AN INTERVIEW WITH ANDREW CUOMO’S PRIMARY CHALLENGER, ZEPHYR TEACHOUT. I’ve heard some gun folks talk about backing her as a way to punish Cuomo for the SAFE Act. I don’t know if she’s better on guns, but I guess that’s not really the point. A poor showing against her — or a defeat — would certainly damage his Presidential ambitions. Personally, I’ve known her slightly for years and she’s a nice person.
Archive for 2014
June 20, 2014
WORRIED MOMS SPECIFY BPA-FREE BOTTLES, wind up making their kids sick.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: 10 Things Everybody Gets Wrong About The South.
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FASTER, PLEASE: Scientists Identify Mutations That Protect Against Heart Attacks. “The findings are expected to lead to a push to develop drugs that mimic the effect of the mutations, potentially offering the first new class of drugs to combat heart disease in decades, experts say. Statins, which reduce LDL cholesterol, another cause of heart disease, became blockbusters in the late 1980s. Since then, there have been no major new drugs approved for lowering heart disease risk. But experts caution that drug development takes years and that there are no guarantees that new treatments will work as hoped.”
BRING BACK DDT: Agonizing Tropical Disease Comes To The United States — To Stay? “To this point, all the US residents diagnosed with chikungunya were infected outside the country; there is no evidence that anyone has acquired the disease within the US. Health authorities wonder, though, whether that can happen. Once the virus multiples in someone’s blood enough to cause symptoms, it can be picked up by a mosquito that bites that person, and then transmitted when the bug bites someone else in turn. That pattern has caused the mosquito-borne disease dengue to become re-established in Florida. The same mosquito species that spread dengue spread chikungunya as well.”
“HE CAN KIDNAP ME ANYDAY . . . HOLD ME AGAINST MY WILL, LOL.” Ladies love this felon’s mugshot. “One user has set up a Facebook fan page for Meeks, who is being held in the San Joaquin County Jail on $900,000 bail.” Chicks dig bad boys.
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: How To Love Your Gluten-Intolerant Boyfriend.
HOW’S THAT “SMART DIPLOMACY” STUFF WORKING OUT? World Has Largest Number of Refugees Since World War II.
IN MY NECK OF THE WOODS: One hour with the Ferrari 458 Speciale. Key problem: “The only time it gets good is when you’re in danger of going to prison. It has no interest in playing at 40 mph. It’s barely awake at 70.” I’ve written about this automotive phenomenon myself.
CRACKING THE BRAIN’S CODES. “At stake is virtually every radical advance in neuroscience that we might be able to imagine—brain implants that enhance our memories or treat mental disorders like schizophrenia and depression, for example, and neuroprosthetics that allow paralyzed patients to move their limbs. Because everything that you think, remember, and feel is encoded in your brain in some way, deciphering the activity of the brain will be a giant step toward the future of neuroengineering.” I’m sure the NSA has a keen interest.
C-SPAN VIDEO: George Will talks about the reaction to his column on campus sexual assault.
Related: Hugh Hewitt interviews the St. Louis Post-Dispatch editor who cut George Will’s column. His name is Tony Messenger, and he became so flustered that he hung up and ran.
WAR ON WOMEN: Rape Victim of Clinton Client Speaks Out: Hillary ‘Took Me Through Hell.’ You know, I think it would have been better for the GOP if Hillary had waited until 2016 to implode.
FROM HARLEY-DAVIDSON, an electric motorcycle.
OUR PATHETIC GOVERNING CLASS: IRS commissioner: You know, e-mail isn’t necessarily an “official record”; Update: IRS Manual says it is.
Related: White House notified of missing IRS e-mail 6 weeks before Congress?
By the way, IRS Commissioner John Koskinen came to that job from being Chairman of Freddie Mac during the housing bust.
IN THE MAIL: Clash of the Financial Pundits: How the Media Influences Your Investment Decisions for Better or Worse.
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TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 407.
CONFUSION IN COLORADO: Hickenlooper silent on gun law comments; supporters and foes baffled.
EVE EPSTEIN: The Met’s Staging of Klinghoffer Should Be Scrapped.
Operas often involve a dramatic death in the final act. But the real-life, cold-blooded murder of a disabled Jewish man should not serve as an evening’s entertainment for the New York glitterati.
The events of 1985 are hard to forget. PLO hijackers seized the Mediterranean cruise ship Achille Lauro and held hundreds of passengers hostage. Among them was 69 year old, wheelchair-bound Leon Klinghoffer. He was separated from the others, shot in the head and chest, and thrown overboard along with his wheelchair.
This season, Metropolitan Opera general manager Peter Gelb intends to stage “the first-ever Met performances” of John Adams’ shock-jock modern opera, The Death of Klinghoffer.
Conflating the deliberate murder of an American citizen with the plight of the Palestinian people was bound to create controversy. But composer John Adams says he didn’t write Klinghoffer to be controversial.
I suppose, then, that he’s not very bright. I wonder who’s out there working on a Matthew Shepard libretto?
UPDATE: From the comments:
Nonsense. I actually saw the opera at BAM twenty years ago, and read the libretto. (The opera was written well before 9/11.) You can cherry-pick lines from the “Exiled Palestinians” and the terrorist murderers (which is what the opera calls them, BTW) to distort the truth, but aren’t you merely adopting the left’s tactics? The opera uses the dramatic tension between the Palestinians and the Jews to build the plot, and the terrorist murderers don’t like Jews, and are given nasty things to say about them (is anyone surprised?) IN AN OPERA.
This is NOT anti-Semitic propaganda, and it’s not Jew-baiting. The Jewish perspective is powerfully presented, Klinghoffer is a hero who denounces his murderers publicly, and the suffering and grief of Klinghoffer’s widow are movingly depicted.
Well, that’s certainly not what I’ve read, but it wouldn’t be the first time the press got it wrong.
HOUSE BACKS LIMITS on government spying. Will the Senate go along? Maybe, now that they’ve figured out that they’re being spied on too.
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