“But the lie is obvious now, isn’t it? Because it is not conservatives who coerced today’s young people or made them afraid of ideas that challenge them. Conservatives did not shame people into silence, or send thugs out on college campuses to beat down those who wanted to speak. The left did all that.”
Archive for 2017
April 29, 2017
I HOPE NOTORIOUS ROBOPHOBE MATTHEW YGLESIAS DOESN’T FIND OUT ABOUT THIS: The race to build the world’s first sex robot. “Harmony smiles, blinks and frowns. She can hold a conversation, tell jokes and quote Shakespeare. She’ll remember your birthday, McMullen told me, what you like to eat, and the names of your brothers and sisters. She can hold a conversation about music, movies and books. And of course, Harmony will have sex with you whenever you want.”
WELL, IT’S RIGHT UP THERE: Is Trump’s biggest first 100 day accomplishment muting the media? “President Trump fought the media and, well, Trump won. After 100 days, this has been the president’s most visible achievement. More Americans believe Trump’s word than the journalists he’s left black-and-blue. Altogether, 37 percent of Americans, according to a new poll by Morning Consult, say they trust the White House more than the press, while 29 percent chose the media.”
ANOTHER LOUSY DAY IN PARADISE: Fyre Fest Attendee Describes Chaotic Scene: ‘It Was Just a Nightmare:’ Ja Rule’s first – and probably last – luxury festival in the Bahamas widely condemned for substandard conditions.
The swine will find their pearls. . . .
UPDATE: Sadly, no one seems to have gotten the reference. From perhaps the most underrated album of the 1980s.
IMMIGRATION AND HEALTH: Measles outbreak at 32, with Somali-Minnesota children hit hard. Why aren’t all refugees/immigrants vaccinated as soon as they reach America?
One of the problems is that immigrants are ignorant enough to believe Jenny McCarthy.
TO THE GOVERNMENT, you are disposable: “A disturbing trend has been emerging in my practice over recent years: More men are being diagnosed with aggressive prostate cancer, and in some cases the cancer has already metastasized to the bones and become incurable. It’s a direct result, in my opinion, of 2012 guidelines by an influential government panel recommending against routine prostate cancer screening in men of all ages.”
NEWS YOU CAN ABUSE: The People’s Climate March — in 26 Zany Photos.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: What Would Happen If We Killed All The Mosquitoes?
JOURNOS RESPOND HARSHLY, PROFANELY TO BRET STEPHENS’ FIRST NEW YORK TIMES COLUMN:
Even an appeal to recognized authority (in Stephens’ questionable opinion) like former Times writer Revkin couldn’t save the columnist — or the Times — from the intense and often profane wrath of journalists, many of whom, if they had the power, would clearly relish the opportunity to cooperate in censoring any and all climate-change skepticism. Some examples (HT Twitchy; profanity cleansed but still recognizable):
Jesse Berney, Rolling Stone: “literally go f*** yourself, new york times. go, eat, dog, d*cks.” (Note: This is from someone at a magazine proven to have published a spectacularly false story about a gang rape at the University of Virginia. — Ed.
A still deeply hungover and mescaline-soaked Hunter S. Thompson just rolled over in his grave. You younger readers might not believe this, but there was actually a time when Rolling Stone paid considerable lip service to questioning authority and that ’60s notion of “doing your own thing.” But then, as they say at David Horowitz’s Front Page Website, sooner or later, inside every liberal — or leftwing institution — is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
UPDATE: “If you’re wondering why certain speakers need protection from violence at colleges, just look at reax on Twitter to one NYT column.”
MILE MARKERS ON THE ROAD TO TRUMP’S SECOND TERM: Principal Slams Jesus: ‘It’s a Public School, We Don’t Believe in That Here.’
AT AMAZON, Fit Desks and Adjustable Desk Stands.
I WORKED AT FYRE FESTIVAL. IT WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A DISASTER:
Then yesterday, to my dark delight, the rug was pulled out from under them. In the morning headliner and all-around relevant band in 2017 Blink-182 pulled out, citing sub-par production standards. Last night the festival evacuated almost everyone off the island on account of they didn’t have food or tents for anyone (minor details). Today, after a wild night of #fyrefestival terror broadcast on social media, Fyre announced the festival would be indefinitely postponed.
I cannot explain how or why the bros running this festival ignored every warning sign they were given along the way. The writing was on the wall. I saw it firsthand six weeks ago. They overlooked so many very basic things. And baby, they forgot to make me sign an NDA.
Heh, indeed.™ Was the Fyre Festival organized by out of work Hillary campaign staffers?
THE FIRST CAR TO CROSS ANTARCTICA IS . . . a Hyundai?
EARLY X-RAY RESEARCH NOT UP TO MODERN SAFETY STANDARDS:
Because Taylor was one of only a few radiological physicists working on defining what amounts of radiation were harmful to humans, the lab he worked in at NBS wasn’t always the safest, especially early on. In a 1995 interview, Taylor recalled one such episode:
“The only single documented whole body exposure that I know that I’ve had was in 1929, and it was measured to be 150 [Roentgen]…. I sat in an X-ray beam for 20 minutes or half an hour or something…. I was just sitting right smack in the beam…. [With that much radiation] you’re supposed to get nauseated, but we didn’t know that in 1929, so I wasn’t.”
For the record, 150 Roentgen is equivalent to 1.4 sievert, which according to this chart starts to put you in the realm of “severe radiation poisoning, in some cases fatal.” But since the chart wasn’t around in 1929, Taylor was just fine. Indeed, he told the interviewer in 1995, “I also used to treat [my] athlete’s foot…. I don’t remember what the dose was, but it was probably four or five hundred R [3.7 to 4.7 Sv].”
“That exposure in addition to medical radiation treatment for bursitis and other benign conditions and from radiation experiments resulted in an estimated whole-body dose-equivalent in excess of a thousand rem [10 Sv],” Taylor’s obituary for the Health Physics Society stated. “He experienced no discernible adverse effect.”
Hmm. Either there’s some sort of quantum observer effect here, where you have to know about radiation sickness to suffer it — which I doubt — or he was just one of those individuals on the right tail of the sigmoid curve, with better-than-average resistance. And, of course, he didn’t receive that 1000R dose all at once. He lived to be 102.
Still . . . .
LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY: Quantum experiments probe underlying physics of rogue ocean waves. “The researchers said their experimental system could provide clues about the underlying physics of rogue waves—100-foot walls of water that are the stuff of sailing lore but were only confirmed scientifically within the past two decades. Recent research has found rogue waves, which can severely damage and sink even the largest ships, may be more common than previously believed.”
YOU MAY NOT WANT THE KINDLE EDITION OF THIS ONE: EMP-Hardened Radio Communications.
WELL, GOOD: CDC working to keep yellow fever vaccine supply from running out. “A year after the Zika outbreak hit the U.S., health officials are now concerned about preparing to fight another mosquito-borne illness: yellow fever. Today officials at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that they are taking urgent measures to keep the nation’s supply of yellow fever vaccine from being depleted within a few months.”
TIMES COLUMNIST BLASTED BY “NASTY LEFT” FOR CLIMATE CHANGE PIECE:
“After 20 months of being harangued by bullying Trump supporters, I’m reminded that the nasty left is no different. Perhaps worse,” Stephens tweeted Friday afternoon, as the hateful messages kept rolling in.
“Go eat dog d—s,” fumed one Twitter user.
“When is the Times going to get rid of you?” another asked.
Stephens even managed to tick off fellow journalists.
“You’re a s–thead. a crybaby lil f–kin weenie. a massive twat too,” tweeted Libby Watson, staff writer at Gizmodo.
“I’m gonna lose my mind,” seethed Eve Peyser, politics writer at Vice.
“The ideas ppl like @BretStephensNYT espouse are violently hateful & should not be given a platform by @NYTimes,” she said.
In the column, Stephens never states that he believes climate change is a farce. He simply asserts that people should look at claims from both supporters and deniers, in the attempt to get all the facts.
The freakout of the Times‘ core readers is reminiscent of the famous moment when the late Julian Simon debated an earlier iteration of hard left religious zealots:
Simon, the economist who was legendarily skeptical about environmental doom, once posed a question at an environmental forum: “How many people here believe that the earth is increasingly polluted and that our natural resources are being exhausted?” Almost every hand shot up. He then said, “Is there any evidence that could dissuade you?” There was no response, so he asked again, “Is there any evidence I could give you—anything at all—that would lead you to reconsider these assumptions?” Again, no response. Simon concluded, “Well, excuse me. I’m not dressed for church.”
Heh, indeed.™
WELL, GOOD: Inexpensive Drug Prevents Deaths in New Mothers, Study Finds. “An inexpensive generic drug that saves the lives of wounded soldiers and civilian car crash victims has now been shown to rescue women suffering hemorrhages in childbirth. . . . In a major six-year trial involving over 20,000 women in 21 countries, researchers showed that tranexamic acid, a little-known blood-clotter invented in the 1950s, reduced maternal bleeding deaths by a third if it was given within three hours. It costs less than $2 a dose and does not require refrigeration.”
BUT OF COURSE: New Biography Says Obama ‘Considered Gayness.’
TIMELY NEWS YOU CAN USE: Seven American Movies About Messing with North Korea.
REPAIR SHOPS — THEY’RE NOT JUST FOR CARS ANYMORE! Congrats to Seth and Bethany Mandel who had their baby at an auto-repair shop in NJ.
UPDATE: Link missing previously; now added.
OBIT GIVES US AN INSIDE LOOK AT INSIDE JOURNALISM. IT’S NOT PRETTY:
A new documentary about the New York Times arrives at just the moment America’s newspaper of record presents itself as something that stands not for news but for power, partisanship, and elitism. It’s titled “Obit,” perhaps in a witty response to the digital era’s advance on outmoded media. An inside look at how the paper’s staff of obituary writers and researchers perform their tasks, Obit may be the closest that any media-maker gets to examining the Times’ confidential procedures during this terrible period of oppositional journalism.
Obit’s timing and title is particularly apropos, considering how universally the DNC-MSM dropped the mask last year — and only a few years prior, already completed building their own mausoleum.
Related: “If you want to see, in an instant, what the New York Times has become, just consider the lead headlines in this morning’s editions of the Times and the Wall Street Journal.”
NEWS FROM KNOXVILLE: World’s Fair Beer is back, 35 years later.