“PADDOCK DIDN’T CHOOSE THIS GROUP RANDOMLY:” Why Did The Las Vegas Shooter Target A Country Music Festival?
Archive for 2017
October 3, 2017
IT’S ABOUT FREAKING TIME: This Crazy New Tech Contest Is Set on Finally Making Jetpacks a Practical Reality.
YOU’RE GONNA NEED A BIGGER LIST: 6 Dumbest Celebrity Reactions to Las Vegas Massacre.
I’D RATHER NOT: Meet the hominin species that gave us genital herpes.
Somewhere between 3 and 1.4 million years ago, HSV2 jumped the species barrier from African apes back into human ancestors – probably through an intermediate hominin species unrelated to humans. Hominin is the zoological ‘tribe’ to which our species belongs.
Now, a team of scientists from Cambridge and Oxford Brookes universities believe they may have identified the culprit: Paranthropus boisei, a heavyset bipedal hominin with a smallish brain and dish-like face.
In a study published today in the journal Virus Evolution, they suggest that P. boisei most likely contracted HSV2 through scavenging ancestral chimp meat where savannah met forest – the infection seeping in via bites or open sores.
Hominins with HSV1 may have been initially protected from HSV2, which also occupied the mouth. That is until HSV2 “adapted to a different mucosal niche” say the scientists. A niche located in the genitals.
Close contact between P. boisei and our ancestor Homo erectus would have been fairly common around sources of water, such as Kenya’s Lake Turkana. This provided the opportunity for HSV2 to boomerang into our bloodline.
Thanks for nothin’.
HEALTH NEWS: A vegan can be just as unhealthy as an omnivore.
UNTOLD GREAT WAR HISTORY: When Major George Marshall Met General John Pershing.
“General Pershing,” the major said, “there’s something to be said here and I think I should say it because I’ve been here the longest.”
Pershing turned back and gave the impertinent young officer a cold, appraising glance. “What have you got to say?”
A torrent of facts poured forth: the promised platoon manuals that never arrived and had set back training; the inadequate supplies that left men walking around with gunnysacks on their feet; the inadequate quarters that left troops scattered throughout the countryside, sleeping in barns for a penny a night; the lack of motor transport that forced troops to walk miles to the training grounds. Finally, the deluge subsided.
Pershing looked at the major and calmly said: “You must appreciate the troubles we have.”
The major replied, “Yes, I know you do, General, I know you do. But ours are immediate and every day and have to be solved before night.”
General Pershing eyed the major narrowly and then turned to leave, the 1st Division staff looking nervously at the ground in stunned silence. After a while, Sibert gratefully told Major George C. Marshall that he should not have stuck his neck out on his account, and the rest of the staff predicted that Marshall’s military career was finished. Marshall shrugged off his friends’ condolences, saying: “All I can see is that I may get troop duty instead of staff duty, and certainly that would be a great success.”
Yet no retribution for the incident ever came. Instead, whenever the AEF commander visited 1st Division from Chaumont, he would find a moment to pull Marshall aside to ask how things were really going. Pershing had finally found an officer who would tell him the unvarnished truth rather than gloss over inadequacies. Marshall eventually received orders transferring him to the AEF General Staff to work under Colonel Fox Conner, the head of the AEF’s Operations section. Together, they would form the core of the group that planned the two great U.S. offensives of the war — Saint Mihiel and the Meuse-Argonne. Pershing was impressed, and after the Armistice asked Marshall to become his aide.
Highly recommended reading for history buffs, or anyone who enjoys a good tale, well told.
THEY JUST AREN’T VERY GOOD AT THIS STUFF: After Las Vegas shooting, Facebook and Google get the news wrong again.
“Unfortunately, early this morning we were briefly surfacing an inaccurate 4chan website in our Search results for a small number of queries,” Google said in a statement. “Within hours, the 4chan story was algorithmically replaced by relevant results. This should not have appeared for any queries, and we’ll continue to make algorithmic improvements to prevent this from happening in the future.”
So, in other words, this is yet another case of “don’t blame us, blame our algorithm.” That’s not exactly what anyone wants to hear, especially when hundreds of millions of people get their news from Facebook and Google. They both need to know that dealing with these kind of issues “within hours,” as the search giant said, simply isn’t enough. Stories can go viral in a matter of minutes. Not only that, but if Facebook can’t keep something like its Crisis Response page clean, then what hope is there for the rest of its platform? And the same goes for Google’s Top Stories, which is often the first thing people see in their search results.
And that’s just the stuff they get wrong on accident, instead of by design.
WHY IS SILICON VALLEY SUCH A CESSPIT OF MISOGYNY? Female ex-Oracle engineers sue for gender discrimination.
MAKE ARMS SALES GREAT AGAIN: US clears $815M sale of F-35 weapons for Australia.
IT’S MORE LIKE “DOMINATE,” REALLY: Gun Control and the Desire to “Improve” Humankind.
LIKE MOST PROFESSIONAL ASSOCIATIONS, IT’S A MEDIEVAL GUILD MASQUERADING AS A GUARDIAN OF THE PUBLIC: John O. McGinnis: The Association of American Law Schools Claims to Favor the Public Interest, While Advancing Its Own.
HEROES ARE EVERYWHERE:
Related: Our politics may be toxic, but America is not.
UPDATE: There’s a GoFundMe page for his medical expenses. I donated.
ANDREA RUTH: Diagnosed Or Not, The Vegas Shooting Is About Mental Illness.
While the media is focusing on the guns the Las Vegas murderer used, and how to get guns out of the hands of law-abiding Americans in an attempt to rid the country of murder, we ought to be discussing how someone like him was able to do what he did.
So, why don’t we? The answer is simple.
Mental health care is expensive. Gun control talk is cheap.
Make no mistake, taking away guns while at the same time ignoring the tragedy mental illness is on loved ones and society — whether it’s diagnosed or not — is folly. Acting like we will never experience such tragedy again if 2nd Amendment rights were voided is simple foolishness.
With freedom comes risks and responsibilities. The 2nd Amendment honors the right for individuals to defend themselves. Even a mentally ill person, until he’s alerted to authorities for certain behavior.
But, again, the mental state that caused the Las Vegas murderer to act is being overlooked in favor of the hot topic of gun control. As long as this continues, we all lose.
An honest conversation about mental illness would also require revisiting one of the Left’s long-held convictions, which hardly seems likely.
I’M GONNA GO WITH “NOT BADLY ENOUGH:” How Badly Is Neil Gorsuch Annoying the Other Supreme Court Justices?
As Linda Greenhouse observed in the Times at the end of Gorsuch’s first term, he managed to violate the Court’s traditions as soon as he arrived. He dominated oral arguments, when new Justices are expected to hang back. He instructed his senior colleagues, who collectively have a total of a hundred and forty years’ experience on the Court, about how to do their jobs. Dissenting from a decision that involved the interpretation of federal laws, he wrote, “If a statute needs repair, there’s a constitutionally prescribed way to do it. It’s called legislation.” Perhaps he thought that the other Justices were unfamiliar with this thing called “legislation.”
Maybe that’s because he’s read their work. But if they’re having trouble keeping up with him, they can always retire. . . .
Speaking of which, there’s no mention of another outspoken Supreme Court Justice whose public statements have been far less temperate than Gorsuch’s. I suspect that’s because she’s the source of the piece.
NICK GILLESPIE: This Is the Time To Defend the Second Amendment and Less-Strict Gun Control: Anti-gun activists are pushing for a crackdown in the wake of the Vegas shooting. That’s understandable but wrong. They demand a sacrifice of liberty to their god the State.
It’s laughable. As a friend on Facebook was noting, 6 months ago, the Left was all “This is the worst fascist government since the 1930s.” Today they’re all “You must surrender your weapons to the beneficent hand of the State.” It’s as if they’re incoherent, stupid, and power-hungry or something.
Writes Gillespie:
It’s not cold-blooded or Vulcan to point out that we remain in the midst of an unprecedented deceleration of violent crime and gun crime. Surely that has some connection to policies over the past quarter-century or so that have made it easier for a wide variety of people to legally own and carry guns.
“From 1993 to 2015, the rate of violent crime declined from 79.8 to 18.6 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older,” says the Bureau of Justice Statistics in its most recent comprehensive report (published last October, using data through 2015). Over the same period, rates for crimes using guns dropped from 7.3 per 1,000 people to 1.1 per 1,000 people. The homicide rate is down from 7.4 to 4.9. These are not simply good things, they are great things. They are the essential backdrop of all discussions about gun crime and mass shootings, even as we grieve the people killed nonsensically in Vegas.
Yeah, the Party Of Science doesn’t care, because they’re really the Party Of State Power.
JIM BUCHANAN, IN MEMORIAM: The Nobel Laureate economist and father of “public choice” economics, Jim Buchanan, would have been 98 today. Recently he’s been the target of a concentrated posthumous character assassination by Duke’s Nancy Maclean, who blames him for creating modern conservative ideology (and the all the ills that come with it) in her book Democracy in Chains. George Mason University historian Phil Magness has been relentlessly fact checking her sources at his blog, and the results aren’t pretty. Duke economist Mike Munger also did a detailed and devastating review. The left, of course, has characterized these careful critiques a “stealth attack on a liberal scholar,” because apparently there can be no other kind.
For those of you who just want to learn a little about one of the great economists, here’s Ryan Young’s obituary from 2013.
WASHINGTON POST: Why the debate over gun suppressors isn’t really relevant to what happened in Las Vegas.
The effect of having a silencer probably would have been negligible. Clinton and others appear to be assuming that silencers — or “suppressors,” as they’re known in the industry — work the way that they do in the movies. Screw a little barrel on the end of your pistol, and you can run through enemy headquarters picking off bad guys with no more audio footprint than a little zip.
In reality, trying to suppress an automatic weapon sounds like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iAjCrKYZcps
The gunfire is clearly audible, as our Washington Post fact-checkers noted in March.
The video above features a weapon from Asymmetric Solutions, a firearm training firm based in Missouri. Thomas Satterly, the company’s director of development, spoke by phone with The Post to explain why a suppressor wouldn’t have silenced the noise of the gunfire in the way Clinton assumed. Satterly is a veteran who served in Somalia in 1993. When we spoke, he was with several friends who served in law enforcement and who contributed their thoughts, as well.
“A suppressor wouldn’t have stopped anyone from doing what they did” in Las Vegas, Satterly said, “and definitely wouldn’t have hidden the noise of the gunfire.”
Indeed. What’s most interesting about this report is that even WaPo staffers felt the need to correct Hillary Clinton twice in one day.