DOES ONE VOTE MATTER?: Neo-Neocon says it does, in an elegant post. She’s right– what you do or don’t do matters. In politics the sum (vote total) determines the outcome, and the sum consists of single votes. This is why conscientious adults must make a sober, realistic assessment of the possible. Bill Buckley quipped that you vote for the most electable conservative. That’s good advice–and a road map to GetRealLand.
Archive for 2016
August 1, 2016
HEALTH: Meat-eaters may have a higher risk of death, but plants are the answer.
Researchers found that associations between protein intake and risk of death were confined to participants who had at least one unhealthy lifestyle habit or ailment, such as smoking, heavy drinking, obesity or physical inactivity.
Specifically, a 10% increase in animal protein intake was linked to a 2% increase in overall mortality and 8% increase in risk of cardiovascular-related death, Song said. However, a 3% increase in plant protein intake was linked to a 10% decrease in overall mortality and a 12% decrease in cardiovascular mortality.
Why animal protein is linked to mortality and plant protein is linked to a lower risk of death remains largely a mystery, Song said.
That’s just what the cows want us to think.
WHY TRUMP’S MESSAGE IS RESONATING WITH SO MANY VOTERS: “Wage stagnation has resulted in many Americans feeling left out of the new economy. On real terms (inflation adjusted dollars), wages are back to where they were in 1996. . . . Frankly, I’ve been confused about the anger and support of Trump. But the misunderstanding is almost certainly due to my luck in life. I live in a bubble in New York City and in the technology industry. I’ve benefited from a good education and an opportunity to work in the new economy. These are not opportunities that most people have been lucky enough to access. The anger stems from a reasonable psychological reaction to relative economic comparisons and the very real difficulty that stagnating wages cause. The Democratic Party and everyone trying to convince her family and friends that Donald Trump cannot be the next President must keep this data in mind.”
REVIEW: 2017 Audi Q7 e-tron TDI Plug-In Hybrid: It’s a diesel-electric plug-in, like a locomotive with a cord. “The e-tron TDI can’t match the dynamic excitement or Bentley-baiting torque output of the SQ7, but it’s fast, well-mannered, and—so long as it’s plugged in often enough—capable of turning in exceptional fuel-economy numbers. Then there’s the prospect of being able to go more than 800 miles between fuel stops to replenish its 19.8-gallon tank, provided you drive gently enough.”
ON SALE FOR $3.99: Virginia Postrel’s The Future And Its Enemies.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Why CVTs Are Awesome Transmissions.
AT AMAZON, save on Cookware.
DIVERSITY IS OUR STRENGTH: IN PICTURES: Huge Pro-Erdogan Islamist Rally In Germany.
CHARLES GLASSER: How not to Gawker yourself: What we can learn.
OPERATION CHOKE POINT hits knife manufacturers.
AN ODE TO the classic Star Trek uniform.
THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF DISNEY MATTE ART — Part Three.
At the massively illustrated Matte Shot movie special effects blog.
CHANGE MORE OF THE SAME: Suspended VA bosses to return to agency jobs next week.
Two Department of Veterans Affairs administrators in Phoenix who were suspended at the outset of a crisis over delayed patient care will return to work Monday, 19 months after they were put on paid leave and given termination notices.
Lance Robinson, associate director of the Phoenix VA Health Care System, will be assigned as a strategic planner at the VA’s southwest regional office in Gilbert, known as VISN 18, according to spokeswoman Jean Schaefer. Brad Curry, the system’s chief of Health Administration Services, will serve as a health systems specialist.
The two men have been focal points in a controversy over the VA’s perceived failure to hold leaders accountable for mismanagement and misconduct that caused a breakdown in care for veterans in Arizona and nationwide.
They each received an almost two-year-long taxpayer-funded sabbatical and new jobs.
ILYA SOMIN on the politics of different science-fiction series.
CRY HAVOC AND LET SLIP THE DOGS OF ABORTION! “As It Prepares For War, Planned Parenthood Is Training A Political Army,” Think “Progress,” breathlessly reports.
Ahh, progressivism, where time and ideas stand still. Philosopher William James coined the phrase “the moral equivalent of war” at the dawn of the 20th century; the concept immediately spread like wildfire amongst his fellow “Progressives” as way to organize Americans and end-run their pesky notions of freedom and individuality, as Jonah Goldberg noted in his 2012 book, The Tyranny of Clichés:
And creating a moral equivalent of war was just the perfect way to get this organic cooperative life off the page and into American hearts and minds. Although the idea began as just the moral equivalent, when the opportunity for a real war loomed on the horizon, the progressives leaped at it with both feet. John Dewey, James’s heir as the foremost practitioner of philosophical pragmatism, championed going to nonmetaphorical war, on the grounds that it would help do all of the things that James wanted from a moral equivalent of war. In less than a decade the optimistic and individualistic possibilities of pragmatism had now evolved into “social possibilities,” specifically what Dewey called the “social possibilities of war.” He complained that opponents of entering World War I failed to recognize the “immense impetus to reorganization afforded by this war” and implored them not to let the crisis go to waste.
After the war (covered extensively in my book Liberal Fascism), progressives returned to the Jamesian argument about the moral equivalent of war, now claiming that World War I proved that planning and social control had worked under Woodrow Wilson’s war socialism. Therefore, the same techniques — command and control economics (i.e., “war socialism”), censorship, propaganda, etc. — should be applied in peacetime. “We planned in war” became the mantra of the intellectuals, furious with the Republican-led “return to normalcy” of the 1920s. And liberalism has never recovered. The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.
From Jimmy Carter declaring the moral equivalent of war in 1977 in a futile effort to solve that decade energy “crisis,” to Obama issuing Thomas Friedman-inspired “Sputnik Moments” seemingly every year at his State of the Union addresses, to Planned Parent’s battle cry (to be fair, they’ve long been in the killing business), the moral equivalent of war continues to endlessly pop up on the left, often in the strangest places.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Court rules for middle school, officer in teen’s burp arrest.
ESPIONAGE: FBI agent charged with acting as agent of China.
A veteran FBI electronics technician – who had top secret clearance – was charged by the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office on Monday with acting as an agent of China.
The man was identified as Kun Shan Chun and also went by “Joey Chun,” according to the official complaint. He was expected to plead guilty, Reuters reported.
Chun, born in China, began working for the FBI in 1997. Chun’s duties with the FBI included “accessing sensitive and, in some instance, classified information.”
Chun is charged with four counts of working to “falsify, conceal, and cover up by trick, scheme, and device a material fact.” He allegedly did not disclose his ties to foreign organizations and individuals in a written questionnaire submitted to the FBI for his security clearance, and did not disclose to the FBI that he made contact with “foreign nationals during a trip to Europe.”
The criminal complaint against Chun was unsealed Monday, but dated March 2016.
The charges against him came too soon for Chun to mount the new Hillary Defense.
THEY’RE WATCHING: ISIS Magazine Says Captain Khan, Mentioned at DNC, Deserved Death.
BAD LUCK: Venezuela is on the brink of total collapse.
Home to the world’s worst economy, Venezuela is beset by severe food shortages, riots in the streets and hyperinflation that’s closing in on 700 percent. World oil prices have plummeted — and Venezuela relies on oil for 95 percent of its income.
Agriculture was neglected as Chavez and Maduro placed all their economic chips on crude and elected to import goods from abroad while spending on social programs that rallied the poor behind the government.
But now Venezuela has no cash to import food or other essentials. And because Chavez nationalized so much industry, it has no private sector to compensate.
So Maduro has now issued an executive decree that subjects all workers to being forced to work for 60 days (or more, “if circumstances merit”) in the fields, growing badly needed food.
Economically, the move makes no sense. Morally, it’s barely one step up from government-sanctioned slavery.
It is government-sanctioned slavery. If only someone had written a book about how this thing always seems to happen to centrally-managed economies.
AT AMAZON, $50 off the Fire HD10 Tablet.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE, LEGAL EDUCATION EDITION: The Hunger Games – Valparaiso Law Edition. “Schools like Valparaiso essentially face the following choice: Admit a large number of marginal students, or shut down.”
NEWS YOUR DM CAN USE: Kids in Roleplaying Games. “This isn’t going to be an article about how to interest children in roleplaying games (RPGs),” Moe Lane writes. “I’m not here to do product placement, and I don’t have any direct experience yet in what kind of RPGs my kids will like. No, the purpose of this article is to talk about kids showing up in RPG campaigns, in the sense of why they should be there, if only in the background. But maybe ‘only’ is not the right word to use, there. So many interesting things happen in backgrounds, after all.”
PEACE IN OUR TIME: Charges Against Cleric Put Iran’s Balkan Activities Under Spotlight.
Bejandi is the most high-profile Iranian cleric to be accused in the predominantly Muslim country, potentially cutting off a rare avenue of influence for Tehran in Europe, where charities believed to be tied to Iran also operate in Albania, Macedonia, and Bosnia-Herzegovina.
The charges against Bejandi come amid a recent crackdown by authorities on foreign-funded Islamic organizations, which the government blames for the radicalization of Kosovar youths and the high numbers of people who have joined extremist groups in Syria and Iraq.
I had been assured that cutting a nuclear deal with Iran would empower the moderates in Tehran and help put an end to these hardline shenanigans.
THE SPACE REVOLUTION HERE IN AMERICA IS BASED ON PRIVATE COMPANIES, AND IS DOING BETTER. RUSSIA IS FACING BAD LUCK, I GUESS: Vostochny Cosmodrome: Russian Space Project Isn’t Going to Plan.