21ST CENTURY DINING: Dutch restaurant serves up ‘My Little Pony Burger’ made from real horse meat.
Archive for 2016
December 14, 2016
Trump’s popularity is rising steadily and most Americans think Obama has already gone as president. The president-elect is driving a bulldozer at 60 miles per hour toward the wreckage of decades of misgovernment and misinformation, while the departing incumbents crawl around on their hands and knees complaining that the lights have gone out. For them, they have.
Read the whole thing.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Neo-Neocon on what an ironic difference two months and an election loss makes at the New York Times.
HENRY KISSINGER: Trump’s SecState Pick A Good Appointment.
Kissinger additionally dismissed concerns Tillerson’s business dealings have made him too cozy with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.
“I pay no attention to this argument that he is too friendly with Russia,” he said at the event put on by the Committee of 100, an organization that advances U.S.-China relations. “He would be useless at the head of Exxon if he was not friendly with Russia…I don’t hear those concerns at all.”
Well, that doesn’t fit the narrative.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: US Air Force progresses on engineering challenges to enable 10-100 KW combat lasers on C130s and then fighter jets.
PROF WHO CALLED TRUMP WIN AN ‘ACT OF TERRORISM’ ALLEGEDLY ASKED TRUMP BACKERS TO STAND DURING CLASS.
On the tenth anniversary of 9/11, Daniel Henninger of the Wall Street Journal wrote, “For activist and professional Democrats, the most ignominious day in their collective political lives occurred a year earlier—the Florida presidential recount. The 2000 election ended only when the Supreme Court resolved it in favor of George Bush. Republican and independent voters moved on, but many Democrats never did; they were now being governed by an illegitimate president. The chances that any Bush policies would retain their support were minimal, with or without 9/11.”
And as Noemie Emery wrote yesterday, the left acted in similar fashion after GWB won re-election in 2004: “‘Democrats Shellshocked by Bush Win Over Kerry,’ ran the piece in World News Daily on November 11, 2004. ‘The Florida-based American Health Association has released symptoms of what it calls ‘post-election selection trauma’ or PEST, which include: feelings of withdrawal … isolation … anger and bitterness, loss of appetite, sleeplessness … moodiness [and] endless sulking,’ though no mentions yet about hair. ‘Manhattan psychologist Bonnie Maslin said many of her patients cried about the lost election,’ Newsday reported days earlier.”
On election night last month, arch-leftist Sally Kohn told the nation during CNN’s live coverage, “There are certainly days when I’m popping Xanax like crazy.”
If a presidential election really induces terrorist attack-level trauma and the need for drugs and therapy on the left, as I wrote in response to Kahn’s on-air meltdown, perhaps it’s time to rethink both your collectivist worldview, and making leftwing politics your substitute religion. Or as Charles Cooke asked earlier this year, “Has Donald Trump’s remarkable rise done anything to change your mind as to the ideal strength of the State?”
Related: More terrorism-related talk from the left: “America is held hostage by flyover states,” sniffs The Hill. Oh the yuuuge, swanky list of demands we’ll be issuing to coastal elites come January. You’ve never seen such really plush and luxurious demands.
Ace of Spades on that insane Hill article: “It’s now week 5 [post-election] and their commitment to Not Getting It has not weakened one bit.”
I THINK I GOT ABOUT THAT MUCH WHEN I WAS PUTTING ON A WOOL SWEATER YESTERDAY: There’s way more energy in a bolt of lightning than we thought. 1.21 gigawatts?
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER? Finally! Mitt Romney lets Harry Reid have it.
NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study identifies why some people can smell asparagus in urine.
YES: Trump Should Focus Blame on Government, Not Just Boeing, Lockheed Martin.
Lockheed’s F-35 gets a worse rap than it deserves, but it was the Pentagon that insisted on a one-size-fits all fighter, in pursuit of cost savings which (to say the least) never materialized.
THE REAL REASON RAND PAUL OPPOSES JOHN BOLTON FOR SECRETARY OF STATE.
HEALTH: Pokémon Go is a no-go when it comes to real exercise.
After analyzing the movements of actual players, the researchers calculated that Pokémon Go encouraged people to take an average of 955 extra steps per day in the first week after downloading the game. Assuming that each step covered 31.5 inches and that players walked at a pace of 2.5 miles per hour, the game prompted people to walk for 11 extra minutes each day.
That’s not much. The World Health Organization recommends that adults get at least 150 minutes of aerobic physical activity each week. If you spread that equally throughout the week, you’ll need to get 21.4 minutes of exercise each day – twice as much as Pokémon Go provides.
And that was just for the first week, when the augmented reality game was most addictive. In subsequent weeks, players spent less time walking around catching monsters; by the sixth week, they were back to their pre-Pokémon Go habits.
It does help get people out of the house, which can’t be a bad thing.
IT WAS A SIMPLER TIME: 33 Vintage Black and White Photos Show Everyday Life of Teenagers in Florida during the 1950s. Apparently, nobody was fat. And I wish I could set the wayback machine for a visit to that B.B. King show. I saw him play with Stevie Ray Vaughn in the 1980s, but . . .
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: In Major Step for Drone Delivery, Amazon Flies Package to Customer in England.
On Wednesday, Mr. Bezos announced on Twitter that his company had made its first commercial drone delivery, on Dec. 7, to an Amazon shopper in Cambridgeshire, England, a major step forward in its experiments with automated shipments.
The flight — to deliver an Amazon Fire streaming device and popcorn to a customer identified only as Richard B. — took off from a nearby Amazon warehouse and lasted 13 minutes, covering about two miles.
What will really impress is when Amazon introduces ballistic deliveries, like a long-range t-shirt cannon at football games.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The Number of Sexual Partners People Want Their Lovers to Have.
GEORGE FRIEDMAN: Obama’s Deep Dive Into Putin’s Intent.
There are a number of questions to ask. First, why did Obama announce what I assume is a major analytic and covert effort to determine whether the Russians did it? Second, why did the CIA then tell officials that it already had done the deep dive and found evidence of Russian actions? Third, why didn’t the CIA tell the president that there was no need for a deep dive? Fourth, why didn’t the CIA share its information with the FBI? Fifth, how would Trump know there was no Russian effort? Finally, why does Congress want to get into the act? The last is the easiest to answer: cameras.
If all the sound and fury were correct, then either U.S. intelligence detected the attempt or the Russians with their usual clumsiness in these matters had poor operational security – unless they wanted it to become public. The detection of an operation to make Trump president did not hurt Clinton. It could devastate Trump. It was emphasized during the campaign that Russian President Vladimir Putin admired Trump, and vice versa. Given that, it would seem likely the Russians wanted Trump to be president. But of course, if they really wanted him to be president and effective, the last thing they would do is anything that would cast a shadow over him. Hacking Hillary to little effect and allowing U.S. intelligence to get wind of it would be imbecilic.
Whether or not Russian efforts were effective is the one question Democrats have yet to seriously consider (at best), and have taken pains to avoid (at worst). Also left unaddressed by the Left is the fact that the DNC’s digital security was so lax (not something we look for in a Commander-in-Chief and her coterie) that Russia was allowed free access to their servers for months. If Clinton had won, it seems likely as President she’d be the most exposed to Russian intelligence in our history, with the possible exception of if FDR had died a few months sooner and left Henry Wallace in charge.
Then there’s the actual content of the emails, which can hardly be addressed without igniting another intra-party civil war. It’s not a stretch to imagine that the primary purpose of all this sound and fury is to distract rank-and-file Democrats from all the disdain shown for them in Clintonworld.
We also have President Obama’s behavior — the unprecedented and reprehensible act of using America’s intelligence services to discredit his successor. This is small, even for the man who described Hillary Clinton as “likable enough” when they were rivals for the Democrat nomination, and who just can’t help reminding people about all the winning he’s done on the campaign trail.
It’s small and cheap and completely expected from a President who poisoned almost every American institution he touched.
JUST IN TIME FOR ROGUE ONE: 5 Things You Need to Know About Disney’s New Star Wars Experiences.
MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: Rise of the alt-right: How mainstream conservatives’ obsession with purity fueled a new right-wing radicalism.
It’s great to see Matt, who helped create NewsBusters, writing in Salon; but it’s akin to Ross Douthat being the token conservative at the New York Times. One conservative pundit is nowhere near enough to offset the institutional leftism. Speaking of which, Salon itself should take a good look in the mirror for playing a role in creating the alt-right: the Website went hard racialist left around the time Obama took office, (not to mention simply hard left) and rarely took their thumb off the scale, to the point where then-Salon editor at large Joan Walsh (whose pigment looks about as pale as mine) wrote a book in 2012 with plenty of approving blurbs from her fellow elite leftists titled What’s the Matter with White People?
Immediately after the election, John Podhoretz tweeted, “Liberals spent 40 years disaggregating U.S., until finally the largest cohort in the country chose to vote as though it were an ethnic group.” Back in 2008, Jonah Goldberg received plenty of brickbats from the left for writing that “The White Man is the Jew of Liberal Fascism,” but Salon seemed to ensconce that notion on page one of their style-guide for writers and accelerated the left’s ongoing war against white males exponentially. Apparently they weren’t expecting much in the way of repercussions.
SCIENCE: New Research Suggests Monogamy Killed the Penis Bone in Humans.
So many jokes, not one of them suitable for a family-friendly website.
MASSACHUSETTS ATTORNEY GENERAL MAURA HEALEY: Not All “Hate Crimes” Are Created Equal.
Attorney General Maura Healey said she does not intend to investigate the vilification and now-lifted campus ban of two pro-Donald Trump Babson College students for any civil rights violations — even as the pair face a disciplinary hearing Friday, though a police report found no basis for racism allegations against them.
Healey, a Democrat who supported Hillary Clinton, instead touted the hate crimes hotline she set up after Trump’s election. . . .
But she indicated she doesn’t consider the case of two pro-Trump students worth her office’s attention.
“We’re not involved in that matter specifically, but certainly wherever we see bias-motivated conduct, hate crimes and the like, we want to make sure that we’re taking that on and addressing it,” Healey said.
Unless, you know, the bias is against white male Republican students.
Related: Documents: Babson College used hearsay to condemn pro-Trump students for ‘victory lap.’
THE THINGS YOU LEARN IN THE WASHINGTON POST: “Did you know that the incoming Trump administration is an Objectivist conspiracy intended to install a cabal of Ayn Rand ‘acolytes’ at the highest levels of the United States government?,” Robert Tracinski asks in the Federalist, adding “Neither did I, and I actually am an Objectivist.”
Plus this: “Oh, no! Important figures in the new administration have been influenced by an author who advocated freedom. And integrity. Does that perhaps sound a little less frightening?”
Read the whole thing.
Related: Kevin D. Williamson on The Parochial Progressive Obsession with Ayn Rand.
IN THE MAIL: How to Drive: Real World Instruction and Advice from Hollywood’s Top Driver.
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