Archive for 2016
December 1, 2016
UNCLEAR HEADLINES: Robbery suspect surrenders after 11 hostages taken at Florida bank.
I guess if the police have to take hostages to force the criminals to surrender, then that’s what they’ve got to do.
THEY TOLD ME IF DONALD TRUMP WERE ELECTED, WE’D SEE SETBACKS FOR GENDER EQUALITY. AND THEY WERE RIGHT! Congress Abandons Plans To Force Women To Sign Up For The Draft.
TRUMP VICTORY DRIVING DEMOCRATS CRAZY? A Hillary Supporter Admitted Himself To The Psych Ward On Election Night When He Realized She Was Losing. To be fair, this guy sounds like he was close enough to walk:
Benjamin Ryan — considered a “Hillblazer” because he raised over $100,000 for the former Democratic nominee — detailed his suicidal nervous breakdown for the Huffington Post on Wednesday.
He said he was “catatonic, plagued by involuntary jerking motions, speech patterns disjointed, weeping uncontrollably.”
“I found out Donald Trump had won the Electoral College while midstream in providing a urine sample for the emergency psychiatric staff of a New York City public hospital,” Ryan writes. “The unlockable bathroom door in this unescapable wing was ajar, and I could hear the victorious Mike Pence’s sinister Sunday-school baritone taunting me with the truth from the hallway television.”
Good grief.
RAHM’S KIND OF TOWN: Chicago tops 700 homicides — with a month to go in violent 2016.
The year got off to a violent start with 50 homicides in January and rarely let up even after the end of the summer — the peak season for shootings.
The numbers are simply off the charts. The 701 homicides through Wednesday marked a nearly 56 percent jump from the 450 killings a year earlier. With one month still to go, that represents the most homicides since 704 in 1998.
Police Department statistics do not include killings on area expressways, police-involved shootings, other justifiable homicides or death investigations that could later be reclassified as homicides. And police said a fatal shooting happened early Thursday, the first day of December, but an autopsy hasn’t confirmed that the death is a homicide.
Nearly 4,050 people have been shot, a 50 percent jump from 2,699 victims a year earlier, according to the department statistics. Shooting incidents rose by comparable figures, to 3,315, up 49 percent from 2,224 a year earlier.
“Peak season for shootings” sounds like something out of a dystopian science fiction novel.
OVERHEARD: WaPo (no link yet) says it’s Mad Dog Mattis for SecDef.
UPDATE: Here’s the story.
President-elect Donald Trump has chosen retired Marine Gen. James N. Mattis to be secretary of defense, nominating a former senior military officer who led operations across the Middle East to run the Pentagon less than four years after he hung up his uniform, according to people familiar with the decision.
To take the job, Mattis will need Congress to pass new legislation to bypass a federal law that states secretaries of defense must not have been on active duty in the previous seven years. Congress has granted a similar exception just once, when Gen. George C. Marshall was appointed to the job in 1950.
An announcement is likely by early next week, according to the people familiar with the decision. Mattis declined to comment. Spokespersons for Trump’s transition team did not respond to requests for comment.
Mattis, 66, retired as the chief of U.S. Central Command in spring 2013 after serving more than four decades in the Marine Corps. He is known as one of the most influential military leaders of his generation, serving as a strategic thinker while occasionally drawing rebukes for his aggressive talk. Since retiring, he has served as a consultant and as a visiting fellow with the Hoover Institution, a think tank at Stanford University.
An inspired choice, if I did say so myself.
THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT SKYNET WANTS YOU TO THINK: Artificial Intelligence Vs Humans: AI More Likely To Enhance Life Rather Than Harm It.
Most Americans already have an AI device right in their pants pocket, in the form of Google Now or Apple’s Siri. Both seem to help much more than hurt.
REVIEW: 2017 Volkswagen Golf R.
AT AMAZON, Save Big in Toys & Games.
FASTER, PLEASE: Genetically Modified Pigs Could Ease Organ Shortage.
Researchers have been trying for decades to make animal-to-human transplants work, a process known as xenotransplantation. Pigs are a particularly promising source of organs. They produce big litters. Organs such as the kidney and liver are similar in size to those of humans. “Nobody has come up with a better animal,” says Joseph Tector, a professor of surgery who runs the xenotransplantation program at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
A previous push into xenotransplantation by companies and scientists in the 1990s faltered due to a number of factors. In early experiments with nonhuman primates, their immune system attacked and rejected the pig organs. There were concerns that remnants of retroviruses in pigs’ genetic makeup, while harmless to the pigs, might end up infecting humans. Trying to modify the pig genome was a slow process; it often took years to successfully modify a single gene.
Then last year, a group led by George Church of Harvard University published a paper describing their use of a new gene-editing technology called Crispr-Cas9. Unlike previous gene-editing systems, Crispr allowed the researchers to make multiple changes simultaneously to inactivate viral remnants in the pigs’ genes.
Crispr has helped renew enthusiasm for xenotransplantation.
In the meantime, if you’re eligible, please sign your donor card.
HAMPSHIRE COLLEGE UPDATE: College bans protesters from campus in wake of flag burning.
HOW SOCIAL MEDIA IS IMPACTING LAW STUDENTS.
BUT TO HIS CREDIT, HE INVENTED SCIENCE FICTION JUST IN TIME: The Man Who Invented VR Goggles 50 Years Too Soon.
UH-OH: Russia Launches Space Cargo Ship, But Its Fate Is Unclear.
Today’s launch started off seemingly smooth and flawless. During a live webcast of the launch, NASA spokesman Rob Navias of the Johnson Space Center in Houston announced that “all vehicle parameters [were] reported performing perfectly” about 2 minutes after liftoff. Nearly 7 minutes later, the spacecraft achieved preliminary orbit insertion.
But as Progress 65 was entering Earth’s orbit, mission controllers began to experience what Navias called ratty telemetry data during the end of the third-stage engine performance. At first it was unclear whether the third-stage engines had shut down and separated from the spacecraft. “Third-stage separation may have happened earlier than planned,” Navias said.
Shortly thereafter, Navias announced that telemetry data “received in bits and pieces indicated that the navigational antennas have deployed.” However, the fate of the spacecraft’s solar arrays was up in limbo. Though telemetry data showed the solar panels were no longer stowed, whether they were successfully deployed remains uncertain.
The ISS currently has a crew of six on board, presumably with enough rations to make it through until Progress 66.
YOU STAY CLASSY, DNC-MSM:
On ABC’s The View, CNN’s Van Jones Compares Steve Bannon to Someone Who Wants to Castrate Men.
Meanwhile, CBS’s Stephen Colbert to Mitt Romney: Bet Those Frog’s Legs ‘Taste Like Trump’s Balls.’
And Bette Midler resorts to cheap Asian stereotypes, tweeting, “Trump sucks up to Mitch McConnell by hiring The Turtle’s wife, Elaine Chao, to Dept of Trans. To give her her due, she CAN drive a car.”
(Wait ’til Midler discovers that Hillary hasn’t driven a car in 20 years.)
As Kurt Schlichter writes, “Trollmaster Trump Is Driving Liberals to New Heights of Fussy Fury” — not to mention new lows of crudeness.
SCIENCE: Four New Names Officially Added to the Periodic Table of Elements.
Yet we still don’t have one named Lehrerium.
STUDY: Using Ecstasy to treat PTSD: ‘I felt like my soul snapped back into place’
PTSD has garnered attention as a problem that plagues returning war veterans, but the majority of those with the disorder are civilians. The National Center for PTSD says that nearly one in 15 Americans, including one in 10 women, will be afflicted at some point in their life. PTSD can be triggered by a single, terrifying incident or by repeated abuse. In effect, the brain and body get stuck in a loop of overreaction to normal stimuli; symptoms may include nightmares, panic attacks and avoidance of normal situations or interactions that remind the patient of their initial trauma.
“It comes out of the fundamental terror part of the brain,” says Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, a psychiatrist and trauma researcher in Boston. “It doesn’t allow you to focus on anything new, because you’re preoccupied with the past threat.” To break the cycle, van der Kolk says, a patient needs to get beyond the ongoing sense of visceral terror. For some patients, talking about the trauma, even thinking about it, is too much.
That’s where MDMA seems to come in. “What we see in the sessions is that it seems to kind of bring people down from being overwhelmed by emotions,” says Dr. Michael Mithoefer, a psychotherapist who led the first MAPS-funded studies using drug-assisted therapy for PTSD. “At the same time, it also kind of brings them up from being numb or disconnected from those emotions.”
That’s how Appleton describes it, too. “PTSD is always distracting you from facing your problems, because it’s terrifying. On the MDMA, you’re finally able to face the stuff that you’ve been pushing down for so many years.”
Like any cure for any disease or disorder, I hope this pans out.
AMAZON NOW COVERS OVER 200 BRANDS with its Amazon Dash Buttons.
IN THE ABSTRACT, YES. BUT GIVEN HOW LITTLE MOST DOCTORS KNOW ABOUT FITNESS, I’M NOT SO SURE. Should a Simple Fitness Check Be Part of Your Checkup?
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Kellyanne Conway Would Be A Feminist Hero If She Were A Democrat.
Feminist? Progressives won’t even think of her as a “real” woman.
IT ISN’T ABOUT TRADE: China Raises Taxes on Imported Cars.
Chinese buyers of eye-poppingly expensive luxury cars will have to pay extra under Beijing’s latest effort to rein in ostentatious spending.
The communist government has added a 10 percent import tax, effective Thursday, on “super-luxury vehicles” priced above 1.3 million yuan ($190,000). The Finance Ministry said it is aimed at encouraging “rational consumption” and curbing energy use and emissions.
Chinese leaders are trying to nurture domestic consumption to reduce reliance on trade and investment, but worry extravagant spending by the elite is politically dangerous at a time of slowing economic growth.
Free and fair elections and a transparent economy would help Beijing with the whole legitimacy thing, don’t you know.
RELATED: See this morning’s post on China’s difficult-to-impossible-yet-totally-necessary switchover from an export-driven economy to one driven by consumer spending.
UNEXPECTEDLY: Grand Rapids’ worker-run, no-tipping restaurant closes.
Not only was the menu unconventional, so was the business model. Bartertown was a collective, which meant there were no bosses, according to Cappelletti. The inspiration for the worker-owned restaurant was based on Cappelletti’s own restaurant experience.
“Because of our economy, people are working 12- to-15-hour shifts, servers take home $200 to $300 a night in tips, the cooks are making $10 an hour and the owner takes whatever he takes, ” Cappelletti told MLive in 2011. “We’re going to have equal pay and equal say across the board. Everyone working together.”
Employees would be expected to join the union, Industrial Workers of the World, he said.
In keeping with the worker empowerment theme, he commissioned a mural depicting Marxist revolutionary Che Guevara, Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong and other provocative leaders tackling restaurant duties.
In the end, the restaurant failed to achieve the employee business model it envisioned.
Do tell.