COMING THIS WINTER TO BOTH MY KIDS’ STOCKINGS: This Lego tape turns anything into a Lego-friendly surface.
Archive for 2017
March 15, 2017
PROTECTING AGAINST HARM FROM POLLUTION with B vitamins? “In the first study of its kind, a team of international researchers looked at the damage caused by one of the pollutants that has the most severe impact on health: PM2.5. The team found that something as simple as a daily vitamin B supplement could potentially reduce the impact of the tiny particles on the human body, although they stressed that research was in its early stages and the sample size was small.” So stay tuned.
HUH. THAT’S NOT HOW IT SOUNDS ON THE NEWS. Poll: Trump Approval, Voter Optimism on the Rise.
More Americans approve of the job Donald Trump is doing as president and of the direction the country is headed, according to Morning Consult/POLITICO surveys conducted over the past six weeks.
The most recent poll, conducted March 9-13, found that 52 percent of Americans approve of Trump’s job performance, compared with a 49 percent approval rating shortly after Inauguration Day. This month’s survey found that 43 percent of respondents do not approve of the president’s job performance.
When asked about the direction of the country, 46 percent of Americans said they believe the country is on the right track, up 4 points since a late January poll and up 17 points since immediately after Election Day, when just 29 percent of voters felt the same way. Still, 54 percent of voters said the country is on the wrong track, 4 percentage points lower than immediately after Trump took office.
Despite several public controversies, the two measurements have remained relatively steady, and almost all of the movement has been in Trump’s direction among all voters.
Much of the gains track with positive economic indicators during his first few weeks in office, including a strong jobs report and stock market gains.
Well, stay tuned.
VIRGINIA POSTREL: Don’t Just Roll Back Back Fuel Standards. End Them. “The CAFE standards are lousy environmental policy. Instead of targeting the real issue — burning less gasoline — the mandates meddle in corporate strategy, impose enormous hidden costs, and encourage drivers to hang on to their old gas guzzlers. Republicans should scrap the standards altogether while they control the White House and Congress. The CAFE rules are a terrible way to achieve either fuel savings or lower carbon emissions.”
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT-MONOPOLY INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF PSYCHOPATHY? Crazy at the wheel: psychopathic CEOs are rife in Silicon Valley, experts say.
BACON, OF COURSE. DUH. What Would You Order For Your Last Meal?
DON SURBER: Trump’s Finest Hour Nears. “Do not worry about the repeal and replacement of Obamacare. President Trump will cut a deal that will make it so by July 31.” One hopes. To be fair, Surber’s been right about Trump more than just about anybody.
AS A WISE COMMUNITY ORGANIZER ONCE ADVISED, GET IN THEIR FACES AND PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Trump goes after Snoop Dogg’s assassination video, tweeting, “Can you imagine what the outcry would be if Snoop Dog, failing career and all, had aimed and fired the gun at President Obama*? Jail time!”
Good for him – it was a mistake for President Bush to have waited until leaving office to comment on Kanye West’s racism and slander that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” during a Katrina fundraiser airing live on NBC. (And note that NBC’s Matt Lauer tried to argue with Bush and play gotcha games when the former president declared it “a disgusting moment.”) In contrast, if the DNC-MSM indulged Obama commenting endlessly on pop culture, there’s no reason why Trump can’t push back against the “assassination fascination” of the left.
* To be fair, Obama embraced and personally met at the White House with rappers who featured eliminatonist imagery on their album covers, just as long as the political target in question wasn’t him.
IT HAPPENED HERE WASN’T SUPPOSED TO BE A DOCUMENTARY: ‘Beware of Jews’ Sign Sparks Outrage in UK Hasidic Community.
(Classical reference in headline.)
FASTER, PLEASE: Mining nature for the next groundbreaking antibiotic.
TRUMP: It’s FAKE NEWS Reporter Found My Tax Returns in His Mailbox.
So how much of a stinker is this tax thing, really? CNN is running with “Democrats urge one another not to get distracted by Trump’s taxes.” Which is probably sage advice, given that Trump paid an effective 25% rate, much higher than Barack Obama, Joe Biden, or Bernie Sanders. And we wouldn’t be talking about Democrats’ tax rates at all if it weren’t for this story, which is enough to make you wonder if the “fake news reporter” wasn’t someone on the Trump payroll.
WOW: Scientists Have Created an Artificial Retina Implant That Could Restore Vision to Millions.
The retina is located at the back of the eye, and is made up of millions of these light-sensitive photoreceptors. But mutations in any one of the 240 identified genes can lead to retinal degeneration, where these photoreceptor cells die off, even while the retinal neurons around them are unaffected.
Because the retinal nerves remain intact and functional, previous research has looked at treating retinitis pigmentosa with bionic eye devices that stimulate the neurons with lights, while other scientists have investigated using CRISPR gene editing to repair the mutations that cause blindness.
Now, a team led by the Italian Institute of Technology has developed a new approach, with a prosthesis implanted into the eye that serves as a working replacement for a damaged retina.
The implant is made from a thin layer of conductive polymer, placed on a silk-based substrate and covered with a semiconducting polymer.
The semiconducting polymer acts as a photovoltaic material, absorbing photons when light enters the lens of the eye. When this happens, electricity stimulates retinal neurons, filling in the gap left by the eye’s natural but damaged photoreceptors.
To test the device, the researchers implanted the artificial retina into the eyes of rats bred to develop a rodent model of retinal degeneration – called Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) rats.
After the rats had healed from the operation 30 days later, the researchers tested how sensitive they were to light – called the pupillary reflex – compared to healthy rats and untreated RCS rats.
At the low intensity of 1 lux – a bit brighter than the light from a full moon – the treated rats weren’t much more responsive than untreated RCS rats.
But as the light increased to around 4–5 lux – about the same as a dark twilight sky – the pupillary response of treated rats was largely indistinguishable from healthy animals.
Remarkable.
Macular degeneration runs in my family, so it’s with a personal sense of urgency that I add this “Faster, please.”
I’M EXPECTING AN EARTH-SHATTERING KABOOM: The Next Generation F-15 Is Packed With Missiles: Eagle 2040C carries up to sixteen air-to-air missiles and sports a slick new paint job.
The F-15 was new and exciting about the time I hit puberty.
JEFF JACOBY: Why are climate-change models so flawed?
‘DO YOU believe,” CNBC’s Joe Kernen asked Scott Pruitt, the Environmental Protection Agency’s new director, in an interview last Thursday, “that it’s been proven that CO2 is the primary control knob for climate?”
Replied Pruitt: “No. I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do, and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact. So no — I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see. But we don’t know that yet. We need to continue the debate and continue the review and the analysis.”
It was an accurate and judicious answer, so naturally it sent climate alarmists into paroxysms of condemnation. The Washington Post slammed Pruitt as a “denier” driven by “unreason.” Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii called Pruitt’s views “extreme” and “irresponsible” — proof of his unfitness to head the EPA. Gina McCarthy, who ran the agency under President Obama, bewailed the danger global warming poses “to all of us who call Earth home,” and said she couldn’t “imagine what additional information [Pruitt] might want from scientists” in order to understand that.
Yet for all the hyperventilating, Pruitt’s answer to the question he was asked — whether carbon dioxide is the climate’s “primary control knob” — was entirely sound. “We don’t know that yet,” he said. We don’t.
Accepting the unknown is a big part of what makes a scientist, a scientist. Pretending knowledge where there is none to advance a statist agenda is what makes a progressive, a progressive.
OBAMA’S “PIVOT” TO PACIFIC SCRATCHED: There’ve been a couple of prior posts on this subject. This Defense News article adds a little more information:
The Obama administration’s Pacific rebalance effort — also known as the Pivot to the Pacific — effort is officially dead, according to a top State Department official.
Asked by reporters about the future of the rebalance, Acting Assistant Secretary of State Susan Thornton said Monday that the new administration has its own plan for the region, even if that plan has yet to take shape.
“Pivot, rebalance, etcetera — that was a word that was used to describe the Asia policy in the last administration. I think you can probably expect that this administration will have its own formulation. We haven’t really seen in detail, kind of, what that formulation will be or if there even will be a formulation,” she said.
However, Thornton — speaking on the eve of Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s first visit to the Asia-Pacific region — stressed that the new administration remains committed to the region, even if the flavor of that commitment may change.
SPOILER ALERT: “The documents were phony.”
In the third week of January, an Israeli named Yoni Ariel flew from Tel Aviv to Rome carrying $9,000 in cash on a secret mission to bring down Donald Trump.
There, he met with an Italian businessman. Seated at a table toward the rear of a café, away from the street where they might attract unwanted attention, Ariel recalled, he handed over the cash. In exchange he was given a copy of a potentially explosive set of documents.
Its 35 pages told the story of a $1.6 billion wire transfer from petroleum giant ExxonMobil to a European office of a Chinese mining company, which a day later transferred 1.4 billion euros to the Trump Organization, the privately held conglomerate founded by President Trump.
The transfers appeared to have taken place in mid-June, at the exact same time that Exxon’s then chief executive, Rex Tillerson, was in St. Petersburg at an economic forum, which Russian President Vladimir Putin also attended. Less than six months later, President-elect Trump — victor in an election that the US intelligence community said the Russian government had interfered with — nominated Tillerson to be his secretary of state.
To Ariel, who is married to an American and calls Russia’s tampering in the elections “an act of war,” the implications of these billion-dollar transfers were clear: Exxon had secretly bribed Trump to name Tillerson to the powerful cabinet post.
Just a taste more:
Not long after Trump won the election, Schorer, the former spokesman for Democrats Abroad Israel, told Ariel about the alleged Exxon payments and the documents that supposedly provide proof.
Ariel, intrigued, decided he would need help paying for trips to Rome to acquire the documents and also with authenticating them. A string of contacts, including the chairman of Democrats Abroad France, and a former Democratic National Committee operative in Washington, DC, eventually led Ariel to Brett Kimberlin, a left-wing political activist who is also notorious as a felon convicted of setting off bombs in the American heartland.
This is the same Brett Kimberlin who during the 1988 election claimed to have sold pot to Dan Quayle — attempted meddling in presidential elections seems to be something of a sideline for him.
Read the whole thing, but even at the end we still have no clue who forged the Exxon documents, or why they did just an obviously phony job of it.
IF HISTORY IS ANY GUIDE, IT MEANS THAT HUMPBACK DISCO IS JUST A COUPLE OF YEARS AWAY: Humpback Whales Are Forming Mysterious ‘Super-Groups’, and No One Can Explain It.
BACK AND TO THE LEFT. BACK AND TO THE LEFT: “Rachel Maddow takes conspiracy theorizing mainstream with Trump tax ‘scoop,’” Sonny Bunch writes in (astonishingly enough) the Washington Post.
LET’S GO TO THE MALL: Wall Street Has Found Its Next Big Short in U.S. Credit Market.
It’s no secret many mall complexes have been struggling for years as Americans do more of their shopping online. But now, they’re catching the eye of hedge-fund types who think some may soon buckle under their debts, much the way many homeowners did nearly a decade ago.
Like the run-up to the housing debacle, a small but growing group of firms are positioning to profit from a collapse that could spur a wave of defaults. Their target: securities backed not by subprime mortgages, but by loans taken out by beleaguered mall and shopping center operators. With bad news piling up for anchor chains like Macy’s and J.C. Penney, bearish bets against commercial mortgage-backed securities are growing.
In recent weeks, firms such as Alder Hill Management — an outfit started by protégés of hedge-fund billionaire David Tepper — have ramped up wagers against the bonds, which have held up far better than the shares of beaten-down retailers. By one measure, short positions on two of the riskiest slices of CMBS surged to $5.3 billion last month — a 50 percent jump from a year ago.
Last summer I found myself across the street from the Citadel Mall in Colorado Springs for the first time in years, and the Dillard’s-end parking lot was cracked and in the process of being overgrown with weeds. Bricks-and-mortar retail hasn’t improved its position since then, so it’s difficult to see a path forward for that property — or many others just like it — which doesn’t include default.
EMERGING THREATS DRIVE THE USN’S FRIGATE CONTROVERSY: My latest Creators Syndicate column.
READER BOOK PLUG: From reader Dale Cozort, Stalingrad Run.