MEDIA NARRATIVE CHART NOW ONLINE: “I created a chart to ensure that budding journalists understand how to properly frame a story involving any type of shooting, terror attack, or other violent crime,” Jon Gabriel writes at Ricochet. “Remember that the job of the Objective Journalist™ is not to tell the audience what happened, but to expand the event into an indictment of Western culture.”
And to advance the interests of their bosses atop the Democratic party, but that goes without saying.
USEFULNESS OF TEMPERATURE SCALES, ILLUSTRATED.
I LIKE THE LOOK: Toyota S-FR Concept: The Scion FR-S’s Angry Little Brother. “Front-engine, rear-drive, with a curb weight under 2,200 pounds. Oh, and it’s headed for production.”
I hope they don’t blink on the styling. The Scion is a surprisingly attractive car, proof that inexpensive cars don’t have to be ugly.
“THE QUEEN IS COMING — LOOK BUSY!” Most worker ants are slackers. “Ants and bees have reputations as efficient team players. In Temnothorax rugatulus—a small brown ant found in pine forests in North America—division of labor is common, with workers specializing in tasks like foraging, building, and brood care. But new research shows that many ants in a colony seem to specialize in doing nothing at all. To get a closer look at how these ants filled their time, researchers marked every member of five lab-based colonies with dots of colored paint. Over the course of 2 weeks, a high-definition camera recorded 5-minute segments of the ants in action six times a day, capturing their behavior (or lack thereof). Out of the ‘workers,’ 71.9% were inactive at least half the time, and 25.1% were never seen working. A small fraction of the ants, just 2.6%, were always active during observation, the researchers wrote last month in Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. Previous studies have postulated that inactivity might be temporary, with ants working in shifts dictated by circadian rhythm. But the new results show that the lazy workers stay lazy no matter the time of day.”
Slave societies rarely encourage individuals to put forth their best efforts.
Related: Armed Guards Protect Senate Democrats As They Demand New Gun-Control Laws.
FEDS SPEND $524K TO STUDY ARCTIC ‘URBAN SUSTAINABILITY:’
So on top of the millions of dollars we’ve already spent combating “climate change” and saving the glaciers, we’re also going to study how to live in the ever-slowly-defrosting polar icecaps to the sweet tune of $524,086.
Take it from the grant description itself, courtesy of the National Science Foundation:
As Arctic ice continues to melt, humans will enter the high north in growing numbers to develop local resources and expand transportation links. The result of this increased activity will be intensified urban development in extreme conditions. The purpose of this project is to promote greater urban sustainability in the Arctic so that the ultimate human impact on the larger environment will be as small as possible.
I know who I want to see in charge of this project:
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Three ‘Harmless’ Bumper Stickers That Police Say Can Destroy Your Family.
IMAGES FOR THE ERA OF HOPE AND CHANGE: What 7 Abandoned American Embassies and Military Bases Look Like Now.
WATCH: NYU PROF: FIGHT ‘CLIMATE CHANGE’ WITH HORMONE TREATMENTS ON SMALL CHILDREN — ‘CLOSES THE GROWTH PLATES’ TO STUNT THEIR GROWTH. Professor Liao says shrinking humans helps fight climate change since ‘larger people consume more energy than smaller people.’
But as Obama’s “Science” “Czar” might ask, why all the half measures, when a much more, well, final solution, for want of a better phrase, suggests itself?
INTRODUCING THE Amazon Handmade Shop.
SEATTLE YOGA CENTER OFFERS “YOGA FOR PEOPLE OF COLOR:”
Rainier Beach Yoga in Seattle has a class called “yoga for people of color.” It started last week and runs once a month.
Teresa Wang, co-founder of the specialized class, said it was started by five queer people of color who came together to create a safe space for people of color who might otherwise be uncomfortable.
An email blast about the class says it’s aimed at people of color and of all sexualities, ages, body sizes, abilities, genders, and experience with yoga. It specifically identifies “lesbian, bisexual, gay, queer and trans-friendly/affirming,” plus people who self-identify as “African American/black/of the African Diaspora, Asian, South Asian, West Asian/Arab/Middle Eastern, Pacific Islander, First Nations/Alaskan Native/Native American/Indigenous, Chican/Latin, or Multiracial/Mixed-Race.” The email adds that “white friends, allies and partners are respectfully asked not to attend.”
So what would happen if a white man decided to attend?
“Well, it’s a class for people of color, so he would be coming to that class knowing that we’re really clear about who we are asking to come to class, so…I’m not really sure because it hasn’t happened to us,” Wang said. “So I don’t really know.”
Perhaps as a result of making the Drudge Report, it seems that Rainier Beach Yoga has deleted the announcement from their Facebook page, but a copy remains in Google’s cache as of the time of this post:
So, separate but equal, to coin a phrase. Michael Graham’s Redneck Nation, written in 2001, which warned about the increasing return of such practices despite America’s best efforts to build a colorblind society in the 1960s through the 1980s, still seems remarkably current.
WELL, THIS IS COMFORTING: Family and friends of British nurse to be tested for Ebola after she contracts the virus again: Glasgow medic returns to London hospital isolation unit in ‘serious condition.’ I didn’t know that it was possible to get Ebola again.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Straight Poop on the Halloween Whopper’s … Green Poop Problem.
IMAGINING our Martian future.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: At USC, Our Administrator-to-Faculty Pay Ratio is a Major Problem. “Amid concern over rising tuition, USC has seen a 305.8 percent increase in hired administrative employees over a 25 year period, while the number of enrolled students has only increased by 66.3 percent, according to a study by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting and the American Institutes for Research which looked at data from 1987 until the 2011-12 academic year.”
What a fascinating phenomenon. Someone should write a book about it.
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: A “Victory Garden” In A Can.
AUTONOMOUS HIGHWAY DRIVING: Coming sooner than you think?
ASHE SCHOW: Hillary Clinton’s (Democrat) Woman Privilege: Hidden emails reveal laughable technological illiteracy, but the media won’t run with this narrative. “If she were a Republican man, she would be chastised for being so bad at, well, everything that has to do with technology. Heck, if she were a Republican woman, she’d be ripped to shreds as a moron on par with how the media treated former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin or former presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. If either of those two women couldn’t figure out how to find an NPR station, for example (as Ms. Clinton couldn’t), they would be the subject of continuous mockery. . . . The bottom line is that there is a narrative here that is not being played out for Ms. Clinton the way it would be for a Republican. There’s comedy gold here, but pointing this out about Ms. Clinton—a woman—would be seen as sexist, even though similar claims of technological incompetence and being too old and out-of-touch have been lodged against Republicans.”
AND, IN FACT, PRETTY MUCH ALWAYS DO: Facebook Is Big, But Big Networks Can Fall. And though it may take a long time to happen, the unraveling process can be very sudden. “Looking at the most recent Pew study on Internet usage among young people, I see that 71 percent of teens use Facebook, with the median user having slightly less than 150 friends. Forty-one percent of them report that they use Facebook most often. But when I look at a similar Pew study from 2013, it looks to me as if 76 percent of teens were using Facebook, with a median number of 300 friends, and 81 percent of social media users reported that they used Facebook most often. If I were Facebook, those numbers would keep me awake at night — not because Facebook can’t survive with only 70 percent of the market, but because a network that is getting smaller and less valuable to its users is a network that is very vulnerable to disruption.”
IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO SEE MEDIA NARRATIVES COLLAPSE SO THOROUGHLY: Common Response After Killings in Oregon: ‘I Want to Have a Gun.’ And it’s nice when the American public displays such obvious good sense.
THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA LAW SCHOOL, WHERE THEY GO OUT OF THEIR WAY TO MAKE MEN FEEL WELCOME. Ha, ha — just kidding!
WHEN THEY REACH A CERTAIN AGE, IT’S IMPOSSIBLE TO GET A GOOD PHOTOGRAPH OF YOUR CHILD, John Dickerson posits at Slate:
The walls of our upstairs hallway testify that we once had photogenic children. There are rows of framed pictures that show them playing baseball, basketball, holding a toad and smiling in the sunlight at their eager parents. Everything is orderly and bright.
But these are pictures from another time. The children in those aging frames don’t look like the giants clomping around the living room and leaving their dishes all over the house even if I’ve told them a thousand times. Those older forms bolt the minute I incline toward the camera. Sometimes when I take out my phone to check email, the little Garbos vanish. The email icon and camera icon are right next to each other, and my children can’t be too careful.
Read the whole thing.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ON TAXES AND MIGRATION: Are America’s tax migrants bringing California and New York’s high-tax views to sunny low-tax shores of Texas and Florida? “If I were one of those conservative billionaires (hello, Koch brothers! hi, Sheldon Adelson!) who are always donating tens of millions to support Republican candidates, I think I might try spending some of the money on something more useful: A sort of welcome wagon for blue state migrants to red states. Something that would explain to them why the place they’re moving to is doing better than the place they left, and suggesting that they might not want to vote for the same policies that are driving their old home states into bankruptcy.”
MIKE NEEDHAM: The Heritage Action CEO explains, “The reality that drove McCarthy’s exit from the Speaker’s race.”
The reality is simple: In the aftermath of the 2011 showdown over the debt ceiling—the showdown that led to the spending caps that Boehner, et al. are now attempting to bust—the GOP began taking a passive posture toward President Obama and a dismissive disposition toward conservatives.
That dynamic within the House Republican Conference has been building over the past four years. It came close to boiling over in January, and finally became too much in September.
Of course, Americans outside of Washington played an undeniably important role in this process. The revival of the conservative grassroots empowered by access to information and a proliferation of technology created an atmosphere that forced Boehner to resign. And in a nod to political reality, McCarthy said “I don’t want to make voting for speaker a tough one…” Indeed it would have been, because as Boehner’s second in command, McCarthy would have been viewed in a similarly unfavorable light.
Rep. Peter King, a liberal Republican from New York, suggested America is now “A banana republic.” That is a petulant, childish reaction intended to dismiss the serious nature of the party’s internal divisions.
To be clear, the solution to overcoming that divide is not some moderate caretaker or an absurd coalition-style government with Nancy Pelosi. . . .
The Republican Party has fallen into the same trap—refusing to recognize or address its serious internal problems. This is an action-forcing event, and every single Republican needs to recognize it as such.
Exactly. Is the GOP establishment listening yet? Somehow, I doubt it.
SOLVING THE IMPORTANT ISSUES: Why Do I Jerk Awake Right As I’m Falling Asleep?
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