PANIC OVER dropping sperm counts.
Archive for 2018
July 25, 2018
HE’S NOT WRONG: Devin Nunes Slams CNN as ‘Democratic Party Propaganda.’
Related: CNN: The Oppo Research Arm of the Democratic Party.
SAW MY FRIEND AND DIVE INSTRUCTOR LIZ PARKINSON ON SHARK WEEK, dodging sharks in an episode called The Laws of Jaws. I notice they had her on the bodyboard, so that they could have her in a bikini. Well, it’s TV, and she is a professional underwater model. (And yes, “underwater model” is a thing). It reruns tomorrow on Discovery at 6 pm ET if you want to catch it.
The first time I met her, she’d been recently bitten by a shark, but luckily while in chainmail shark armor, so she just had a scar where it had driven the chainmail into her skin. “I think I have kind of a thrill-seeking personality,” she said.
OPEN THREAD: Thread away.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Prof calls on art teachers to reject ‘geometry of whiteness.’
“Geometry of Whiteness” was my favorite Alan Parsons Project album.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS BACK, I MENTIONED THE MOVIE LITTLE PINK HOUSE ABOUT THE KELO CASE. You can now get it on Amazon or from iTunes.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A Student-Built Hyperloop Pod Just Hit an Astonishing Speed Record.
BRUCE BAWER: Yet Another Aspiring Apparatchik Exploits Norway’s 9/11.
Read the whole thing.
CHILD RAPE? SI! HILLARY’S PANTSUIT? NO: Your Essential Comedy Rule Book [Woke Edition].
(Classical allusion in headline.)
“DADDY, WHAT’S A MODEM?” A look at where the Internet went wrong, in my latest Daily Caller column.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Oregon woman finds mountain lion napping in her home: ‘This is wild.’ I’m dubious about the “loving gaze.”
AT AMAZON, deals on Office Supplies.
AND THE NINTH CIRCUIT ISN’T EVEN IN CHICAGO: The Dead Can Vote–At Least on the Ninth Circuit.
ECONOMIC ILLITERACY FROM FEDERAL JUDGES: Eleventh Circuit invalidates state law preempting Birmingham’s minimum wage increase. The whole opinion is a mess, but I was struck by this:
As an initial matter, we have little trouble concluding that the plaintiffs have suffered concrete injuries as a result of the Minimum Wage Act. According to the amended complaint, Lewis and Adams work in Birmingham and earn less than $10.10 per hour. Birmingham Ordinance No. 16-28 guaranteed them $10.10 per hour, adjusted annually to a cost of living index.
In fact, the Birmingham ordinance didn’t guarantee Lewis and Adams anything, as it didn’t guarantee that their employers would be willing to pay them more than the market wage they had been earning. The rest of the opinion proceeds as if minimum wage laws are an unmitigated good for low-wage workers. The implicit reasoning, in part, is that if low-wage workers, particularly African American low-wage workers, approve of being promised something (a higher wage) for nothing (no negative consequences on the low-wage labor market), they must in fact be getting something for nothing. It’s as if neither public choice nor mainstream labor economics is at all familiar to the judges. More incentive for McDonald’s to speed up its installation of unmanned kiosks, I suppose.
WELL, THIS ISN’T ENCOURAGING: A female Ebola survivor infected family a year later. “Scientists do not know how the virus hid inside the woman for 13 months before re-emerging in lethal form.”
We really need a cheap and effective vaccine.
REAL VIKING: “THAT’S NOT AN AXE!” Peak Hipster: Nordic miniature shaving axe. They want so badly to be manly.
SLATE: Climate Is ‘Complicated’ and ‘Influenced by Many Factors.’ “Is the Left finally backing down from the climate panic?”
If so, then they must have a new panic all packaged up and ready to go.
HOT OFF THE PRESS: A few days ago, my colleague Peter Kirsanow and I filed this amicus curiae brief requesting the Supreme Court to take the case of Metcalf v. United States. It argues that part of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr., Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009 is unconstitutional. I am pretty confident that under any fair reading of the Constitution, we are right: Congress’s authority to prohibit slavery under the 13th Amendment does not give it the authority to criminalize bias crimes untethered to the goal of eliminating slavery and preventing its return. Of course, being right doesn’t always get you Supreme Court review.
If you want to know how it feels to advocate on behalf of someone found by a jury to have committed a heinous crime, the answer is that it feels okay: When fighting the good fight, advocates of limited government do not always get to choose their allies. There’s a principle involved here.
ART OF THE DEAL: Trump, Juncker Announce Deal Pulling Back From U.S.-EU Trade War.
WHAT EVERYONE NEEDS: A lockblade Swiss Army Knife with a corkscrew.
Or you can go with the Rescue Tool, but you’ll have to give up the corkscrew.
I THOUGHT WE WERE TO ATTEMPT NO LANDINGS THERE: Europa Lander may not have to dig deep to find signs of life.
The 1,900-mile-wide Europa harbors a huge ocean beneath its icy shell. What’s more, astronomers think this water is in contact with the moon’s rocky core, making a variety of complex and intriguing chemical reactions possible.
Researchers therefore regard Europa as one of the solar system’s best bets to harbor alien life. Europa is also a geologically active world, so samples of the buried ocean may routinely make it to the surface — via localized upwelling of the ocean itself, for example, and/or through geyser-like outgassing, evidence of which has been spotted multiple times by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope.
NASA aims to hunt for such samples in the not-too-distant future. The agency is developing a flyby mission called Europa Clipper, which is scheduled to launch in the early 2020s. Clipper will study Europa up close during dozens of flybys, some of which might be able to zoom through the moon’s suspected water-vapor plumes. And NASA is also working on a possible post-Clipper lander mission that would search for evidence of life at or near the Europan surface.
I’ve been waiting for this mission since reading 2010: Odyssey Two when it was first published in 1982. But since the post-Clipper lander mission isn’t even scheduled yet, I’ll have to wait a good while longer.
Faster, please.
