WAIT, WHAT? Uber Says You Can’t Flirt In Its Cars.
Archive for 2016
December 9, 2016
KNOWING YOUR GEOGRAPHY CAN BE USEFUL: African migrants storm Ceuta. It’s a massive break-in. Ceuta is a Spanish enclave in Africa, so it’s Europe in Africa. It’s across the strait from Gibraltar. (According to some, Ceuta is the southern pillar — as in the Pillars of Hercules.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Leftist Students Shouted ‘F*ck You B*itch’ at the Gay Director of a Pro-Trans Movie, Boys Don’t Cry.
“Reed College, by the way charges, $50,000 a year for tuition. The opportunity to scream insults at a queer film director whose perspective is mildly different from today’s leftist students is certainly an expensive privilege.” Parents and students, spend your money wisely.
I DON’T LIKE THE INTERNET OF THINGS: Another Lawsuit Highlights How Many ‘Smart’ Toys Violate Privacy, Aren’t Secure.
AT AMAZON, 12 Days of Deals — Day 5.
Plus, deals for Cooks and Bakers.
Plus, today only at Amazon: Bissell 86T3/86T3Q Big Green Deep Cleaning Professional Grade Carpet Cleaner Machine, $284.99 (29% off).
And, also today only: Wolverine F2D Mighty 20MP 7-in-1 Film to Digital Converter, $98.99 (29% off).
MORE CARTEL WAR CASUALTIES: Three federal policemen were murdered and their bodies burned in Mexico’s Guerrero state. Their killers claimed the cops were crooked. Who knows the truth? The Cartel War officially began in December 2006. Mexico was battling well-financed criminal organizations long before December 2006, but that’s the month former President Calderon decided to use military forces to fight the cartels. That means we’re looking at a sad tenth anniversary. Here’s the StrategyPage Mexico update from ten years ago (mid- to late December 2006). Note the Mexican Army begins its Michoacan state operation on December 11.
Here’s a column on the Cartel War written in early 2008 — at the 13-month mark. It’s still useful background. This column’s from June 2013 and looks at President Enrique Pena Nieto’s decision to send a military-led expedition into Michoacan state.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Obama’s Second Term Was a Complete Failure.
As the Professor warned in the middle of Obama’s first term, “Up to now, comparisons with Carter were a tool of Obama’s critics. From now on, they’re likely to be a tool of his defenders. Because as bad as Carter was, Obama is shaping up to be worse. Much worse.”
YOU KNOW YOU’RE GOING TO NEED THEM: AmazonBasics AA Performance Alkaline Batteries (48-Pack), $11.02.
FORGET DRAINING THE SWAMP. MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Make D.C. a swamp again: Trump is scaring progressive hipsters away, he should send federal workers after them. “I propose that over the next several years, we transfer a lot of federal employees out of the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, to parts of the country that aren’t doing so well economically. This would provide a boost to places like Buffalo, New York, or Quincy, Illinois, or Fresno, California, while getting federal bureaucrats out of the D.C. bubble.”
INFECTIOUS DISEASE: DNA From 17th Century Mummy Of A Child From Lithuania May Rewrite History Of Smallpox.
The researchers captured, sequenced, and completely reconstructed the smallpox DNA and then compared the strain to those from modern samples dating between 1940 and 1977, when the last known case of the disease occurred in Somalia.
The findings showed that the evolution of the smallpox virus happened more recently than previously believed and that the ancestor of all available smallpox viral strains were no older than 1580 albeit it is not yet clear what animal is the true reservoir of the pathogen and when the virus first jumped from animals to humans.
The researchers, who published their findings in the journal Current Biology on Dec. 8, also found that the evolution of the pathogen into two circulating strains, the variola major and minor, occurred after 1796, after scientist Edward Jenner came up with a vaccine.
“Our data clearly show that the VARV lineages eradicated during the 20th century had only been in existence for ∼200 years, at a time of rapidly expanding human movement and population size in the face of increasingly widespread inoculation and vaccination,” the researchers wrote in their study.
It’s a little unsettling that something so deadly and virulent could erupt so suddenly.
ZERO MEASURE OF DEVOTION: Vets group blasts ‘secret’ VA ratings system.
A veterans group has blasted the Department of Veterans Affairs over leaked internal documents showing dozens of medical facilities performing at below-average levels.
USA Today obtained the documents and published them Wednesday, revealing the secret system.
The VA had previously refused to make the ratings public, claiming the system is for internal use only. It rates each of the VA’s medical centers on a scale of one to five, with one being the worst.
Roughly 45 facilities — many in the Upper Midwest and the Northeast — performed at an above-average rating, the report said, while 40 were below average.
The worst performing centers are in Dallas and El Paso, Texas, and in Nashville, Memphis and Murfreesboro, Tenn.
The documents also show that some medical centers have not improved despite scandals and scrutiny from Congress. The Phoenix VA still sits at a one-star rating despite a 2014 scandal revealing veterans died while waiting for care and that staff manipulated wait-time data there and at other VA hospitals across the country.
The VA announced last October it plans to allocate $28 million to the Phoenix center in addition to its annual budget.
Abolish the VA and give vets vouchers for the private health coverage of their choice.
HEALTH: 1 Patient, 7 Tumors and 100 Billion Cells Equal 1 Striking Recovery. “The remarkable recovery of a woman with advanced colon cancer, after treatment with cells from her own immune system, may lead to new options for thousands of other patients with colon or pancreatic cancer, researchers are reporting. Her treatment was the first to successfully target a common cancer mutation that scientists have tried to attack for decades. Until now, that mutation has been bulletproof, so resistant to every attempt at treatment that scientists have described it as ‘undruggable.'”
MEANWHILE, ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE AISLE: Democrats Plan Fight to Save Obamacare.
The emerging strategy is centered around highlighting people who have benefited from the law and who would lose insurance coverage or key consumer protections if it goes away. “We have to lead with them and their stories,” said Jeremy Bird, a Democratic strategist who served in senior roles for both President Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 and Hillary Clinton’s campaign this year. “This is about what Trump and the Republicans want to take away from working families across the country, and we have to make that very clear this is what we’re talking about.”
Organizers say they’ll announce details about the coalition on Friday, but the efforts could include rallies both in Washington and in the states and districts of Republican members of Congress. It might also involve television advertising, although Bird said the most important part of the drive would be mobilizing constituents—including Trump voters who would be negatively affected by repeal—on the ground across the country. “I think that’s more important than some barrage of national ads,” Bird said. “That strategy is not going to work anymore in the future. It’s got to be about grassroots organizing. It’s got to be about real people who are constituents of these folks making it known.”
This sounds all-too nice. Because it is.
If you — or GOP lawmakers — aren’t mentally prepared for the howls, the accusations of racism/sexism/etc, the tales of woe, and the panic-mongering, then you don’t understand how Democrats play this game.
The ugliness hasn’t even begun to begin.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Babson College “Hate Crime” Investigator Who Went After Trump-Supporting Student Was A Hillary Clinton Backer. “The chief Babson College official investigating two students accused of hurling racist and homophobic slurs after President-elect Donald Trump’s victory declared her avid support of Hillary Clinton on Twitter the day before the incident. Jaclyn Calovine, Babson’s associate director of community standards, is the official complainant against the students on behalf of the college, charging them with harassment and disorderly conduct.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Novel Nanomaterial Enables Rewritable Optical Circuits.
JUSTICE? OSU Activists Complain Terrorist Was Wrongly Shot By Police.
An Ohio State University (OSU) student who attempted to go on a stabbing spree last month before being gunned down by a nearby officer has been added to a protest list of non-whites “wrongly” shot and killed by a police.
The OSU Coalition for Black Liberation is a campus protest group on OSU’s main campus in Columbus. The group held a rally Wednesday to protest the death of young black men at the hands of police, and read off a list of non-white men who had been killed by police in the last two months. Among the names read off was that of Abdul Razak Ali Artan.
Artan, of course, is the man who attempted to kill his classmates last week by attacking them with his car and then going on a stabbing spree. He was gunned down by OSU policeman Alan Horujko, who arrived on the scene just minutes after the rampage began and swiftly neutralized Artan.
If there is ever a time for the police to use deadly force, this would have to be it.
But to some, political correctness and race-baiting are more important than protecting innocent lives.
BAD SPORTS: More than 1,000 Russian athletes involved in doping, McLaren report says.
The findings come in the second part of an investigation by Canadian lawyer Richard McLaren, who announced the results of his inquiry in London on Friday.
His second report – which comes after WADA extended his mandate in July – confirmed the findings of the first report while revealing more about a system of covering up tests that was refined over time.
“The results of the forensic and laboratory analysis initiated by my team established the conspiracy that was perpetrated between 2011 and 2015,” McLaren said. “It is impossible to know how deep and how far back a conspiracy goes. For years, international sports competitions have unknowingly been hijacked by the Russians. Coaches and athletes have been playing on an uneven field. Sports fans and spectators have been deceived.”
Most notably, he said more than 1,000 Russian Olympians and Paralympians – in summer and winter sports – were identified “as being involved in or benefiting from manipulation to conceal positive doping tests.”
Mixing sports and politics never works out very well for sports.