THIS SCIENCE IS SETTLED: John Daly claims he lost 67 pounds by adopting a ‘whisky and popcorn’ diet.
I bet he could have lost more weight even faster if he’d gone with a good single malt instead of Jack Daniels — or at least, if the need should ever arise, that’s what I’ll tell my wife.
SHOCK-JOCK POLS: Democrats are projecting competence by swearing.
Noah Rothman:
A New York Magazine profile of obvious 2020 hopeful Kirsten Gillibrand featured the esteemed gentlewoman from New York unleashing cascade of profanity upon her interlocutor. Her interview included “one ‘f***,’ two ‘f***ings,’ one ‘bulls***,’” and a variety of other lesser but equally crude expletives, according to Politico’s Alex Caton. At a public event, while sitting across from several former speechwriters for Barack Obama, California Senator Kamala Harris (another likely 2020 candidate) castigated Representative Raul Labrador for claiming that Americans do not die for want of health insurance. “What the f*** is that?” she remarked. Her audience roared and ate it up.
Republicans “don’t give a s*** about people,” barked newly elected Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez in an attack on the GOP’s approach to health-care reform. Perez employed similarly salty language to attack the Trump White House’s spending proposals. “They call it a skinny budget,” he said. “I call it a sh***y budget.” Representative Beto O’Rourke can often be seen weaving the occasional “s***” into stump speeches as he prepares to challenge Senator Ted Cruz. “Mr. President: If there was a wiretap at Trump Tower, that means a fed judge found probable cause of crime which means you are in deep s***,” tweeted Representative Ted Lieu, whose garment-rending online persona has attracted a devoted following of hysterical liberals.
Once is sui generis. Twice is a coincidence. Forty-seven times is a campaign.
Indeed. It’s about keeping the base riled up until November, 2018.
As to what that says about the base, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader.
VIDEO OR IT DIDN’T HAPPEN: MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle Claims Being a Woman Is a Preexisting Condition.
There’s video. It happened.
IN-DEPTH TEST: The Volvo XC90. I have a soft spot for them, since they used to sponsor the late, lamented Glenn & Helen Show.
AT AMAZON, shop the Mother’s Day Gift Shop.
LONG WAY DOWN: Iceland drills 4.7 km down into volcano to tap clean energy.
At this depth, engineers hope to access hot liquids under extreme pressure and at temperatures of 427 degrees C (800 F), creating steam that turns a turbine to generate clean electricity.
Iceland’s decision to harness the heat inside the earth in a process known as geothermal energy dates back to the 1970s and the oil crisis.
But the new geothermal well is expected to generate far more energy, as the extreme heat and pressure at that depth makes the water take the form of a “supercritical” fluid, which is neither gas nor liquid.
“We expect to get five to 10 times more power from the well than a conventional well today,” said Albert Albertsson, an engineer at the Icelandic energy company HS Orka, involved in the drilling project.
To supply electricity and hot water to a city like Reykjavik with 212,000 inhabitants, “we would need 30-35 conventional high temperature wells” compared to only three or five supercritical wells, says Albertsson. The cost would be much less.
On a remote island nation with lots of volcanic activity, geothermal would seem to make sense. But even after digging “Thor,” scientists “have two years to determine its success and the economic feasibility of the experiment.”
TOLERANCE: Jakarta’s Christian governor Ahok found guilty in Islam blasphemy trial.
The sentence was harsher than expected and will come as a shock to many of his supporters. TV news coverage of the scene outside the court showed some supporters weeping.
Prosecutors had called for a suspended one-year jail sentence on charges of hate speech. The maximum sentence is four years in prison for hate speech and five years for blasphemy.
Judges said he did it deliberately and did not show remorse. Ahok told the court he will appeal the ruling.
Thousands of police have been deployed across the capital in case clashes break out between Ahok’s supporters and hard-line Islamists who demanded he be sacked and jailed over the allegations.
That’s instructive.
21ST CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: More Older Couples Are ‘Shacking Up.’ “The number of people over 50 who cohabit with an unmarried partner jumped 75 percent from 2007 to 2016, the Pew Research Center reported last month — the highest increase in any age group.”
THIS IS NOT THE GOP MAJORITY I WAS PROMISED: GOP Senator Determined Healthcare Bill Will Pass ‘Jimmy Kimmel Test’
GEORGE KORDA: Tennessee Democratic Party: Catawampus, and it’s getting no help from above. “Democrats are in their worst elected-officeholder position at the state and national levels in nearly 100 years. They are at a nadir in Tennessee, with only 25 seats in the 99-member state House of Representatives and five seats in the 33-member senate. Senate Democrats could hold a caucus meeting in a mid-size car.”
UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Could marijuana hold a key to keeping our brains forever young? Science is starting to find out.
Their findings were provocative: A low dose of THC, they reported, “reversed the age-related decline in cognitive performance of mice aged 12 and 18 months.” They traced this change to a shift in gene expression — the way that our DNA codes are transcribed and translated into proteins and other molecules. According to the study, “the expression profiles of THC-treated mice aged 12 months closely resembled those of THC-free animals aged 2 months,” as if the older mice’s brains were getting younger.
The experiment focused on learning, spatial skills and memory. While older mice typically did not perform as well as young ones in mazes or with location-recognition tasks — an outcome consistent with the decline of brain function in aged individuals — they performed just as well as their younger cohort under the influence of THC. Meanwhile, younger mice given doses of THC demonstrated worse performance, more in line with that of average old mice.
I had a high school teacher who jokingly (?) said that drugs should be legalized, but only for old people. “We’re bored and everything hurts,” was the punchline.
Maybe it will turn out that he was onto something.
WITH DNC IN MIND, CITY BANS CARRYING URINE, FECES: College asks students to contemplate ‘pee privilege.’
(Classical reference in headline.)
IDIOCRACY ON THE LATE SHIFT: From Johnny Carson to Stephen Colbert. As Dennis Prager writes, “Whatever the Left dominates, it ruins.”
Related: The courts, and Stephen Colbert, are enabling Trump’s violations of the norms.
NOT THAT THERE’S ANYTHING WRONG WITH THAT: Richard Simmons sues National Enquirer over stories claiming he is changing gender.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Smart Contact Lens Detects Diabetes and Glaucoma.
PATRICK POOLE VISITS THE SITE OF THE DECEMBER COPTIC CHURCH SUICIDE BOMBING IN CAIRO.
IS NOT SHOWING UP TO RIOT “A FAILED CONSERVATIVE POLICY?” Looking Back at New York’s “Hard Hat Riots,” 47 Years On.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. With its bedrock smashed to pieces, Labour cannot win.
No part of the UK has been more faithful to Labour than Wales. The party has won almost every general election in nearly 100 years. In the south Welsh valleys, “Tory” is less of an affiliation than an insult. Now all that stands to be upended – in a result that will drive political columnists to file obits for Corbyn. But spend some time in Bridgend, as I did just after May’s flying visit, reporting for the Guardian and making a film for Vice News, and a more complex and worrying picture emerges.
First, this is not an election that the Conservatives are winning, it’s one Labour is losing. In Bridgend, I never once spotted a blue placard or poster. There wasn’t even a Tory candidate, until late last week, when central office imposed its own woman against the wishes of the local association. All this reminds me of visiting south Wales before last year’s Brexit vote, and realising that the ground game for Vote Leave was mainly a bunch of teenagers – one of whom was about to sit his GCSEs.
What’s affecting the Labour vote? The truth is, it’s been sliding for years in Bridgend, and leadership is only a small part of the reason why. Party diehards will say almost unanimously that they like Corbyn “and his ideas”, but the most telling comment I heard was from Ben, a thirtysomething who worked at the local Ford plant. He reeled off the Labour leaders he’d lived under: Blair, Brown, Miliband, Corbyn. “These people couldn’t be further from what I am. They don’t represent me.” He saw the divide not as ideological but cultural. Never mind the nuances in policy, what he heard was the same breed of professional politician. And while his dad and granddad had “always voted Labour”, he wouldn’t.
As Labour has removed itself culturally from its working-class roots (sound familiar?), it has also retreated politically from the center and into far-leftism (which should also sound familiar).
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The art of driving fast on public roads in the 21st century: A how-to.
OBAMA WASTING NO TIME SETTLING INTO THE HECTORING JIMMY CARTER PHASE OF HIS POST-PRESIDENCY:
● Obama now lecturing America on food waste and eating meat, gets fact-checked by his former chef.
● Barack Obama Jets to Milan to Deliver Climate Change Speech, says there that Climate Change ‘Created by Man’ and ‘Can Be Solved.
● Crucial for Americans to Resist ‘Hate,’ Obama Says in Rare Address.
That last item is pretty rich coming from a guy who before his last State of the Union address, met with a rapper who featured an illustration of a gang posing with a recently murdered judge in front of the White House on his then-most recent album.
THEY COULD USE ONE: A competitor for Fox News?
“SOCIALISM”: How Venezuela Ruined Its Oil Industry.
So there are primarily two related causes that have resulted in the steep decline of Venezuela’s oil production, despite the sharp increase in the country’s proved reserves. The first is the removal of expertise required to develop the country’s heavy oil. This started with the firing of PDVSA employees in 2003 and continued with pushing international expertise out of the country in 2007.
Second, the Chávez government failed to appreciate the level of capital expenditures required to continue developing the country’s oil. This was in no small part due to inexperience among the Chávez loyalists that were now running PDVSA, but it may not have mattered in any case. When oil prices were high, Chávez saw billions of dollars that could be siphoned to fund the company’s social programs, and that’s exactly what he did. But he failed to reinvest adequately in this capital-intensive industry.
One of the amazing things about today’s low oil prices is that they’ve been achieved concurrent with a longterm decline in Venezuelan production. Assuming the country returns someday to sane and sensible government, the first thing they’re going to do is get those oil fields working again — and probably with very little regard to price.
That’s going to put the pinch on North American frackers, but the rest of OPEC is going to suffer, too, and perhaps to an even greater extent.
NOTHING TO CELEBRATE: A Hundred Years of Communism.
Stalin killed so many people in the Great Purge that it is remarkable that anyone was left to do the killing. Former comrades, artists and intellectuals, military officers, clergymen, dissidents, outcasts and normal Russian men and women were slaughtered in a tidal wave of blood. What is striking is not just who Stalin killed but who he spared. While hundreds of thousands of innocents were massacred, Lavrentiy Beria, who was not just a bloody killer but a known rapist, received generous promotion. [“If only Comrade Stalin knew!” -ed.]
Having carved up Eastern Europe with Adolf Hitler, and oppressed its beleaguered inhabitants with such atrocities as the Katyn massacre, where 22,000 men from the Polish officer corps and intelligensia were shot in cold blood, Stalin was himself subjected to invasion. The Red Army fought with startling courage and conviction to prevail, but as the West looked on they became embarrassed. A storm of rape and murder followed the Soviets, carried out by callous and vengeful soldiers. The Nazis in Eastern Europe were replaced with cruel and subservient Stalinist officials. Bierut in Poland, Hoxha in Albania, Rákosi in Hungary and Gottwald in Czechoslovakia kept their people mired in poverty and persecution.
The Soviets inspired others. Mao took power in China and launched a sweeping campaign of modernisation that left millions of expendable victims starved or killed. Juche arose in North Korea, wrapping itself around the country in a chokehold that has persisted to the present day. Pol Pot butchered almost a quarter of Cambodians. Mariam mass-murdered in Ethiopia. Perhaps the most successful of the communist states was Cuba, where, at least, there was not large-scale killing or famine.
Read the whole thing.
(Hat tip, Will Collier.)
WELL, YES: Donald Trump is turning liberals into conspiracy theorists.
This comes from none other than Chris Cillizza:
The firing of White House chief usher Angella Reid, the first woman to hold that job, was seized on as the latest piece of evidence that Trump and his administration was nothing more than an old boys club — openly hostile to women and minorities.
Turns out, according to Axios reporting, that Reid got along well with the President and First Lady but was far less popular with the staff of the White House she oversaw. “When her departure was announced to the residence staff yesterday morning, workers burst into applause,” Axios reported.
In each of these four instances — and all of these have been in the last week! — liberals, fueled by Twitter outrage, jumped to conclusions that portrayed Trump and other Republicans in the poorest possible light. And, on each occasion, the fuller story either totally or mostly rebutted the version of the story the left had seized on.
Cillizza cautions that “Democrats run the risk of appearing like the boy who cried wolf to the public — and in the process taking some steam out of the very legitimate questions they are asking about the Trump administration.”
But the panic-mongering isn’t about posing legitimate questions. It’s about keeping the base riled up until November, 2018.
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