THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO CHOOSE: Killer Whales Are Conceiving, but the Pregnancies Are Failing.
Archive for 2017
July 2, 2017
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: My sex doll is so much better than my real wife. “After my wife gave birth, we stopped having sex and I felt a deep sense of loneliness. But the moment I saw Mayu in the showroom, it was love at first sight.”
From the wife: “I make the dinner, I clean, I do the washing. I choose sleep over sex.”
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How fireworks exploded into history – and became an American symbol.
I BLAME THE VIOLENT RHETORIC OF ELIZABETH SANDERS AND BERNIE SANDERS: California Democrats to far-left single payer advocates: Stop bullying and threatening us!
But Elizabeth Sanders says anyone standing in the way of single payer healthcare is guilty of “blood money.” Bernie Sanders says they’re going to kill “thousands of people.” Fellow California Democrat Nancy Pelosi says they’re dishonoring God. Hillary Clinton and Motel Williams concur with all of the above.
What, you think you wouldn’t have to deal with the blowback from this sort of hyperbolic rhetoric surrounding health care whipping your base into a frenzy? Sorry about that, Sacramento.
Or as Seth Barron wrote in City Journal in response to GOP Rep. Steve Scalise being shot by a deranged Sanders supporter, “Every policy difference, no matter how trivial, has been cast as a matter of life and death. Proposed changes in federal Medicaid reimbursement practices will consign ‘tens of thousands of people’ to early death, according to Senator Bernie Sanders, while rolling back federal guidelines on transgender bathroom signage will cause more teenagers to kill themselves, according to ThinkProgress…Trump’s opponents in the media, academia, and politics can pretend that their calls for radical action were meant metaphorically or in a nonviolent sense. But they are the ones who opened this box of fear, panic, and rage. Let them take responsibility for the climate that now exists.”
YOU’RE TAKING YOUR CHANCES WITH 11-YEAR-OLD BOYS IN ALASKA: Bear crashes through window of 11-year-old boy’s bedroom.
AT AMAZON, shop the Sexual Wellness Store.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation. “Things were getting better at a breakneck pace for 25 years after World War II. Then it all just … slowed way down.”
SPIKED: ORWELL’S WAR ON THE ‘SMELLY LITTLE ORTHODOXIES’ OF LEFT AND RIGHT. It’s an interesting review of Robert Colls’ new book, George Orwell: English Rebel, though note this passage:
Setting out his stall, Colls, a professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University, puts his finger on why Orwell despised ideology as a ‘form of abstract knowledge which, in order to support a particular tendency or regime, has to distort the world and usually does so by drawing off, or separating out, ideas from experience. Ideology, in Orwell’s eyes, could never afford to get too close to the lives of the people. The more abstract the idea and the language that that expressed it, the more ideological the work and vice versa’, he writes at the book’s beginning.
‘[Orwell] knew that if he was saying something so abstract that it could not be understood or falsified, then he was not saying anything that mattered’, Colls continues. ‘He staked his reputation on being true to the world as it was, and his great fear of intellectuals stemmed from what he saw as their propensity for abstraction and deracination – abstraction in their thinking and deracination in their lives. Orwell’s politics, therefore, were no more and no less than intense encounters turned into writings he hoped would be truthful and important. Like Gramsci, he believed that telling the truth was a revolutionary act. But without the encounters he had no politics and without the politics he felt he had nothing to say.’
What’s this now about Gramsci and truth? (Though don’t let that stop you from reading the whole thing; it’s a fascinating article.)
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST:
● Shot: Stephen Hawking says Donald Trump risks ‘turning Earth into Venus’ with 250 degree temperature.
—The London Telegraph, today.
● Chaser: President Obama ‘has four years to save Earth.’
—The London Guardian, January 17, 2009.
Classical reference in headline:
FLASHBACK: New status anxiety fuels Trump derangement.
Our privileged, college-educated left — what Joel Kotkin calls the gentry liberals — feels that its preeminent position in American society is under threat. And people care a lot about status.
What’s more, the people who seem to be lashing out the most are, in fact, just those gentry liberals: academics, entertainers, pundits, low-level tech types, and so on. As journalism professor Mark Grabowski reported, another academic texted him on election night: “Oh my God! We will be the ones ostracized if he wins.”
Maybe we shouldn’t “ostracize” people based on whether their candidate wins, but in a way this professor was right: A Trump victory is a blow to the status of the people who thought Hillary Clinton was their candidate — one that they feel even more deeply because gentry liberals, having been raised on the principle that the personal is political, seem to take politics pretty personally.
Related: Trump Is Playing With The Press.
Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).
Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.
They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control.
And they still haven’t learned.
Plus: How David Brooks Created Donald Trump. “When politeness and orderliness are met with contempt and betrayal, do not be surprised if the response is something less polite, and less orderly. Brooks closes his Trump column with Psalm 73, but a more appropriate verse is Hosea 8:7 ‘For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind.’ Trump’s ascendance is a symptom of a colossal failure among America’s political leaders, of which Brooks’ mean-spirited insularity is only a tiny part. God help us all.”
SINCE WE’RE BACK TO THE MEDIA BELIEVING THAT CLIP ART CAN KILL, and presidents should maintain a sense of official decorum, here’s a reminder of something that never made a blip on their radar, right around this time last year:
RAPPER KENDRICK LAMAR TO PERFORM AT WHITE HOUSE FOR SEMI-RETIRED PRESIDENT ON JULY FOURTH.
Obama met with Lamar, apparently one of his favorite “artists,” before his final State of the Union address. As Victor Davis Hanson noted at the time, the cover to Lamar’s 2015 album To Pimp a Butterfly features a dead judge and his murderers posing in front of the White House.
Related: “Wrestling isn’t real. Neither is your outrage.”
IMPORTANT HEALTH ADVICE FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Have lots of sex, live a whole lot longer.
USEFUL IDIOTS, THEN AND NOW — OR, QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED:
Her book does not contain, alas, the remarkable statement that constituted my own first introduction to a useful idiot. It blazes in my memory across the 58 years since it was uttered. It was 1946. The Cold War was just beginning, and I was listening to a radio debate on the subject between Clare Boothe Luce and Rev. Harry F. Ward, former chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union and an ornament of New York’s Union Theological Seminary (professor of Christian ethics there, I believe), who was already famous as an apologist for Communism. Mrs. Luce made a scathing reference to the Soviet Union’s “concentration camps,” to which Dr. Ward promptly responded, “Those are not concentration camps. They are personal rehabilitation camps, and they have done those people a world of good!” It is testimony to the impact that piece of idiocy had on me that I remember every word, and am prepared to bet money that my quotation of it is practically verbatim.
—The late William Rusher’s 2004 review of Mona Charen’s Useful Idiots, headlined, “Will They Ever Learn?”
Flash-forward to today: “Pretty sure they were trying to keep them from jumping:”
CHOOSE THE FORM OF YOUR DESTRUCTOR. Reminder: Progressives Destroyed Normalcy And Now They’re Shocked Trump Isn’t Normal.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN: A new dawn in Supersonic Transport and technological innovation. “Things were getting better at a breakneck pace for 25 years after World War II. Then it all just … slowed way down.”
AT AMAZON, American Flags.
THE ATLANTIC ON HOW THE LEFT LOST ITS MIND: Polemicists, conspiracists, and outright fabulists are feeding an alternative media landscape—where the implausibility of a claim is no bar to its acceptance:
Over the past two decades, an immense amount of journalistic energy was spent exploring the right-wing media ecosystem—from talk radio, to Fox News, to Breitbart and beyond—and documenting its growing influence on mainstream GOP politics. This turned out to be a worthy and prescient pursuit, and if any doubt remains about that, I’d present “President Donald Trump” as Exhibit A. While serious Republicans in the political class spent years scoffing at the “entertainers” and “provocateurs” on the supposedly powerless fringe, the denizens of the fever swamp were busy taking over the party.
But 2017 poses the question: Could the same thing happen on the left?
It’s a prospect that deserves more serious attention and debate than it’s gotten this year. The Trump era has given rise to a vast alternative left-wing media infrastructure that operates largely out of the view of casual news consumers, but commands a massive audience and growing influence in liberal America. There are polemical podcasters and partisan click farms; wild-eyed conspiracists and cynical fabulists. Some traffic heavily in rumor and wage campaigns of misinformation; others are merely aggregators and commentators who have carved out a corner of the web for themselves. But taken together, they form a media universe where partisan hysteria is too easily stoked, and fake news can travel at the speed of light.
CTRL-F “Andrew Sullivan,” “The Atlantic” and “Sarah Palin’s Uterus:” Zero results.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How glitter boobs became the summer’s hottest festival trend.
MICHAEL WALSH ON THE DEEP STATE: They Never Stop, They Never Sleep, They Never Quit.
Read the whole thing.
GO AHEAD, PUT SALT ON YOUR FOOD. “Evidence has been gathering for years that government salt consumption guidelines might well kill more people than they save. The research does suggest that some subset of Americans may be especially sensitive to salt and would benefit from consuming less. Among those are folks with ancestors from Sub-Saharan Africa. But for most people, the risk lies elsewhere.”
MEDIA HORRIFIED AFTER TRUMP TWEETS VIDEO BODY-SLAMMING A CNN LOGO:
#FraudNewsCNN #FNN pic.twitter.com/WYUnHjjUjg
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 2, 2017
Journalists reacted in horror Sunday morning after President Trump tweeted a fake video that showed him body-slamming “fraud news” CNN in a fake wrestling match.While many of the president’s supporters online reacted to the video with humor, the consensus among journalists seemed to be that Trump was inciting violence against the media.
“It is a sad day when the President of the United States encourages violence against reporters,” CNN said in a statement responding to the tweet.
ABC News’ chief political analyst Matthew Dowd claimed Trump is “advocating violence against media” and demanded Republican leaders “put country over party” in response to the fake video of fake wrestling.
“Around the world, journalists are murdered with impunity on a regular basis,” Poynter managing editor Ben Mullin gravely stated. “This isn’t funny.”
CNN commentator Ana Navarro called the tweet “an incitement to violence” in an appearance on ABC News. “He is going to get somebody killed in the media,” she claimed.
None of them actually believe that, of course. What the DNC-MSM is actually angry about is that those enjoying the president’s tweet the most are millions of those same voters whom they’ve trashed for years, not least of which those residing in “downtown Arkansas,” as the New York Times embarrassingly tweeted yesterday. Just this past week, CNN producer Jimmy Carr was caught on hidden camera by an associate of James O’Keefe saying, American voters are “stupid as shit.”
Much more openly, they were mocked on the air by another Democrat operative with a byline back in 2009, also an employee of CNN:
Back in 1992, a Newsweek editor (back when Newsweek was still owned by the Washington Post) defended on C-Span her wearing of a button to that year’s Republican National Convention a pin that read “Yeah, I’m in the Media. Screw You.” A media that allowed such actions with no consequences, and spent decades pretending to be “objective” while trashing anyone with a (R) after his or her name, and who votes quadrennially in overwhelming numbers for the Democrat presidential candidate is shocked! shocked! that they’re suddenly not being treated (and tweeted about) with Marquess of Queensberry rules.
And then there’s the president as pro-wrestler kingpin angle, no doubt also causing vapors in the DNC-MSM. But in 2008, all three major presidential candidates had their dalliance with professional wrestling…
…With the winner of the election going on to eventually be interviewed by a woman who produces YouTube clips while sitting a bathtub full of milk and Cheerios. During his 2008 appearance on WWE, the future POTUS asked, paraphrasing the catchphrase of pro wrestler “The Rock,” “Do you smell what Barack is cooking?”
Yes. And its indigestible aftermath as well. Or as Iowahawk tweeted today:
Take a bow DNC-MSM – to paraphrase the former president, you did that build that.
UPDATE: Retired ABC Reporter Details Obama’s Off-the-Record ‘Profanity-Laced Tirade’ About the Media.
He and Hillary are their bosses. What choice do the media have, but to take it? As Larry Elder tweets, imagine how the media would react if Trump did that. But keep the above link in mind next time someone from CNN theatrically laces into Sean Spicer or Sarah Huckabee.
MORE: “After weeks of hearing how assassination plays* and holding up a severed head was just ‘art’ – the leftist response to [Trump’s] tweet is precious,” podcaster Stefan Molyneux adds on Twitter.
* Sponsored by CNN’s parent company.
WHY THE CALORIE is broken.
Wrangham and his colleagues have since shown that cooking unlaces microscopic structures that bind energy in foods, reducing the work our gut would otherwise have to do. It effectively outsources digestion to ovens and frying pans.
Wrangham found that mice fed raw peanuts, for instance, lost significantly more weight than mice fed the equivalent amount of roasted peanut butter. The same effect holds true for meat: there are many more usable calories in a burger than in steak tartare.
Different cooking methods matter, too. In 2015, Sri Lankan scientists discovered that they could more than halve the available calories in rice by adding coconut oil during cooking and then cooling the rice in the refrigerator.
Wrangham’s findings have significant consequences for dieters.
If Nash likes his porterhouse steak bloody, for example, he will likely be consuming several hundred calories less than if he has it well-done.
Yet the FDA’s methods for creating a nutrition label do not for the most part account for the differences between raw and cooked food, or pureed versus whole, let alone the structure of plant versus animal cells. A steak is a steak, as far as the FDA is concerned.
Industrial food processing, which subjects foods to extremely high temperatures and pressures, might be freeing up even more calories.
But it all seems so precise and objective.