammunition manufactured from the Vietnam era onward is not going to fire. I have myself inherited or purchased old rounds produced long before WWII, and all of them fired just fine with the single exception of a box of 9mm rimfire solids (which probably dated back to before WWI).
Why not just offer the cartridges, with a disclaimer, at bargain prices to the American public via the Civilian Marksmanship Program?
