Landlocked Russia needs a buffer kingdom

George Friedman maps the tight spot Russia is in.  All her productive assets, her good farms and industries are in south and east end of their seemingly endless empire.  The rest of the country has little value. 
The only way to trade with the world is through three narrow bottlenecks that her enemies can stopper.   There is no great barrier of mountains or sea to hold off armed Europeans.  She is always going to be poorer than her competitors who are rich in ports and she is always going to feel vulnerable without a buffer of client states.  See Friedman's story here.

Syria is a sideline.  The Ukraine and the trio of Baltic states will always be the main prize.

Why God Made Canadians

"God did not make us to stand patiently in queues and politely clap for our leaders no matter how distant, corrupt, and dismissive. That's why he made Canadians."

Ace of Spades says it's time to be unruly in America and vote out clientist GOP nominees.

I've stood on a deserted street corner at 2 a.m. in Toronto, waiting for the green light to walk. But the part about "corrupt" isn't true.

Source

Saving for a re-tread instead of saving for retirement:

The singularity is arriving.  Your own stem cells and plug-and-play gene edits are about to transform what it means to be old.  Retirement won't mean what it used to mean. You can earn more if you want.  You can also run out of savings before you run out of days.  We'll be the guinea pigs.

Evidence:  Multiple Sclerosis victims conquer the disease with their own stem cells.  "Since we started treating patients three years ago, some of the results we have seen have been miraculous. This is not a word I would use lightly, but we have seen profound neurological improvements."

Evidence: Diabetic mice saved with insulin stem cells. "Scientists have successfully converted human skin cells into fully-functional pancreatic cells. The new cells produced insulin in response to changes in glucose levels, and, when transplanted into mice, the cells protected the animals from developing diabetes in a mouse model of the disease."

Evidence:  Macular degeneration reversible with stem cells?  The blind will see again.

From an earlier post, "The Blind Shall See"   New liver and lung tissue, new pituitary and eyeballs. And more.     Stem cells converted to mice semen resulted in live mouse births.

This is happening in our day.  We have lived to see it. 
I'm interested in a re-tread with fresh skin, a soft cornea with 20-20 vision, but perhaps I'll keep the thinned hair which looks distinguished and is easy to shampoo.

Source

Flab zapper: Is there really a fast safe way to lose fat?

The Daily Mail article holds out hope. A half hour treatment with laser energy to raise the near-surface fat cells temperature by about 5 degrees is enough to kill off 25% of them.  No surgery involved.   Over the following weeks, your body digests and removes the unsave-able tissue.

 

Hmm.  It's easy to imagine the perfect fat fix and hard to come up with a real (other than diet) but this sounds promising.

Moslems who believe in magic blame the West for Islamic Terrorism.

From Strategy Page

Interviews with refugees from the fighting in Iraq and Syria as well as people still in those countries shows that over 80 percent believe the Islamic terrorists .... are creations of the West .... as a means to destroy their countries and Islam. This is nothing new and while all this is unbelievable to most Westerners and largely ignored by Western media and politicians it is very real and has been for a long time.

In the Islamic world, there is a lot of attention paid to sorcery and magic, and people accused of practicing such things are regularly attacked and sometimes executed because “sorcery” is a capital crime under Islamic law. Conspiracy theories are also a popular way to explain away inconvenient facts. 

in 2008 many Pakistanis believed ...the Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai, India was actually the work of the Israeli Mossad or the American CIA and not the Pakistani terrorists who were killed or captured and identified. Such fantasies are a common explanation, in Moslem nations, for Islamic terrorist atrocities. Especially when Moslems, particularly women and children are among the victims. In response many Moslems tend to accept fantastic explanations shifting the blame to infidels (non-Moslems).

The "inshallah" thing is made worse by a stronger belief in the supernatural and magic in general. This often extends to technology. Thus, many Iraqis believed that American troops wore sunglasses that enabled them to see through clothing, and had armor vests that were actually air conditioned. When they first encountered these beliefs, U.S. troops thought the Arabs were putting them on. Then it sank in that Arabs really believe this stuff.   ..  Even Western educated Arabs, speaking good English, will casually express, and accept, these tales of the Israeli Mossad staging the attacks

When troops at one base discovered that they weren't being attacked much because many of the locals believed that the base was surrounded by a force field the troops would casually make reference to their force field. They would do this inside the base if any Iraqis were nearby and especially when they were outside the wire and among the locals.

Canada needs a Trump, not the Son of somebody.

Our culture is seizing up. The cream on top likes it and the milk on bottom hates it.  A Trump presidency will have more hands-on popular outcomes and fewer proxy fights where the players hide behind lawfare and PC interest group puppets.  It won't be what you call conservative but it will be a damn fine and overdue breath of fresh air.  He's no deep thinker and his positions will pivot to what works. He may just make America Great again.

"Lion rampant".  Neither donkey nor elephant.

And BTW, Mexico will pay for part of a wall.  There's not enough outrage down there to say flat out, "NO".  There'll be a face-saving way in which money spent in a related area will defray part of the cost of a wall and maybe that wall won't be complete, but it will still shift the illegal numbers down.

Lose weight by finding the Cheat Calories and using a shortcut to count. UPDATE

3500 uncounted calories is a pound you gained.
Every time I go off counting, I get bigger.
Every time I go back to counting, I get smaller.
Counting is so picky, I hate it, but I found two helps.

1.  Use a shortcut list that lets me estimate without weighing every ingredient.
2.  Find the cheat calories and measure them.

First:
FIND THE CHEAT CALORIES.
Cheat 1:    I was eating less but I kept gaining.  Then I clued that I wasn't counting my coffee because it's just liquid, sort of like flavoured water.   WRONG.  I was putting 35% whipping cream and heaped up sugar into every cup about ten times a day while at work.   About 75 calories per cuppa.  This was good for a pound a week weight gain.   I forced myself to drink it black most of the time, found it wasn't so bad, and lost weight.  Even got accustomed to the taste after a while.    Hassle fix:  Eliminate the cheat calories so you don't have to count.

Cheat 2:  The next time my belly bulged, I was puzzled until I spotted the cheat.  I had taken to having little shots of Drambuie through the afternoon and evening, usually just a sip.  How could a little bit of liquid make me fat?   High alcohol drinks are the equivalent of drinking half water and half liquid fat.  I started measuring the booze and my weight went down again. I also sip a little less, now that I know a sip of the golden liqueur is like swallowing fat.  Hassle fix:  I weigh the entire bottle at day's end and count just once what I drank.

Check this newer post for a cheat sheet.

"That's our boy". Political success has many fathers.

Trump is surely right when he says, " "I think they are warming up. I want to be honest, I have received so many phone calls from people that you would call 'establishment,' from people -- generally speaking conservative Republicans --that want to come in our team,”

Of course they do. Success has many fathers.  "That's a my boy, Trump".
He likes the stuff that other rich people like and he's winning.

Democracy, if necessary, but not necessarily democracy.

What an uproar with Trump and Sanders to our south!  Candidates popular with the people might get the most votes.  Today the National Review has rounded up pundits for a special dump Trump edition.   The common people (the usual translation of "demos") have the power to elect in Canada and the States. If you don't like it, make your case for another candidate but don't be a scold.  A lot of people think they are the cream afloat upon the voters' milk and believe it's their duty to make us vote for cream.

I used to milk a Jersey and put it
(the milk, not the cow)
in just such a jar.

Maybe the popular vote is not the best way to select leaders.  There's always the option of picking the first thousand names in the phone book for high office and contrariwise, the option to bid cash for high office.   There's the option of pre-qualifying voters by education, IQ, income or property. You can have public service exams to select the prime minister and his ministers.  You can always fall back on genetics and pick family members as we seem to have done with Trudeau II.  (Clinton II, Bush III).

As long as democracy by popular vote of all adult citizens is the law of the land, I suck it up when I don't get my way.   2016 is the year for more homogenized milk and less separation of the cream and the skim.

Copy Palin And Get Yourself Some Canadian Media Presence

Grumpy because media folk are locked to the left and think they are the only reasonable ones? I've seen a lot of advice to invest in media, not politicians.  Guess who did that?  Sarah Palin.

Glenn Reynold's advice:  "Don't waste your money on campaign donations. Want more influence for your buck?  Buy a liberal media outlet or better yet a women's magazine."

Palin didn't buy "Elle" but she became an entertainment celebrity. She's now being trashed as a sell out but she's moving votes successfully.  Copy her, rather than mock her, in our own Canadian way.

She takes flak for being an entertainment personality.  That's better than the Obama strategy to get invited onto other people's personality shows to chill out and win "likes".  Our voters are part of a culture, not cadres in a party structure.

"For most people politics is about personality, identity, and group loyalties. This is more like rooting for a sports team than support for particular ideas, ideology, or policy. It's always has been this way and probably always will be."

It's always going to be that way.  Now that everyone can publish their opinion cheaply ( and that includes me), popular populist politicians are going to be the norm.  Politics is changing and for the better because more players are in there trying to move the market in their favour.  That's competition.

Trump is pertinent to Canada because our PM is on record mocking him and the "mother country" has debated refusing him entry to Britain.  We can't operate in the American sphere without walking that back.  My mother would be shocked at such rudeness.

Trump Gets Credit For Iranian Prisoner Release?

I've been thinking this and Trump has now claimed it.
A prisoner swap is small potatoes but Obama had kept it off the table until suddenly now.
My interpretation:  Iran thinks Trump may be the next American president and they don't like the prospect of going from Obama softball to Trump hardball.  Wiping out one of Trump's planks while getting something for themselves, makes sense.

Every story is complex and the specifics of who is being released matter.  The impulse to release the prisoners, the proximate cause, may well have been triggered by Trump's ascendancy.   Remember, this was the same week Iran took American sailors at gun point and humiliated Obama.  Obviously Iran doesn't mind being disliked.  They're getting some hackers back and the US is getting some civilians back.

The Great Canadian Threat

Cruz is the "Manitoban Candidate", Goldberg observes, "hiding in plain sight until he can impose the metric system on our children and make us all passive-aggressively polite".

Source

He makes two memorable points:

"The issue (natural born citizen) remains unsettled because it matters so little",

and 

"Even less plausible than Cruz’s not being a natural-born citizen: that Donald Trump actually cares about this."

Dolts to the left of us, Dummies to the right. Which party has the smart voters?

Two studies show it depends on the topic.  One study found complex and nuanced language for topics that differ by party.

"Conservatives exhibited more complex thinking on ... open-door immigration, smoking, castration, and easy access to birth control. Liberals were complex when discussing organized religion, abortion on demand, making racial discrimination illegal, and being assertive".

A second study found dogmatism common to both left and right but the topics differed. 

The researchers report, "Conservatives are indeed more dogmatic on the religious domain; but liberals are more dogmatic on the environmental domain." 

Where are the populist candidates? Canada's behind the curve

The digital revolution means Jane and John Doe voters will publish more opinion than party poobahs.  The unintended consequence is more democracy.  The insiders' table is getting crowded by the "wrong sort" of people, but not in Canada.   "Feel The Bern" Sanders and "Build the Wall" Trump are crowding the top of the charts to our south.  Farage, Wilders, Le Pen, and various "evil right wing fringe groups" get traction elsewhere.

Pre-approved

The common element is populism, saying what a lot of voters really think.    The closest we come in Canada is Elizabeth May who is a narrowly-targeted populist, speaking to the vegetarian tin-hat brigade.  How come "This Man Is Approved By The Party" describes the leaders of the only three Canadian parties that count?  I envy the ferment across the line in the US of A.

LOL:   Don Cherry for PC lead?  
Change is on its way.   Remember, to "reform" something is simply to change its shape or form
and doesn't mean "improve".

There's more where this came from

Canadian example that Trump will win big

Four months ago, my colleague at work was choosing to vote Liberal or NDP.  Yesterday he tells me, "Trump makes a lot sense, he's the only one who tells it the way it is".  If the Canadian centre left is this easily wooed, be sure that the crossover vote from Democrats will be YUGE.  Left-to-right is not the only voting dimension.   Straight talk-vs (doublespeak and dissimulation) is a voting dimension.  What's true and workable is a third dimension but no one appears to be offering it and I probably wouldn't know it if I tripped over it.

Christianity Better For Atheists

Dawkins prefers Christian culture.   "Christianity might be a bulwark against something worse" he says.

Your Grandkids Won't Have Relatives

Big Government is baked into our future, thanks to cute babies, one per couple.

The math isn't hard.  After two generations of one-baby families, the kids of your kids will have no sisters or brothers, and no cousins, either.  And no uncles and no aunts either.

Big Government and Big Data are the new ties that bind.  They will grow and not shrink and so will the dependency on support from strangers who don't love you.  Politics is grooving to the left, fueled by demographics.

I don't see "The Waltons" or "Cheaper By The Dozen" making a comeback, but with  pink-tinted glasses, I see networks forming through social media, networks that meet needs kin groups used to meet, networks that leapfrog right over Big Government and make such top down governance a teentsy bit obsolete.

Anti Theft Device For Car

This device targets Millenials, since most active thieves are younger types.

Software counts emotions

EMOTIENT  guesses and counts the emotions of the people being recorded in real time.  Think "angry crowds"  "shoppers"  "students"  "focus group"  "negotiators".  APPLE bought this startup recently and the demo is impressive.
 
Emotient Analytics in Action from Emotient on Vimeo.