I WAS EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: Giant Mushroom Cloud Seen Over Beijing. “While rumors swarmed online about the cause of the unusual cloud, Chinese police arrested two internet users who said the pollution had been triggered by a chlorine leak at a chemical plant or an explosion at a steel refinery, notes The Economic Observer.”
Archive for 2012
June 17, 2012
ANOTHER GRIM MILESTONE: Politico: Obama Plays 100th Round Of Golf As President.
AT AMAZON, Blu-Ray releases under $10.
THE ASSAULT ON FREE SPEECH: McConnell warns of attempts by Obama, Media Matters to silence critics.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell called out the White House Friday for maintaining a long-standing relationship with Media Matters for America, despite the liberal group’s attempts at “driving [conservative] voices clear out of the public square.”
“It’s hard to imagine a more broadly-accepted proposition than the fact that Americans are free, above all else, to speak their minds openly and freely without fear of punishment or reprisal from government authorities,” McConnell said in a speech at the American Enterprise Institute. “Human nature being what it is, however, I think we would all have to admit that there will always be a temptation, particularly among those in power, to muffle one’s critics.”
During the speech, entitled “Growing Threats to Our First Amendment Rights,” McConnell emphasized what he views as a continuing effort by the Obama administration and its surrogates, like Media Matters, to “muffle” free speech by exposing “critics to harassment and intimidation, either by government authorities or third party allies, and that should concern every one of us.”
“The attacks on speech are legion,” said McConnell.
It does seem that way.
UPDATE: Someone tell David Axelrod.
STACY MCCAIN is not intimidated.
#BLOOMBERGFAIL: Researchers Whose Work Was Cited to Justify Bloomberg’s Large Soda Ban Explain Why it Won’t Work.
Bloomie needs to be focusing more on New York’s rat outbreak. Also, bedbugs. You know, public-health projects that actually have to do with public health, not oikophobic attacks on behavior.
FASTER, PLEASE: Cold virus hitches a ride to kill cancer: study. “In a significant step forward for the development of a potential new cancer treatment, scientists have found how a common cold virus can kill tumors and trigger an immune response, like a vaccine, when injected into the blood stream. Researchers from Britain’s Leeds University and the Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) said by hitching a ride on blood cells, the virus was protected from antibodies in the blood stream that might otherwise neutralize its cancer-fighting abilities. The findings suggest viral therapies like this, called reovirus, could be injected into the blood stream at routine outpatient appointments – like standard chemotherapy – making them potentially suitable for treating a range of cancers.”
A FATHER’S DAY cuteness roundup.
JOHN KASS: The Real Father’s Day. “If you are a dad, you know the exact date. It’s the day your kids were born, the day your flesh came into the world to confront you.”
MARK STEYN: Earthly woes mount as Obama’s rhetoric soars.
Round about this time in the election cycle, a presidential challenger finds himself on the stump and posing a simple test to voters: “Ask yourself – are you better off now than you were four years ago?”
But, in fact, you don’t need to ask yourself, because the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances has done it for you. Between 2007 and 2010, Americans’ median net worth fell 38.8 percent – or from $126,400 per family to $77,300 per family. Oh, dear. As I mentioned a few months ago, when readers asked me to recommend countries they could flee to, most of the countries worth fleeing to Americans can no longer afford to live in. . . .
Self-pity is never an attractive quality, and in an elected head of state even less so. Obama whines that his opponents say it’s all his fault. One can argue about whose fault it is, but not, as my colleagues at National Review pointed out, whose responsibility it is: It’s his. He’s the only president we have. And he made things worse. He increased the national debt by some 70 percent, and what do we have to show for it? No dams, no railroads, no moon shots. Just government, and bureaucracy, and regulation, unto national bankruptcy.
Read the whole thing.
A TALE OF TWO PHOTOS: Romney Campaign Bus vs. DNC’s Romney Roadshow. “Mr. Woodhouse will never learn that he should not compare sizes, will he? At least he finally had the self-awareness to not call it ‘awesome’ this time.”
SITZPINKLERS: Stop stand-up urination for men, Swedish politicians urge. And people wonder why Europe is in decline. . . .
THE INSTAWIFE ON YOUNG WOMEN IN BIKINIS: “Men being attracted to women of this age is called normal.” But lots of people don’t want men to be normal.
AT AMAZON, warehouse deals on TV & Video.
FORMER OBAMA ECONOMIC ADVISER AUSTAN GOOLSBEE: President Obama Needs To Say “Mea Culpa.”
EDITORIAL: Student Loans Need Reform. Looks like Brian Tamanaha’s loan-capping idea is getting some traction. So is the proposal to put some of the responsibility for defaulted student loans onto colleges.
Meanwhile, here’s a review of Tamanaha’s new book, Failing Law Schools.
RODNEY KING DEAD AT 47, according to TMZ.
FROZEN MICE: 40 years later, Peter Mazur’s remarkable achievement seems all the more remarkable.
On June 17, 1972, Mazur and his colleagues celebrated the birth of the first mammals from early embryos that had been frozen to -321 degrees Fahrenheit in their cryogenic research lab and thawed for implantation into a foster mother. The newborn mouse pups made the cover of Science magazine four months later, when the research results were published, and Mazur and his Oak Ridge National Laboratory research partner, Stanley Leibo, and British collaborator David Whittingham were the toast of the biology community and beyond.
Successfully freezing and thawing embryos was an extraordinarily delicate procedure that had generally been met with failure by cryobiologists who’d theorized about the best techniques and experimented with various solutions to preserve the embyroys and prevent the formation of ice — a lethal flaw — during the process. . . .
The 84-year-old scientist, a research professor at the University of Tennessee for the past 13 years, walked at a brisk gait earlier this week as he showed me and a photographer to his office — jammed with volumes of research papers, his own and others — and shared some diagrams and descriptions of those 1970s experiments and reprint of the Oct. 27, 1972 issue of Science.
“It was a big deal,” Mazur said, recalling the excitement of the time. . . .
Mazur noted that six years after their paper was published in Science, Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards reported in the medical journal Lancet the birth of a child resulting from in vitro fertilization of a human oocyte (unfertilized egg). Edwards was awarded the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for that work.
“The combination of procedures of IVF, embryo transfer and embryo cryopreservation has led to an explosion in the use of assisted reproduction applied to humans as well as to laboratory, and domestic and wild animals,” Mazur wrote.
According to stats provided by Leibo, in the past 20 years there have been at least 2 million live calves born all the world from cryopreserved cattle embryos. The same procedure has also been used to preserve embryos of at least 25 other mammalian species.
In the case of humans, from 2005 to 2009 in the United States, more than 37,000 pregnancies were produced by transfer of cryopreserved human embryos.
Now we take that stuff for granted.
NOBODY TELL ANDREW SULLIVAN: Ukraine Tries to Sober Up Its Bears for Euro Soccer.
TEN RICH DADS who don’t think their kids deserve their money.
THEODORE DALRYMPLE: Is Grief Always Depression? The American Psychiatric Association thinks so. “Has no one in the APA read Hamlet? . . . The APA seems to view loving relationships as the British working class used to view teeth: better not to have any, since they only give you trouble in the end.”
CHANGE: Roberto Unger, Obama’s Former Harvard Law School Professor, Says The President ‘Must Be Defeated.’ “His policy is financial confidence and food stamps.”
The funny thing is, Unger’s a big lefty but most of his list of complaints could pretty much come from a Tea Partier.
UPDATE: When I think of Unger, I always think of Arthur Allen Leff’s Memorandum From The Devil, which was written in reply to Unger’s Knowledge and Politics. Leff’s response to Unger is possibly the best thing ever published in a law review. (Probably not coincidentally, it’s also short). My favorite line: “When nonironic divine address comes out of Langdell Hall these days, attention must be paid.”
If you like Memorandum, you might also want to read Unspeakable Ethics, Unnatural Law.
A RANT ON cyberspace etiquette.
HIGHWAY TO HELL: Howie Carr: Pay-per-mile tax is latest cash grab from greedy pols. Please. It’s not a “tax,” it’s a “funding strategy.”