Archive for 2017
March 10, 2017
WELL, IT IS A SPACE AGENCY, AFTER ALL: New NASA budget focuses almost exclusively on space.
WHY YES, THIS IS CNN:
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “Superman v Objectivism: Could Ayn Rand Be Superman’s Biggest Enemy?”
FIRST WORLD PROBLEMS: There Are Too Many Flavors Of Hummus. Shockingly, not by Bernie Sanders.
IF ONLY WE HAD SOME WAY TO KILL MOSQUITOES QUICKLY, AND IN LARGE NUMBERS: U.S. Medical Experts Issue Warning on Yellow Fever’s Advance.
THEATER OF THE ABSURD: Playgrounds in Movie Theaters? Worst. Moviegoing. Experience. Ever.
For last year’s Captain America: Civil War, my wife and I had the babysitter take the boys to the local multiplex, while we went to see it at the Alamo Drafthouse theater — where they serve cocktails instead of rowdy young boys.
Highly recommended.
KINDA, SORTA, EVENTUALLY: Uber says it will stop using Greyball to evade authorities.
“We are expressly prohibiting its use to target action by local regulators going forward,” Sullivan said.
The tool seeks about a dozen data points on a new user in a specific market, like whether the Uber app is opened repeatedly in or around municipal offices, which credit card is linked to the account, and any publicly available information about the new user on social media. If the data suggests the new user is a regulator in a market where Uber is not permitted, the company will present that user false information about where Uber rides are, showing ghost cars or no cars in the area.
Uber said on Friday that Greyball wasn’t just targeting regulators—it used the tool to prevent riders who might aim “to physically harm drivers,” as well as prevent dispatching rides to competitors who might try to disrupt service. Uber also affirmed that it used Greyball to shut down “opponents who collude with officials on secret ‘stings’ meant to entrap drivers.”
But now Uber is walking back on that last use case for Greyball. Sullivan told the BBC this week that “it would take some time” to enforce the company’s new prohibition on using Greyball to blackball regulators, although the tool will still be used to root out other users that might try to violate Uber’s terms of service.
From the sound of this, Uber drivers will remain just a corporate wink and a nod away from using Greyball to avoid police stings.
JON GABRIEL: Samantha Bee Called Young Man a Nazi. Then Apologized. Kinda.
Samantha Bee is not funny. She hosts a nightly TBS show named “Full Frontal,” which mimics the hard-left fake-news template of “The Daily Show.” The latter show still exists, hosted by the not-funny Trevor Noah, while the not-funny Seth Meyers and the once-funny Stephen Colbert mine the same depleted vein on their own late-night talk shows.
All of these programs are intended as Comedy, but are better described as Urban Liberals Yelling At Americans Who Disagree With Them. Here’s how the formula works:
•Play an out-of-context clip of a Republican.
•Show the host staring into the camera, crinkling his/her nose, opening his/her eyes wide, or tapping his/her pencil.
•Peals of digitally enhanced laughter from the live audience, as home viewers check Netflix.You don’t tune into “Full Frontal” for jokes or satire, but common snark and mockery of The Other. It’s Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate with a laugh track.
Ouch.
Read the whole thing.
JOB-HUNTING IN THE EUROZONE: Austria Is Hiring a Professional Hermit.
YOU DON’T SAY: IRS Making Gains in Customer Service But Still Falling Short, Says GAO.
“Customer service” is a laudable goal, but ultimately an impossible one when an organization’s mission is the extraction of money by almost any legal means.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A New Lab-Built Fungus Eats Sugar and Burps Out Drugs.
In seven papers published today in Science, representing a decade of work by hundreds of scientists across four continents, the Synthetic Yeast 2.0 project reports the first fully designed, and partially completed, made-from-scratch eukaryotic genome. Eukaryotes—organisms whose cells have a nucleus and other defined organelles—encompass all complex life: yeasts, plants, hamsters, humans. So writing a custom genome for one is a big deal by itself. But the artificial yeast will have a more stable, easily manipulable genome for scientists to work with, and for the chemical, pharmaceutical, and energy industries to use for a new generation of drugs, biofuels, and novel materials.
Novel, indeed.
NOAH ROTHMAN: Dems’ Irrational Obamacare Exuberance.
Most of the surveys taken since the election that show the ACA is suddenly popular do not break down the responses along demographic and partisan lines, but the surveys sponsored by Fox News do. In August, their survey (conducted by the GOP firm Shaw & Company Research and the Democratic firm Anderson Robbins Research) found 54 percent of respondents disapproved of the ACA with only 41 percent viewing it favorably. Among the disapprovers, 24 percent of Democrats gave ObamaCare bad marks. Flash forward to mid-January and Fox’s poll found 50 percent of adults suddenly approve of the law with 46 percent dissenting, but Democrats drive much of that shift. That survey discovered that, suddenly, only 8 percent of Democrats offered pollsters negative reviews of the law. Republicans and self-described independents’ views remained virtually unchanged.
If Democrats began considering ObamaCare as a proxy for their support of the outgoing president as they stared down the barrel of a Trump administration, it is no coincidence that the ACA’s approval ratings began to correspond with those enjoyed by President Barack Obama in his final days. That also suggests that the boomlet of favorability ratings for the Democrats’ health-care overhaul is chimerical.
This and the Iran Deal are about all they have left of eight years of Barack Obama.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: In “When Did Media Bias Become a Virtue? Liberal dismay about the New York Daily News’ scaling back its front-page campaign against Trump exposes the underside of a partisan press,” Jonathan Tobin writes at NRO:
The saga of the News’ journey from all-out attacks on Trump to more-measured criticism isn’t particularly extraordinary. The left-leaning News was all over Trump throughout the campaign. Its implacable hostility was the work of editor Jim Rich, who initially had the support of publisher Mortimer Zuckerman for his stand. But over the course of the year, the paper’s leadership became less convinced of the wisdom of Rich’s decisions. They believed the unrelenting abuse thrown at Trump was having an impact on their circulation. While most liberal publications got little pushback from their position on Trump, the News’ readership is made up of working-class New Yorkers in the outer boroughs of the city who liked the billionaire’s aggressive nationalism and politically incorrect style.
Rich was eventually forced out, resigning in October 2016. Though the decision was ostensibly a dispute about budget cuts, it is believed that Rich’s over-the-top belligerence toward Trump was the real reason.
Rich’s successor, Arthur Browne, is no supporter of Trump, but as the editor told Politico, after spending more than a year depicting Trump as a clown who was a certain loser, the paper needed to reevaluate its strategy. Once he became the president-elect, the News editor felt the paper’s criticism should focus on his policies rather than merely continuing the assault on Trump’s character. He has backed that up with consistently critical coverage and has approved front pages that referred to the president with the following language: “NUTS!” “WAR ON TRUTH,” “BANANAS!” and “POOR BABY!” He even mourned the election result with a “HOUSE OF HORRORS” headline. But that wasn’t extreme enough for the uniformly liberal staff of the News, which longed for more depictions of Trump like the one Rich ran showing him beheading the Statue of Liberty.
I’m so old, I can remember when Daily News was furious over much milder imagery, and imbued it with magical and evil powers.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Cancer Pill Gleevec Keeps Patients Alive and Well for a Decade.
HEADS UP, PREPPERS: There could be a maple syrup shortage on the horizon.
UNLIMITED POWER! General Atomics Announces Next-Generation Railgun Pulsed-Power Containers.
“For the past decade, GA-EMS has provided pulsed power in support of the Navy’s railgun program,” stated Nick Bucci, vice president Missile Defense and Space Systems at GA-EMS. “Our next generation HEPPC breaks our own energy density record and exceeds the capabilities of other available railgun pulsed power container solutions. What we have packed into a 10-foot standard shipping container is equivalent to what is currently available in a 20-foot shipping container, doubling the energy density to provide greater flexibility for ship and land-based installations and maneuverability for mobile applications.”
GA-EMS internally funded the development of the HEPPC in support of a Multi-mission Medium Range Railgun Weapons System, which integrates pulsed power, launcher, hybrid missile and fire-control technologies. Each HEPPC includes high-energy pulsed power modules with an energy content of more than 415 kilojoules per module. Each module utilizes GA-EMS’ world-record-breaking high-energy density capacitors.
I was going to write, “Faster, please,” but it doesn’t get much faster than a railgun.
THANKS, OBAMA! Less than half of Marine Corps aircraft are ready to fly.
WHATEVER HAPPENS WITH OBAMACARE, I THINK THIS WILL BE A TREND: How To Be A Savvy Medical Tourist.
THEY’RE NOT SAYING IT’S ALIENS… BUT IT’S ALIENS: Could Mysterious Cosmic Light Flashes Be Powering Alien Spacecraft?
Astronomers have catalogued just 20 or so of these brief, superbright flashes, which are known as fast radio bursts (FRBs), since the first one was detected in 2007. FRBs seem to be coming from galaxies billions of light-years away, but what’s causing them remains a mystery.
“Fast radio bursts are exceedingly bright given their short duration and origin at great distances, and we haven’t identified a possible natural source with any confidence,” study co-author Avi Loeb, a theorist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said in a statement Thursday (March 9). “An artificial origin is worth contemplating and checking.” [5 Bold Claims of Alien Life]
One potential artificial origin, according to the new study, might be a gigantic radio transmitter built by intelligent aliens. So Loeb and lead author Manasvi Lingam, of Harvard University, investigated the feasibility of this possible explanation.
The duo calculated that a solar-powered transmitter could indeed beam FRB-like signals across the cosmos — but it would require a sunlight-collecting area twice the size of Earth to generate the necessary power.
And the huge amounts of energy involved wouldn’t necessarily melt the structure, as long as it was water-cooled. So, Lingam and Loeb determined, such a gigantic transmitter is technologically feasible (though beyond humanity’s current capabilities).
Why would aliens build such a structure? The most plausible explanation, according to the study team, is to blast interstellar spacecraft to incredible speeds.
Incredible, indeed.
SOMETHING GOOD CAME OUT OF SAMANTHA BEE’S ATTACK ON ‘NAZI HAIR:’ “Kyle also revealed on Fox News that he’s actually a registered Democrat who is politically moderate. He also said his diagnosis is very serious as there is no cure for the type of brain cancer he has, but he is relying on his faith and trying to stay positive…There are people chiming in on his GoFundMe page who are currently living with glioblastoma or have relatives who are. Some of those messages reference a verse from Genesis 50 which seems pretty appropriate in this situation: ‘As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good in order to bring about this present result, to preserve many people alive.’”
Speaking of Weimar America, between Bee attacking a young brain cancer patient as having “Nazi Hair,” CNN correspondent Reza Aslan feasting on actual human brains(!) with cannibals in India and Lena Dunham’s ongoing reactionary épater Le Bourgeois sexual shtick, I hope Time-Warner-CNN-HBO is proud of the product they’re putting out these days and their most prominent spokespeople.
SPENGLER ON THE GHOST OF HEIDEGGER AND THE SEX LIVES OF THE NEW YORK INTELLECTUALS:
Every writer speaks from an agenda which has no more claim to verity than any other, and which agenda prevails is strictly a matter of power. This is a trivial thought, but de Man invoked the influence of Martin Heidegger, the most prominent 20th century Existentialist. That was appropriate in a number of ways; after de Man’s death it was discovered that he had written nearly 200 articles for the Belgian puppet government’s press during the German occupation of World War II, including some anti-Semitic ones. He had also been convicted of embezzlement in absentia by a Belgian court. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party with enthusiasm and, although he did not find Hitler quite up to his expectations, he never repudiated this vile action.
De Man was revealed to be a rotter, but the damage was done. Deconstructionism encouraged every group to devise its own narrative and assert its own will. If the Western Canon simply expressed the will to power of dead white men, then minorities of various kinds could invent their own narratives and assert their own putative truth.
Earlier this week, Steve Green Insta-linked to an article at PJM with the ostensibly humorous title “Transgender Man Identifies as Alien, Plans to Remove Genitals, Adopt Kids.”
But as political scientist Dale Kuehne, quoted by Rod Dreher in a fascinating piece titled “[Camille] Paglia: Transgender & Civilization’s Decline” correctly notes, “if the ultimate source of reference is the self, and if no other self than the individual is a reference point, how can you know who or what you are?… We don’t live at a tipping point; we already live beyond the tipping point. Whether adults realize it or not, the most important conversation today is not about gender, but about identity, as released from the confines of gender.”
This is the endpoint of Nietzsche’s nihilism and Foucault’s postmodernism. As David P. Goldman (aka “Spengler”) notes in the passage quoted at the start of this post, Heidegger’s brand of postmodernism had a very different endpoint – thankfully, we’re not quite there yet, even if we are living in Weimar America.