DELIBERATIVE BODY: Senate Rules Like the One Used to Silence Elizabeth Warren’s Criticism of Jeff Sessions are Dumb, Arcane, and Self-Aggrandizing. “Senators should not be afforded special privileges shielding them from vigorous criticism.”
Yeah, it’s not like the Senate is a college campus or anything.
TORQUEY: Tesla’s 5-Seater Model S Crushes $1.5 Million Sports Cars Off the Line.
This latest test by Motor Trend pushed the Tesla ahead of the 2017 911 Turbo S, which was previously the quickest according to tests conducted by the magazine in November 2016. It also puts the Model S P100, which has a base price of $135,700, ahead of the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, and Porsche 918 Spyder, which have base prices of $1.5 million, $1.5 million and $845,000 respectively.
Operating in Tesla’s Ludicrous Easter Egg mode, the Model S accelerated from 0 to 30 mph 0.05 seconds faster than the 911 Turbo S, the magazine says in its review. The two vehicles even out as the acceleration continues, with the Tesla edging ahead by 0.2 seconds as the cars move from 60 mph through to 90 mph. The two cross the quarter-mile mark together at 10.5 seconds, according to Motor Trend.
I wonder how many miles of regular driving were left in the batteries’ charge after that (admittedly impressive) stunt.
ONE OF TRUMP’S BIGGEST FLAWS — WHICH HE SHARES WITH JEFF SESSIONS — IS WEAKNESS ON ASSET FORFEITURE: Meet the Libertarian-Leaning GOP Texas State Senator[s] Whose Career[s] Donald Trump Wants To Destroy.
There’s nothing “law and order” about asset forfeiture. It’s government-sponsored theft.
WAPO MIGHT ACTUALLY BELIEVE THEIR OWN HEADLINE: Mitch McConnell gives Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign an in-kind contribution.
IT’S THE MEDIUM NOT THE MESSAGE: College Warns Against Recording in Class After Prof’s Anti-Trump Rant Goes Viral.
I FEEL LIKE LINCOLN ALWAYS MAKES IT ABOUT 90% OF THE WAY TO BEING A REAL LUXURY CAR. AM I BEING UNFAIR? From Expedition to Navigator: our predictions for Lincoln’s SUV.
ANN ALTHOUSE ON THE LEFTIST JIHAD AGAINST IVANKA: “The Woman Must Be Destroyed.” “A woman with a business is subject to special rules. Political rules. And if she does not hew to them, she must be destroyed. By a gang of women. You know how women help women? They don’t.”
John McCain is a lot of things, some of them unpleasant, but he is most certainly not an armchair general.
Katrina vanden Heuvel on the other hand is a very silly person and an important voice in Twitter’s progressive echo chamber.
THANKS, OBAMA: 95% of Brigade Combat Teams Unprepared to Fight Immediately.
ARE WE FACING A POST-TRUMP GUN SLUMP? Trump’s a better salesman than Obama. But nobody’s a better gun salesman than Obama.
But if you want to buy ammo, check out my former students’ company, LuckyGunner.com. The prices are good and the service is great.
GOOD LORD: Radiation at Japan’s Fukushima Reactor Is Now at ‘Unimaginable’ Levels.
Adam Housley, who reported from the area in 2011 following the catastrophic triple-meltdown, said this morning that new fuel leaks have been discovered.
He said the radiation levels – as high as 530 sieverts per hour – are now the highest they’ve been since 2011 when a tsunami hit the coastal reactor.
“To put this in very simple terms. Four sieverts can kill a handful of people,” he explained.
He said that critics, including the U.S. military in 2011, have long questioned whether Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO) and officials have been providing accurate information on the severity of the radiation.
TEPCO maintains that the radiation is confined to the site and not a risk to the public. It’s expected to take at least $300 billion and four decades to fix it.
Faster, please.
SUPER! Marvel Comics to Abandon Social Justice Storylines?
The comicbook industry has suffered from a lot of self-inflicted wounds.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Cleanly placing atomically precise graphene nanoribbons.
SOCIAL JUSTICE MEDIA:
Anything is tolerated on Twitter, so long as it isn’t dissent. Or humor. Or fun.
I’m in the process of moving my Twitter-type social-media cocktail-party activities to gab.ai. It’s in beta and a little rough around the edges, but I like what I see so far — and they promise unmitigated freedom to speak and no shadow-banning.
WAIT, I THOUGHT THE SCIENCE WAS SETTLED: Forget what you’ve learned – scientists just created a stable helium compound. “If you remember your high school chemistry, you’ll know that helium is a bit of an oddball. This noble gas is the least reactive element on the periodic table, and thanks to its full outer shell, conventional wisdom states that helium cannot interact with other atoms to create stable compounds. While other noble gas elements have shown signs of forming compounds under extreme pressure, helium has remained firmly exclusive – until now. Scientists report creating what appears to be a stable helium-sodium compound, and it challenges some of the most basic assumptions of modern chemistry.”
LASERS, IS THERE ANYTHING THEY CAN’T DO? Lasers help doctors remove brain cancer.
Lasers can help surgeons rapidly analyse brain cancers and decide how much tissue to remove, a study shows.
It is a difficult decision as taking too little leads to the cancer coming back, while too much could lead to disability.
The technique, called SRS microscopy, has been tried on more than 360 patients at the University of Michigan Medical School and Harvard University.
The next stage is for it to be tested in full clinical trials.
“Brain cancer is like a cloud, you can define the centre, but the edges are really hard to discern,” says one of the researchers, Dr Daniel Orringer.
In other cancers – such as in the bowel – doctors would just take some of the non-essential surrounding tissue as well.
However, there is no non-essential tissue in the brain.
This study is so impressive that I’m not going to quibble with that last line.
DRUG SMUGGLING UPDATE: Marijuana disguised as limes. 4,000 pounds of fake limes. Two tons. You can’t make this stuff up. Well, I guess you could, but who’d believe you?
US Customs and Border Protection officers seized nearly two tons of marijuana packed in phony limes near the Texas-Mexico border last week, according to authorities.
The 3,947 pounds of weed came through a commercial shipment of key limes in Pharr, Texas, on Jan. 30, officials said.
The truck hauling the “produce” crossed the Pharr-Reynosa International Bridge along the Texas-Mexico border near the Gulf of Mexico. Over 34,000 of the fake fruit packages were discovered by an imaging inspection system and narcotics K-9 team.
But fake fruit isn’t a new scheme.
This isn’t the first time smugglers tried to use fake produce to bring drugs into the United States. Last year, agents found 2,493 pounds of marijuana stuffed into fake carrots at the same border crossing.
VIDEO: AREA MAN BULLIED BY FIERCE WAVES OF CLIMATE CHANGE: “When you get knocked down, you have to get up again.”
REGULATORY CAPTURE: Fixing the Federal Policy on E-Cigs Will Save Lives.
Unless something changes soon, the doomsday clock will strike midnight on the e-cigarette industry. Thanks to regulations finalized in August 2016 by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), manufacturers of e-cigarettes and nicotine vapor products now have less than two years to complete an expensive and arduous application process to keep their products on the market. Unable to shoulder the costs, many mom and pop vape shops are already starting to shutter. Thousands more are likely to close soon.
Meanwhile, smokers and former smokers who rely on e-cigarettes as smoking-cessation tools or lower-risk alternatives will soon encounter limited options and increased costs. In all likelihood, many probably will be driven back to combustible cigarettes. This would be a real shame, since e-cigarettes are at least 95 percent less harmful than combustible alternatives and smoking-related illness is a leading cause of preventable death in America.
These Obama-era FDA regs are about collecting tax revenue and protecting established players in the nicotine-delivery business (AKA, Big Tobacco).
DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY: Flashback to 2013, when Sen. Schumer Said President ‘Deserves His Choices’ For Cabinet.
(Classical reference in headline.)
TO BE FAIR, THAT’S THE WHOLE POINT: Survey: College ‘bias response teams’ threaten free speech.
RICHARD EPSTEIN: Neil Gorsuch: The Man For The Court.
ENERGY: Global oil glut disappearing faster than expected.
“This implies that current crude oil price levels are near the point where the market balances, allowing U.S. and OPEC production to increase to meet higher demand in 2017 and 2018,” the EIA said.
Total world consumption for crude oil and liquid fuels is expected to average 98.09 million barrels per day this year, up from the previous forecast of 97.2 million barrels a day, the EIA said in its latest report.
The EIA also raised its price forecast for West Texas Intermediate crude CLH7, -0.71% to $53.46 a barrel this year, from the previous forecast of $52.50. For 2018, it upped its view by $1 to $56.18. It also lifted forecasts on Brent LCOJ7, -0.44% to $54.54 this year and $57.18 next year.
Notice that prices are expected to hover in the $50-$60 range (as predicted here and many other places), rather than in the $100-$140 range.
Have you hugged a fracker today?
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