JOURNALISM: “By the way, did Davidson ever critique the global effort to flatter Barack Obama’s wife (not to mention the truly insane effort to flatter Bill Clinton’s wife — which is the main reason we’ve got Ivanka Trump’s father as President).”
Archive for 2017
April 28, 2017
GOOD FOR THE SECOND AGE OF NUCLEAR PREPAREDNESS, I GUESS: Radiation Detectors As Sleek As Your Smartphone.
A FUEL-CELL MILITARY TRUCK: Chevrolet Colorado ZH2 Concept: An Experiment with an Eye toward the Military Vehicles of Tomorrow.
I drove an earlier model GM fuel cell vehicle several years ago. It wasn’t bad.
YES, OF COURSE: Neither Ann Coulter nor Linda Sarsour should be censored.
IMPORTANT PUBLIC ANNOUNCEMENT: Knoxville is not on Central Time. Like much of the Southeast, it’s on Eastern Time. Nashville is on Central Time, but it’s a different city located 3 hours to the West. If you schedule something with me by email, and you don’t specify a time zone, I’ll assume you mean Eastern time.
UPDATE: This isn’t even close to the worst Knoxville error. Over a decade ago, Fortune magazine sent a team of photographers (complete with leather pants and German accents, like something out of a bad movie) to my house for a story on blogs, which were then new and exciting. Only they sent them to Kentucky because Fortune’s travel person apparently thought Knoxville and Fort Knox were the same thing. They took a $500 cab ride to my house in Knoxville — and the travel person at Fortune had booked them out on a flight from Nashville that afternoon, because, hey, it’s all the same, right? I had to tell them to book from TYS, and then I drove them to the Knoxville airport myself just to be sure they made it. . . .
READER BOOK PLUG, from H.D.Woodard, Wearing the Cat: The Complete Novel – Volume One.
WELCOME TO FANTASY ALTAMONT ISLAND: Fyre Festival: Luxury music festival turns into chaos.
Perhaps the attendees are getting off easy though. As Iowahawk tweets, “In fairness people who paid $12k to watch Blink 182 deserve a life sentence to a dystopian Cannibal Island.”
HMM: EU prepares for post-Brexit membership for united Ireland.
In a step that may stoke concerns in Britain that Brexit could hasten the fragmentation of the UK, diplomats are planning to ask leaders of the EU’s 27 post-Brexit member countries to endorse the idea in a summit on Saturday.
It would allow the province to follow the example of German reunification in 1990 and reflect the terms of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended decades of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland.
The agreement allows a referendum on reuniting Ireland where there is reason to believe a majority in the province is in favour.
Brussels is playing hardball.
TRUMP TO NRA: The 8-Year Assault On The Second Amendment Is Over. “Trump reaffirmed his campaign pledges to expand gun ownership rights and roll back some of the restrictions instituted under his Democratic predecessor.”
THE WORST PART ABOUT WRECKING A RACE CAR “is the bit where you sit there, strapped into the thing, waiting to be towed back to your trailer.”
AT AMAZON, it’s the Mother’s Day Gift Shop.
THE FANTASY-BASED COMMUNITY: Cersei Lannister, Hillary Clinton, human nature, and bad government.
WHY ARE DEMOCRAT MONOPOLY CITIES SUCH CESSPITS OF VIOLENCE? L.A. Police Commission Makes Violent Protests Like UC-Berkely More Likely, Jack Dunphy writes.
WORRIED ABOUT “RAPE CULTURE?” LEGALIZE PROSTITUTION. An unexpected court order in Rhode Island decriminalizing indoor prostitution decreased rape offenses by 31%. Much more here.
FACEPALM: Facebook and Google confirmed as victims of $100M phishing scam.
Both companies confirmed to Fortune that their employees were victims of the phishing scam, where the perpetrator — 48-year-old Evaldas Rimasauskas — forged email addresses, invoices, and contracts to swindle Facebook and Google into paying for electronic supplies. The payments were deposited into bank accounts in Latvia, Cyprus, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Hungary, and Lithuania.
The court documents unsealed by the DoJ last month described the two tech companies as a “multinational technology company, specializing in internet-related services and products, with headquarters in the United States,” and a “multinational corporation providing online social media and networking services.” There are hundreds of companies that could have fit the above descriptions, but the reveal makes it pretty obvious in hindsight.
How much of your data do you entrust to these two companies?
MEDICAL MYSTERIES: Another Study Just Linked Chronic Fatigue Syndrome to Gut Bacteria.
JUST THINK OF HIM AS A DEMOCRAT OPERATIVE WITH A PUNCHLINE, AND IT ALL MAKES SENSE: Trevor Noah wants you to cut the outrage over Obama’s $400,000 Wall Street speech.
It’s fun watching the left act so surprised at Obama’s cozy relationship with Wall Street — some of us were aware that his anti-big business shtick was pure kabuki quite a long time ago.
HMM: Mud DNA means we can detect ancient humans even without fossils. “We have an astonishing new way to study our early human ancestors: looking for their DNA in ancient sediments in places such as caves. A team of researchers has found the DNA of Neanderthals and Denisovans in some of the sites where they are known to have lived. . . . The approach can now be used to find out whether early humans were present even when no bones have been found – and what kind of humans they were. It might also help resolve the debate about when the Americas were first inhabited by people, for instance.”
Yeah, I immediately thought of this mud.
BUT WOULD THEY GIVE IT BACK? Turkey’s Erdogan will tell Trump Turkey could help retake Raqqa.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Can the Liberal Arts Be Saved?
NO, REALLY: Mark Zuckerberg, Man of the People.
HOW THE FEDS COULD GROUND Uber’s Flying Taxis.