Wednesday, April 25, 2018
Watch Robots Attempt to Assemble Ikea Furniture
I can think of few tasks that most people would rather relegate to a robot than assembling Ikea furniture. I personally love assembling Scandinavian stick furniture, but I suspect I’m in a minuscule minority. There is a reason why there are dozens of YouTube videos of people attempting to assemble Ikea furniture while drunk or high, little kids and old people attempting it, and other, similar scenarios engineered for confusion, frustration, and hilarity to ensue.
We can now add robots to that undignified list.
These Ikeabots were programmed by the Control Intelligence Robot Group at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore to assemble an Ikea STEFAN chair without any human intervention. After much coding, training, subtask perfecting, and a lot of trial and error, the dual robot arms were able to...
Experts Say Trump Has Strong Position in Supreme Court’s Travel Ban Case
The nation’s highest court will hear oral arguments from both sides Wednesday in one of the most highly anticipated cases of the term.
At issue is whether President Donald Trump has broad unilateral authority to exclude foreigners to enter the United States, as a 1952 statute suggests, or whether an executive order he issued last year amounts to an unconstitutional “Muslim ban,” as opponents contend.
“The big question is, does the court look at campaign statements? And does it grant deference to the executive?” said Josh Blackman, a professor at South Texas College of Law in Houston.
Lower courts had blocked Trump’s executive order, citing the president’s December 2015 call for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration, along with other statements he made on the campaign trail and on Twitter.
But the Supreme Court in June ruled that the order — with some restrictions — could take effect while the case worked its way up the judicial ladder. Blackman said that is a good sign for the administration. Generally when the Supreme Court overturns a lower court’s injunction, he said, it means the justices also end up reversing the final decision.
“I’m pretty hopeful,” added Christopher Hajec, director of litigation at the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI). “Under our constitutional form of government, the decisions over who to let in and who to keep out are...
THE LEFTIST MEDIA’S PRO-HILLARY BIAS WAS FAR, FAR, FAR WORSE THAN WE IMAGINED
Fair point, right? Not to the leftist media, who continue to argue that Trump’s “attacks” on them threaten our democracy.
What I personally find far more threatening to our democracy is the unimaginable sycophantry toward failed Democrat presidential nominee Hillary Rodham Clinton the media practiced during the election two years ago.
Case in point: Meet Amy Chozick, a so-called “political reporter” for The New York Times who published a book Monday, “Chasing Hillary,” that recounts her experiences “chasing this luminous figure” since meeting her as a child, as reported by Kyle Smith of National Review.
In the book Chozick readily admits that she dreamed of she and Clinton trying on clothes together at a fashion retailer named Zara, readily admits that “it felt damn good” to “bask in the girl power” when Clinton won the Democrat nomination and readily admits that she found Clinton’s email scandal uninteresting and irrelevant.
Yes, of course, because who the hell cares if Clinton’s recklessness compromised the identity of a CIA informant who later wound up dead, right? RIGHT?
Chozick also admits that practically every other female leftist-media reporter felt the same way as her about their queen:
Chozick says that perhaps 18 out of 20 reporters on the Hillary beat on a typical day were women, and she makes it clear that this wasn’t an accident: The crew were excited about the prospect of what they dubbed the “FWP,” for First Woman President.
When awaiting an offer from the campaign to take a group photo with their idol, Chozick relates that the reporters excitedly chattered amongst themselves about the prospect in text messages. It doesn’t make the women look great.
Nor does it make them look great that when some pretty boy actor who supports Clinton showed up to talk to them, they started acting like horny monkeys: “[H]is ‘feral grey eyes’ caused the women ‘to abandon whatever story we were working on to flip our hair and ask useless questions.'”
It also doesn’t help their image that after Clinton lost the election, they experienced a “breakdown” and had to comfort one another with...
Bombshell: FEC Records Indicate Hillary Campaign Illegally Laundered $84 Million
Yet the mainstream media took no notice of last week’s federal court filing that exposes an $84 million money-laundering conspiracy the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign executed during the 2016 presidential election in violation of federal campaign-finance law.
That lawsuit, filed last week in a DC district court, summarizes the DNC-Clinton conspiracy and provides detailed evidence from Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings confirming the complaint’s allegations that Democrats undertook an extensive scheme to violate federal campaign limits.
From Bundling To Money Laundering
Dan Backer, a campaign-finance lawyer and attorney-of-record in the lawsuit, explained the underlying law in an article for Investor’s Business Daily: Under federal law, “an individual donor can contribute $2,700 to any candidate, $10,000 to any state party committee, and (during the 2016 cycle) $33,400 to a national party’s main account. These groups can all get together and take a single check from a donor for the sum of those contribution limits—it’s legal because the donor cannot exceed the base limit for any one recipient. And state parties can make unlimited transfer to their national party.”
This legal loophole allows “bundlers” to raise large sums of money from wealthy donors—more than $400,000 at a time—filtering the funds to the national committees. Democrats and Republicans alike exploit this tactic. But once the money reaches the national committees, other limits apply.
Suspecting the DNC had exceeded those limits, a client of Backer’s, the Committee to Defend the President, began reviewing FEC filings to determine whether there was excessive coordination between the DNC and Clinton. What Backer discovered, as he explained in an interview, was much worse. There was “extensive evidence in the Democrats’ own FEC reports, when coupled with their own public statements that demonstrated massive straw man contributions papered through the state parties, to the DNC, and then directly to Clinton’s campaign—in clear violation of federal campaign-finance law.”
On behalf of his clients, on December 15, 2017 Backer filed an 86-page complaint with the FEC, asking the FEC to commence enforcement proceedings against Hillary Clinton, her campaign and its treasurer, the DNC and its treasurer, and the participating state Democratic committees. The complaint, and an attached exhibit consisting of nearly 20 pages of Excel spreadsheets, detailed the misconduct and provided concrete evidence supporting the allegations. In short, here’s what happened and what the evidence establishes.
Think Of It Like A Shell Game With Millions Of Dollars
During the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton, the DNC, and participating state Democratic committees established the Hillary Victory Fund (HVF) as a joint fundraising committee to accept contributions from large donors, some exceeding...
The 90 Miles Mystery Box: Episode #237
You have come across a mystery box. But what is inside?
It could be literally anything from the serene to the horrific,
from the beautiful to the repugnant,
from the mysterious to the familiar.
If you decide to open it, you could be disappointed,
you could be inspired, you could be appalled.
This is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended.
You have been warned.
Tuesday, April 24, 2018
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