Archive for 2016
January 14, 2016
January 13, 2016
BREAKING: Several explosions heard in downtown Jakarta, casualties reported. “A massive explosion was seen in front of the U.N. office in the Indonesian capital Thursday and was accompanied by six other blasts, according to a U.N. official. Jeremy Douglas, a U.N. regional representative in Jakarta, tweeted there were at least six ‘bombings’ and then a ‘serious exchange of gunfire in downtown Jakarta.’ He said police are urging people to stay away from the windows.”
Damn Lutherans.
THEY TOLD ME IF I VOTED FOR MITT ROMNEY, AN INTRUSIVE, SEX-CRAZED FEDERAL GOVERNMENT WOULD BE OPPRESSING US. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Homeland Security Asking Hotel Staff to Report Customers for Too Many Condoms.
Abolish the Department of Homeland Security. I was a critic when it was founded, but it’s turned out worse than even I expected.
DEMOCRATS IN DISARRAY: De Blasio rips Cuomo for derailing his agenda.
SOONER OR LATER, ENCRYPTION ALWAYS FAILS: Dutch police hack into ‘uncrackable’ Blackberry.
TOO BAD THEY WERE SO DAMN SEXY: Sex with Neanderthals May Explain Modern Allergies. “You may have to pump yourself full of Zyrtec just to step outside during allergy season because your ancestors couldn’t keep their hands off those sexy Neanderthals, suggests two new studies in the American Journal of Human Genetics. Neanderthals and a second now-extinct hominid—Denisovans—were living in Europe and Asia for hundreds of thousands of years before humans arrived and were likely well-adapted to the local pathogens, according to a press release. When humans showed up and started interbreeding, they took on some of the Neanderthal and Denisovan genes. One of the studies reports three genes having to do with ‘innate immunity’ in modern humans show more similarities to Neanderthal and Denisovan genomes than the rest.”
You know what they say: Until you’ve had ‘thal, you haven’t had it at all.
EVERYTHING WITHIN THE STATE, NOTHING OUTSIDE THE STATE, NOTHING AGAINST THE STATE: The Radical Left Will Never Let Christian Colleges Be Christian.
FEMINISTS LEAST HEARD FROM: North Africa Exports Rape Culture to Germany.
I can’t know from personal experience what it’s like to walk around as a woman in the Middle East or North Africa, but I’ve spent more than a decade of my life on and off in that part of the world and have had conversations with more than a thousand people, men and women alike. Women are unanimous here: Harassment in North Africa ranges from annoying to unspeakable while it’s virtually non-existent in Lebanon and Syria. I don’t know why. That’s just how it is.
“The worst part is that Egyptian men won’t back down when I tell them to leave me alone,” the Australian woman in Cairo added.
The Cologne police department says most of the offenders come from North Africa rather than Syria, which is exactly what we should expect.
“In a 2008 survey by the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights,” Mona Eltahawy writes in her book, Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution. “More than 80 percent of Egyptian women said they’d experienced sexual harassment, and more than 60 percent of men admitted to harassing women. A 2013 UN survey reported that 99.3 percent of Egyptian women experience street sexual harassment. Men grope and sexually assault us, and yet we are blamed for it because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong thing.”
Sexual assault in public is so pervasive in Egypt that the authorities ban men from some cars on the subway so women can get to work in the morning without being mauled.
Foreign women get it in Egypt, too, most infamously when CBS reporter Lara Logan was brutally assaulted in Cairo’s Tahrir Square on the night the Egyptian army removed Hosni Mubarak from power. An enormous mob surrounded her, stripped her naked, sexually assaulted her and damn near killed her.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have given up on the 19th Century goal of civilizing the barbarians quite so quickly.
Related item here.
GOOD NEWS! Scientists say human greenhouse gas emissions have canceled the next ice age.
No seriously, considering what Top Scientists, Walter Cronkite, and Leonard Nimoy were predicting 40 years ago, that really is good news.
(By the way, there’s at least one scientist in that show who was caught on camera decades apart predicting both the coming ice age and the coming global warming, just to cover all his bets.)
REPORT: Statins May Help, Not Hinder, Heart Bypass Recovery. “People who are taking statin medications and need heart bypass surgery are often told to discontinue the drugs before and after surgery because of concerns about adverse effects. But that may not be a wise idea, a new review of studies has found. . . . Some of the studies found that statin use reduced the likelihood of irregular heart rhythms, including atrial fibrillation. Others found that statins reduced the incidence of stroke and heart attack and lowered the risk of postoperative kidney injuries. The exact mechanism is unclear, but cardiac surgery, especially those with prolonged anesthesia, significantly increases inflammation, and statins may help control it.”
PC INSANITY RUN AMOK, AMOK, AMOK:
In what many are panning as ludicrous, the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA) has come out with a list of words/chants/actions that they have decided are both offensive and disrespectful to other students, players, and officials during athletic events.
Here are just a few of my favorites … but will give you the link so you can chose your own top five.
- Singing the song “Na-Na-Na-Na/Na-Na-Na-Na/Hey-hey/Goodbye.”
- “Booing of any kind” (keep in mind, this is at sporting events).
- “Push it, push it, push it” (someone better notify Salt-N-Pepa).
- Waving arms or making movements or sudden noises in an attempt to distract an opponent” (Yes, you read that correctly; The Wave = Bad).
- Chanting “U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A.”
Still, though, it sort of makes sense; as Obama noted in his State of the Union last night, America has solved all of its other problems, so we can finally begin the precision fine-tuning of language to avoid hurt feelings, micro-aggressions, and even micro-micro-aggressions. Which edition of the Newspeak Dictionary are we on these days?
(H/T: James Lileks.)
TOTALLY NAILED IT:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRLqlkRsMn8
Related: “Quick reminder: Al Gore refused to sell Current to [Glenn Beck’s The Blaze network] because ‘the legacy…is important to us.'”
AUSTRIA: Boom in demand for self-defence weapons. “The number of weapons permits issued in Vienna and Styria for pistols and revolvers has multiplied in recent months, a trend which is seen to have taken off after the terror attacks in Paris and in the wake of the increasing number of migrants and refugees entering Austria.”
AT AMAZON, Save on men’s vitamins.
SAD NEWS FROM THE MEDIA WORLD; Al Jazeera America to shut down in April, CNN reports:
In an email to staff on Wednesday, Anstey said that the decision to pull the plug on Al Jazeera America was “driven by the fact that our business model is simply not sustainable in an increasingly digital world, and because of the current global financial challenges.”
Al Jazeera America launched in 2013 after its Doha-based parent company bought Current TV from Al Gore and others for $500 million. The channel was billed as a more sober alternative to the rancor and sensationalism that typifies other cable news outlets.
“Viewers will see a news channel unlike the others, as our programming proves Al Jazeera America will air fact-based, unbiased and in-depth news,” the channel’s former CEO Ehab Al Shihabi said around the time of the launch.
The channel was simultaneously a beacon of hope and a subject of ridicule among members of the media. There was widespread surprise when the channel opted to keep its Arabic-sounding name. Rival executives had doubts that the channel’s staid brand of news would ever catch on.
Rank and file journalists, on the other hand, were pleased to see the new entrant into the crowded television news space.
If “Rank and file journalists” really were “pleased to see the new entrant into the crowded television news space,” it was because Al Jazeera America became the final redoubt for some industry old-timers, as Eliana Johnson of NRO wrote in her eye-opening article on the failed network in 2014:
In New York’s brutal TV-news world, Al Jazeera has become a warren of the displaced, a home of last resort for many anchors, reporters, and producers who have been fired, laid off, or otherwise discarded by better-known networks.
On air, former CBS News correspondent and CNN anchor Joie Chen now anchors AJA’s flagship broadcast, America Tonight; John Seigenthaler, whose NBC News contract was not renewed several years ago as a cost-saving measure, now delivers the channel’s 8 p.m. evening newscast; Antonia Mora, the former Good Morning America news reader, now reads to a profoundly smaller audience; David Shuster, who landed at Current TV after he was forced out of MSNBC, serves as an anchor; Soledad O’Brien, one of the first to go when Jeff Zucker took the reins at CNN, is one of AJA’s “special correspondents”; Sheila MacVicar, laid off by ABC News and then by CBS News, is a correspondent. As is Mike Viqueira, whom NBC News would never let off the weekend White House shift. Lisa Fletcher, laid off by ABC News in 2010, is an anchor.
AJA has scooped up the same sort of refugees to work behind the scenes. The senior vice president for news gathering, Marcy McGinnis, was teaching journalism at Stony Brook University when AJA came knocking, after being forced out of CBS News. David Doss, the longtime executive producer of CNN’s AC360, was unemployed before he started at AJA in July. The pattern holds all the way on down to the network’s social-media editor, Jared Keller, who was fired by Bloomberg after text messages surfaced in which he complained about his job. His next stop? Al Jazeera America.
The situation is particularly poignant for Jewish producers, some of whom had to choose between unemployment and relatively well-paying work for a channel whose parent network has exhibited virulent anti-Semitism. A cynical joke making the rounds of television Jewry refers to “Jews for Jazeera,” a subtle play, of course, on “Jews for Jesus.”
Which even the Orwellian CNN article above is forced to admit: “But from the beginning, Al Jazeera America has been beset by lousy ratings and internal strife.Two former employees filed lawsuits last year against the company with charges of anti-Semitism and sexism in the newsroom.”
Anti-Semitism and sexism from a Qatar-based TV channel? Allah forefend! On the other hand, at least we got to see, for a few years at least, a Mad TV sketch from 2004 finally come to life:
Exit quote from Iowahawk, who tweets, “As God is my witness, I thought Durka Durka Mohammed Jihad News would fly.”
IN GERMANY, Hints Of Pim Fortuyn?
WELL, TO BE FAIR, OBAMA GOT THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Angela Merkel to receive award for refugee crisis just weeks after mass sex assaults.
PROGRESS TOWARD SAVING THE PLANET: Advanced Nuclear Startup Terrestrial Energy Lands Initial Funding.
One of the most promising developers of advanced nuclear power plants, the Canadian startup Terrestrial Energy, has landed $7 million in funding. Although the investment is small, it is an important signal that the private sector might back innovative nuclear reactors as the search for low- or no-carbon forms of power generation accelerates.
More than $1.3 billion in private capital has been invested in North American companies working on advanced nuclear reactor technologies, according to Third Way, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. But much of that money has gone to companies pursuing nuclear fusion, which is in a far earlier stage than technologies that employ fission, the conventional form of nuclear power (see “Finally, Fusion Takes Small Steps Toward Reality”).
In addition to the money Terrestrial Energy has raised from undisclosed investors, Transatomic Power, a nuclear startup founded by a pair of MIT PhDs, has raised $6.3 million from investors including Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund. Nevertheless, many new nuclear startups are still scrambling to fund their research and development programs. Terrestrial’s funding is “good news for everyone,” says Transatomic founder Leslie Dewan, “because it provides market validation for the sector as a whole.”
Faster, please.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: Lawprof: University of Louisville Law School No Longer Neutral.
Since 1846 the law school at the University of Louisville has provided nonpartisan space for individuals to teach, discuss, and research matters of law and public policy. Despite the thousands of partisans who’ve walked its halls, the law school as an institution has remained nonpartisan, preserving its neutrality, and refusing to embrace an ideological or political identity.
Unfortunately, this long run of institutional neutrality seems headed for an abrupt end. Promotional materials for the law school now proclaim its institutional commitment to “progressive values” and “social justice.” Incoming students and faculty are told that, when it comes to the big issues of the day, the law school takes the “progressive” side.
The plan, in short, is to give the state-funded law school an “ideological brand.” (The Interim dean says it will help fundraising and student recruitment.) In 2014, the law faculty voted — over strong objection — to commit the institution to “social justice.” Now we’re at it again, seeking to brand ourselves “the nation’s first compassionate law school.”
These branding projects are misguided. For starters, the chosen brands are divisive, alienating about half the people in the country. While terms like “social justice” and “compassionate” might seem “inclusive” to you, tens of millions of Americans disagree. People hear these terms in a legal or political context and think “liberal orthodoxy.” . . .
Even those who benefit from our divisive brands (e.g., “progressive” faculty and students) can appreciate the costs to higher education. Universities function as a marketplace of ideas, where conventional ideas are tested, year in and year out, against unconventional ones. Ideological brands like “social justice” and “compassionate” obstruct this critical process. They do so by formally prioritizing liberal orthodoxy in an array of university matters (including research, hiring, and student scholarships).
Read the whole thing, and expect more of this kind of pushback. And more scrutiny from outside funders. Meanwhile, prospective students who aren’t full-tilt leftists should probably look elsewhere.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: “Printing Press” Method Stamps Out Gold Nanoparticles With New Properties.