TO SOME PEOPLE, ARBITRARY GOVERNMENT POWER IS THE VERY BEST GOVERNMENT POWER: Flashback: One Woman’s Case Proves: It’s Basically Impossible to Get Off the ‘No-Fly List.’
Archive for 2016
June 16, 2016
BECAUSE THEY’RE NOT CRAZY: Why Terrorists Target Gun-Free Zones.
IT’S SAD TO SEE SO MUCH HATRED DEPLOYED AGAINST AMERICA’S OLDEST CIVIL RIGHTS ORGANIZATION: After Senate Democratic Filibuster, NYC Mayor Hopes to See NRA ‘Torn Down.’
But all this stuff is an attempt to use raw power to humiliate and control the Flyover People. No more, no less.
THE HEATHKIT SKYNET: Study: You’ll Love Your Robot More If You Assemble It Yourself.
YOU STAY CLASSY, MSM: So it turns out that Daily News writer Gersh Kuntzman misrepresented the owner of the gun shop he visited last week.
I’d be curious to see the “bruise” left on his shoulder from firing an AR-15.
AND RIGHTLY SO: Green Party Nominee Jill Stein Blasts Clinton Over EmailGate.
BENTLEY’S SPORT UTE: Drives Way Better Than It Looks.
NO DIET, PLEASE: Air Force Leader Wants ‘Flying Coke Machine’ to Replace A-10.
Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh compared the desired capability to the convenience and flexibility of a soda machine. “Imagine the … flying Coke machine and just having a Coke machine overhead, and you put your quarter in and you get whatever kind of firepower you want when you want it,” he said at a Defense Writers Group breakfast in Washington, D.C. “In the perfect world, that’s close-air support of the future.”
For years, the Air Force has been trying to kill the A-10 Thunderbolt II, the service’s close-air-support workhorse. Officials have cited budget constraints and the need to save money to invest in other platforms as reasons to get rid of it. Congress has kept the plane alive, but service leaders are already thinking about what comes next.
“The right close-air support replacement is something that’s overhead the ground force all the time and is firepower on demand,” Welsh said. “It’s flying artillery” and “911 rockets.”
The Air Force’s top procurement programs have suffered from development problems and schedule delays in recent years. But Welsh doesn’t envision major difficulties in acquiring a new close-air-support system.
“We don’t think this would take that long to do and we don’t think it’s that complicated of a design problem,” he said. “The technology is available to us. We can develop it.”
Make it a drone and put the Army in charge of it.
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Also, Summer Deals in Jewelry.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: Unhappy With Trump And Hillary? The Problem Is What The Presidency Has Become.
AWAKE IN DEEPEST BLUE STATE AMERICA: West Hollywood Inundated With AMAZING Pro-Gun, Pro-Gay Posters.
(Via SDA.)
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Simulation of quantum entanglement with subsurface dopant atoms.
FLASHBACK: “It’s really amazing how liberals are finding a way to blame Christians for the actions of the Orlando terrorist, who was, 1) gay, 2) Muslim, 3) Democrat, and 4) racist. But then that’s what they did that time when a crazed liberal gay activist tried to shoot up the Family Research Council. Remember that? He literally said he wanted to kill everyone and then ‘smear Chick-Fil-A in the victim’s faces’… So when gay liberal Muslims kill gays, it’s our fault, and also when a gay liberal tries to kill Christians, it’s our fault. I guess they’re consistent?”
As Jonah Goldberg wrote yesterday, there’s a reason why “Orlando Shooting Reaction Has the Feel of Eternal Recurrence.”
HOW EXERCISE HELPS THE BRAIN GROW:
Physical activity is good for our brains. A wealth of science supports that idea. But precisely how exercise alters and improves the brain remains somewhat mysterious.
A new study with mice fills in one piece of that puzzle. It shows that, in rodents at least, strenuous exercise seems to beneficially change how certain genes work inside the brain. Though the study was in mice, and not people, there are encouraging hints that similar things may be going on inside our own skulls.
For years, scientists have known that the brains of animals and people who regularly exercise are different than the brains of those who are sedentary. Experiments in animals show that, for instance, exercise induces the creation of many new cells in the hippocampus, which is a part of the brain essential for memory and learning, and also improves the survival of those fragile, newborn neurons.
Researchers believe that exercise performs these feats at least in part by goosing the body’s production of a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor, or B.D.N.F., which is a protein that scientists sometimes refer to as “Miracle-Gro” for the brain. B.D.N.F. helps neurons to grow and remain vigorous and also strengthens the synapses that connect neurons, allowing the brain to function better. Low levels of B.D.N.F. have been associated with cognitive decline in both people and animals. Exercise increases levels of B.D.N.F. in brain tissue.
That’s a reason to hit the gym, but a pill would be nice.
BREAKING: LABOUR PARTY MP JO COX MURDERED IN BRITAIN. “The gun — outlawed in Britain since the 1996 Dunblane school massacre in Scotland — has been described as ‘makeshift.’ Keep in mind that early reports, especially by eyewitnesses, are often inaccurate and unreliable, but this, if true, will have lasting political resonance in the run-up to Britain’s plebiscite on leaving the EU – ‘Brexit’ — on June 23,” Michael Walsh writes, linking to a BBC report that claims “the gunman was heard shouting ‘Britain first.’”
Read the whole thing.
UPDATE: “Jo Cox dead: Britain First denies involvement in attack on Labour MP,” the London Independent reports:
Britain First has denied involvement in the attack on Labour MP Jo Cox in Birstall, west Yorkshire – and the group’s leader has said he would like to see the person who carried it out “strung up by the neck on the nearest lamp post.”
The 41-year-old politician has died after she was shot and stabbed outside Birstall library, where she was holding an advice surgery for constituents.
Following reports that a man shouted “Britain First” as he attacked Ms Cox, the group issued a statement describing the claims as hearsay from unconfirmed sources, according to a statement on the political group’s website.
* * * * * * *
Two separate named witnesses have said the attacker said “Britain First”, including 38-year-old Graeme Howard, who told the Guardian the attacker “was shouting ‘Britain first’ when he was doing it and being arrested.”
Clarke Rothwell, who was reportedly within yards of the attack in Birstall, told the Examiner that the man shouted “Britain First, Britain First”.
Iowahawk squares the circle:
MICKEY KAUS: “My theory: MSM terrified Orlando attack will produce Trump lead. All hands on deck. Old rules No Longer Apply. We’ll show him.”
He’s very likely right, but I’m not sure about the “old rules apply” part, as the MSM pounding Trump is simply a continuation of a long playbook.
During the height of the MSM’s zaniest conspiracy theory dissembling during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Mickey wrote, “Previously, [the media] couldn’t grouse about the Iraq War without seeming defeatist (and anti-liberationist and maybe even selfishly isolationist). Even the Clintons never figured a way out of that trap…Katrina gives [the MSM] a way to talk about Iraq without talking about Iraq. No wonder Gwen Ifill smiles the ‘inner smile.’”
Such demagoguery produced results, as Bryan Preston wrote in November of 2006 at Hot Air. “What cost the GOP its majorities in Congress and statehouses?… The GOP’s fortunes fatally cratered in the Fall of 2005, and were recovering ever since minus a couple of blips this year. What happened in the Fall of ‘05? Katrina. That storm turned out to be the hurricane that changed history:”
There’s a lesson in all of this, that’s an old one but an important one to remember: Demagoguery wins, and more so when it comes in the middle of a horrific disaster. Also, lies do indeed travel halfway around the world before the truth gets its boots on. By the time the story of New Orleans buses surfaced (only to be buried by the AP and ignored by the national media), the disaster had been framed as a Bush failure and the damage was already done. The media’s later mea culpa did nothing to change the basic narrative that already had a life of its own.
Years later, DNC Chairwoman Donna Brazile would later confess, “Bush came through on Katrina,” but as a wise future mayor would advise in the fall of 2008, “Never let a crisis go to waste.”
And speaking of 2008, it was that year that the media went all-in to elect Obama, ceding their pose as “objective” journalists in order to consummate their “Slobbering Love Affair” with the man they made president, to borrow from Bernie Goldberg’s classic title.
But it’s always been just a pose. On Tuesday, CBS Late Show host Stephen Colbert “slammed Donald Trump on Tuesday’s episode of The Late Show, drawing a swastika to explain the presumed Republican presidential nominee’s response to the Orlando, Florida mass shooting on Sunday,” Entertainment Weekly notes.
The old rules at CBS certainly apply here — comparing the Republican nominee to a Nazi has a long and storied pedigree at the “Tiffany Network.” Just ask the ghosts of Walter Cronkite and Daniel Schorr, who dished out the same treatment – on the CBS Evening News no less, not the network’s late night gab fest and comedy show – to Barry Goldwater in 1964.
There’s no doubt the media viscerally loathes Trump — in large part because Trump isn’t afraid to get in their faces and punch back twice as a hard, as a wise community organizer would advise. But they’d be battering any presidential candidate with an (R) after his name right around this time. The old rules are very much in force.
DAMN YOU, AUTOCORRECT: Depressing paper suggests cancer’s an evolutionary mechanism to ‘autocorrect’ our gene pool.
HEALTH GUIDELINES (FINALLY) CATCH UP WITH SCIENCE: Coffee no longer comes with cancer warning—it may actually prevent it.
THE COUNTRY’S IN THE VERY BEST OF HANDS: It Was John Brennan Himself Who Halted LEO Training on Islam, Jihad.
Silly David. Gun control is about humiliating the flyover people and cementing government power.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. “Anderson Cooper’s bullying of same-sex marriage opponents isn’t tough journalism but an example of media cowardice in the face of Islamist violence.”
Not just cowardice, but approval, as in the case of many former — and likely current — CNN employees.
PUNCHING BACK TWICE AS HARD: President Obama Made A Stupid Comment on Gun Control, See One Pundit’s Epic Response.