SCIENCE IN A BOTTLE: 132-year-old experiment washed ashore in Australia.
Archive for 2018
March 8, 2018
ECO-TERRORISTS = PATRIOTS? LEFTISTS THINK SO:
She wasn’t the only one. A columnist for the Seattle Stranger, a weekly newspaper, asked outright, “Are the Terrorists Right?” Her answer was yes. Firebomb some buildings and we’ll write stories that, while containing the requisite weasel words about not condoning violence, treat firebombers as otherwise thoughtful scholars.
Ironically, environmental reporters often wonder why there is so much division on environmental policy. Gallup found that climate change was the most divisive issue facing voters today — not gun control or abortion. When reporters treat firebombings as a conversation starter rather than a crime, can anyone be surprised that conservatives believe environmental policy to be the domain of the slightly deranged?
Sadly, this trend is unlikely to change. Environmental reporters are often activists themselves. When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer laid off most of its staff, its chief environmental reporter, Lisa Stiffler, went to work immediately for a local environmental group.
No reason to merely think of the media as Democratic activists with bylines when they’re plug and play with far left advocacy groups.
UGH: Syria enters ‘new phase of horror’ as Assad pushes on with eastern Ghouta offensive.
Claims from President Bashar al Assad that his forces are doing all it can to protect civilians in the two-week-old offensive on eastern Ghouta are “frankly ridiculous”, human rights chief Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein said on Wednesday.
The Russian-supported “indiscriminate, brutal attacks“ have killed at least 800 people and led most of the area’s estimated 400,000 population to seek shelter in basements from intense shelling and air strikes despite demands from the UN for a ceasefire on 24 February.
The fate of Eastern Ghouta reflects the ‘siege, starve and surrender’ Assad playbook in several other urban battles in Syria’s complex conflict.
There were reports that the Assad regime used chlorine gas on Ghouta, but those reports may be false.
DRAMA IN REAL LIFE: Death and Daring at 1,500 Feet: If your pilot died mid-flight, could you bring down the plane in one piece? “It’s the stuff of nightmares. You have zero flying experience and your pilot suddenly becomes incapacitated. Would you be able to get yourself safely back on the ground? One of the few people who can definitively answer that question is John Wildey, an English retiree who, in the fall of 2013, was riding shotgun in a two-place Cessna when his friend succumbed to a massive coronary.”
FIRST AMENDMENT NOT WELCOME AT TWITTER? Not if you are tweeting in defense of unborn babies, it appears. Live Action founder and president Lila Rose says Twitter has blocked her and her advocacy group “from all advertising and promotion.” Should this be called “censostrangulation” or maybe “stranglsorship”?
AMAZING: ‘Mind-reading’ A.I. produces a description of what you’re thinking about.
Think that Google’s search algorithms are good at reading your mind? That’s nothing compared to a new artificial intelligence research project coming out of Japan, which can analyze a person’s brain scans and provide a written description of what they have been looking at.
To generate its captions, the artificial intelligence is given an fMRI brain scan image, taken while a person is looking at a picture. It then generates a written description of what they think the person was viewing. An illustration of the level of complexity it can offer is: “A dog is sitting on the floor in front of an open door” or “a group of people standing on the beach.” Both of those turn out to be absolutely accurate.
In the wrong hands this could be creepy as hell, but I’m thinking of its application for longterm coma victims.
SO LET’S UNPACK THIS LEFTY “WISDOM” ON GUNS:
1. Repeal the Second Amendment. Okay, buddy, go for it. You need 2/3 of the House, 2/3 of the Senate, and 3/4 of the state legislatures.
2. Redefine gun ownership as a right, not a privilege. Um, that seems inconsistent with repealing the Second Amendment, but whatever, I’m cool with it.
3. Prosecute the NRA as a terrorist organization, “which is what they are.” Actually, no, it’s not. Terrorism has legal definition and the NRA isn’t anything of the sort. What they are is an organization that disagrees with you on policy. Prosecuting people who disagree with you on policy as terrorists is fascistic, and also tends to make me want to go buy more and bigger guns.
So in short, we have a platform that’s part incoherent, and part monstrous. Nice work. And, sadly, typical.
LARRY O’CONNOR: CBS really wants Oprah to run against Trump.
The full court press is on over at CBS to try and convince Oprah Winfrey to run for president in 2020.
Winfrey recently told People Magazine that it would take a message from the Almighty to get her to run. “’God, if you think I’m supposed to run, you gotta tell me, and it has to be so clear that not even I can miss it.’ And I haven’t gotten that yet,” she said.
So it appears CBS is determined to inspire some sort of divine intervention to get Oprah to to throw in her hat.
Earlier this week Oprah appeared on CBS’ Late Show with Stephen Colbert and an animated “God” showed up, complete with Oprah for President swag.
More details about CBS’s desperation at the link, plus:
But here’s the really strange thing about this pressure from CBS to get Oprah to run: Winfrey is actually their employee. She is, in fact, a journalist for CBS News.
So, apparently, CBS News is completely comfortable dispensing with even the faintest hint of journalistic integrity for their high-priced, 60 Minutes Special Correspondent.
In all fairness, it’s been a long time since CBS News or 60 Minutes dropped any pretense of objectivity.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: College paper editor defends explosive decision to … print a photo of Charles Murray.
Exit quote: “De-platformers aren’t in conflict with speakers. The conflict is between factions within the audience: Rather than staying away, holding another event, or protesting at the venue, one faction asserts a right to control what others may listen to. It is a variant of book-burning.”
Read the whole thing.
RANDY BARNETT: The New Challenge to Obamacare.
Readers may be familiar with a new constitutional challenge by 20 state attorneys general to the Affordable Care Act, which Ilya blogged about here. Their argument, in a nutshell, is that with the amount of the penalty for failing to have health insurance now set to zero, the individual insurance “requirement”–AKA the “individual mandate”–can no longer be justified as a tax. This is so because one of the essential characteristics of a tax is that it raises at least some revenue for the government. For this reason, the “saving construction” employed by Chief Justice Roberts no longer applies, as it is no longer even a “reasonably possible” reading of the insurance requirement, which now raises no revenue.
On this claim, the AG’s are on very strong ground. To the extent they are correct, the NFIB v. Sebelius was a bigger victory than we realized when it was decided, as it left the insurance mandate susceptible to being killed off in this way via reconciliation.
Because this constitutional claim makes sense, the attention will turn to the issue of standing and, perhaps, mainly to severability. If the insurance requirement is invalidated, does that bring down the rest of the Affordable Care Act?
Read the whole thing.
And it’s sad to have to say this, but Obama being gone — along with his implicit threat to go to war against SCOTUS over ObamaCare — might be a critical factor in Chief Justice John Roberts’ thinking.
AXIOS: Exclusive polls: Big warning signs for Senate Democrats. Nobody from either party should get excited about polls at this point, but this does shred the “inevitable Blue Wave” narrative.
Related: About That Blue Wave: “The prevailing wisdom suggests that there will be a Democratic wave election in 2018. In a manner that suggests that little was learned from the 2016 primary or general elections, pundits and analysts seem so committed to this narrative that they promote it even when the data point in the other direction.”
Also: New Poll: Rick Scott Leads Bill Nelson 42-35 in Florida.
Plus: Marquette Poll finds Tammy Baldwin underwater on favorability, 39% unfavorable/ 37% favorable.
Don’t get cocky, kids — whether you’re Dems or Republicans. Remember, the voters don’t like much of anyone, really.
MEGAN MCCARDLE: The ‘moral hazard’ of naloxone in the opioid crisis.
A chemical called naloxone acts as an “opioid antagonist” — which is to say, it reverses the drug’s effects on the body. It can thus save people who have overdosed.
As opioid usage has worsened in the United States, more and more jurisdictions have acted to increase access to naloxone. Not only first responders but also friends, family and even librarians have started to administer it. These state laws were passed at different times, giving researchers Jennifer Doleac and Anita Mukherjee a sort of a natural experiment: They could look at what happened to overdoses in areas that liberalized naloxone access and compare the trends there to places that hadn’t changed their laws.
Their results are grim, to say the least: “We find that broadening Naloxone access led to more opioid-related emergency room visits and more opioid-related theft, with no reduction in opioid-related mortality.”
You can never assume that the results of one study, however well done, are correct. But these results look pretty robust. If they hold up, they would mean that naloxone is not saving lives; all we’re doing is spending a lot of money on naloxone to generate some increase in crime.
Sad, but not shocking.
IN THE MAIL: The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph.
Plus, fresh Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
ROGER SIMON: California and the Resurrection of Jeff Sessions.
Read the whole thing.
THIS IS SORT OF LIKE MY “WELCOME WAGON” IDEA: Displaced Puerto Ricans have come to Florida by the thousands—and one group is working to turn them into conservative voters.
Thousands upon thousands of Puerto Ricans have landed in Florida in the months since Hurricane Maria battered their island. They have simple priorities, but complicated needs.
They need a place to live and a way to make a living. They want to get their kids enrolled in local schools and find out if they have to take a test to do so. Maybe they were a real estate agent in Puerto Rico and wanted to know if their license transferred over; or a medical professional with great job prospects at local hospitals if they could just improve their English; or a bilingual teacher who needed help navigating the application process.
Over the last several months many of these transplants learned about a program called “Welcome to Florida.” They may have heard about it at church, or on Spanish-language radio, or from a friend. Whatever the case, “Welcome to Florida” was offering free English classes and help with many of the logistics of establishing a new life on the mainland.
You might expect that this outreach was being underwritten by a progressive group, but you would be wrong. “Welcome to Florida” is a project from the Koch-funded LIBRE Institute. . . .
It’s a smart move, politically. Thousands of Puerto Ricans settling in Florida represents a rare opportunity to mint new voters in America’s quintessential swing state. And it’s one of the rare cases where conservatives are being proactive about bringing new voters into their tent.
Smart indeed.
IGNORANCE IS BLISS AND/OR POLICY: If You’re Trying To Ban Guns, The Least You Can Do Is Learn The Basics. “In a debate imbued with emotion, gun-control advocates rely on ignorance.”
David Harsanyi:
When Barack Obama tells a crowd that a mass shooter used a “fully automatic weapon,” he’s not concerned with the finest taxonomic distinctions of a gun, he’s depending on the yawning obliviousness of a cheering crowd. When CNN featured an alleged gun expert explaining that the AR-15 he’s about to fire is “full semi-automatic,” he’s making the functionality of firearm sound scarier to those who are ignorant about guns.
“Jargon” are words and expressions that are difficult for a layman to understand or use. Rather than use jargon, Second Amendment advocates are usually mocking those who use jargon-y sounding words in efforts to fearmonger viewers and constituents. When you claim that the streets are rife with “high-capacity, rapid-fire magazines” or “jumbo clips” you’re trying to fool your audience with a veneer of expertise you don’t possess. When you claim that we need to ban “gas-assisted, receiver firearms” you’re trying to make a semi-automatic weapon sound like a machine gun for a reason.
And the reason is to limit, restrict, ban, or otherwise infringe on a constitutionally protected right.
THE DANGEROUS DIFFUSION of basic infantry tactics.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Communist Party: Jeremy Corbyn Too Extreme On Hamas and I.R.A.
CHANGE: China’s Military Revolution: Smarter, Better, Faster, Smaller.
The United States armed forces underwent a similar revolution in the ’70s and ’80s after the Draft was ended — and the end result was the deadliest military in history.
This practice of buying favorable attention in the media is nothing new and is centuries old. The U.S. is unique in that, for about a century, the American mass media was largely free of this blatant bribery. But in most of the world, a clever journalist quickly attracts the attention of people who will pay for some favorable comments. It’s no secret, although many journalists insist they are not bought.
A long post, but worth the read.
YOU WANT MORE MEN WITHOUT CHESTS? BECAUSE THIS IS HOW YOU GET MORE MEN WITHOUT CHESTS: Two Miramar SWAT officers suspended for heading to Parkland massacre.
WHEN “DIVERSITY AND INCLUSION” IS A LIE: Liberals have 20:1 edge in student fee funding at UW-Madison. “Although funding decisions must be made in a viewpoint neutral manner, in accordance with a 2000 Supreme Court ruling involving three UW Madison students who objected that the mandatory fees were used to fund groups they did not support, left-leaning organizations still wind up with more than 20 times the amount of funding allocated to conservative groups.”
To be fair, “diversity and inclusion” is pretty much always a lie.