AS LONG AS IT’S NOT FROM THERANOS: New method screens hundreds of chemicals in blood simultaneously.
Archive for 2018
July 25, 2018
AT AMAZON, summer savings in Car Care.
Plus, bargains in Bedding.
J. CHRISTIAN ADAMS: Hollywood Left and Never Trumpers Unite To Hound President.
INSANE: Santa Barbara Authorizes Jail Time for Handing Out Straws.
Santa Barbara’s ordinance “is likely the most severe straw ban in the country,” according to Reason, but it’s far from the only straw ban. Seattle banned plastic straws earlier this month, mandating a a $250 fine for violators. Santa Barbara, however, has gone much further than Seattle — even aside from the harsher punishments its law imposes. Santa Barbara has banned not only plastic straws, but also compostable straws. Oh, and each individual straw counts as a separate infraction, meaning that if someone got busted handing out straws to a table of four people, he or she could end up facing years behind bars.
The Eighth Amendment to the Constitution says that “Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.” But I doubt the Framers had the scourge of recyclable paper straws in mind when they wrote those words.
FASTER, PLEASE: Designer molecule kills malarial parasites.
OVER AT THE PJ LIVE BLOG: Is it even possible not to own the libs?
19TH CENTURY PROBLEMS: Germs From Backyard Chickens Are Making People Sick.
KEEP PORTLAND… PLEASE: Portland ICE Occupiers Finally Evicted After Terrorizing Neighborhood, Shutting Down Food Cart, Spewing Racial Slurs at Cops. “The fight goes on and this has been great tactic.”
THIS IS THE EQUIVALENT OF ASKING CATS NOT TO BE OBSESSED WITH LASER POINTERS: Please, Please, Please Stop Reporting on Viral Receipt Stories.
Readers of these stories aren’t looking for evidence that some guy is an open bigot. They’re looking for evidence that millions of people are secret bigots, people who live in places like Texas, Kansas, Tennessee, small-town New Jersey, etc.
Media outlets that fall for receipt stories don’t just misinform their audience, they do so in a way that damages our nation’s social cohesion.
Just think of the media as Democratic operatives with bylines, and you’ll understand why they view this as a feature, not a bug. As Fred Siegel wrote in his 2014 history of the American left, The Revolt Against the Masses:
The best short credo of liberalism came from the pen of the once canonical left-wing literary historian Vernon Parrington in the late 1920s. “Rid society of the dictatorship of the middle class,” Parrington insisted, referring to both democracy and capitalism, “and the artist and the scientist will erect in America a civilization that may become, what civilization was in earlier days, a thing to be respected.” Alienated from middle-class American life, liberalism drew on an idealized image of “organic” pre-modern folkways and rhapsodized about a future harmony that would reestablish the proper hierarchy of virtue in a post-bourgeois, post-democratic world.
And with the exception of a few brief time-outs in the culture war for pesky interludes such as WWII and 9/11, it has been ever thus.
DOWN BUT NOT OUT: Islamic State kills about 100 in southwest Syria attacks.
The coordinated attacks were the deadliest to hit government territory in many months. Some 96 people were killed and 176 wounded in total, the head of the Sweida health authority told the pro-Damascus Sham FM radio.
The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a Britain-based war monitoring group, said 156 people were killed. Islamic State said in a statement that it had killed more than 100 people in the attacks.
Northeast of Sweida city, the jihadists launched simultaneous attacks on several villages where they clashed with government forces, state media and the Observatory said.
In the city itself, at least two attackers blew themselves up, one near a marketplace and the second in another district, state television said. State news agency SANA said two other IS militants were killed before they could detonate their bombs.
With about half a million dead, another eight million internally displaced, a further five million or so refugees in neighboring countries, various Kurdish groups in control of the northeastern third of the country, and no end in sight, Syria as it was known has ceased to exist.
THEY SHOULD BE: Study: Few young women with PID tested for HIV, syphilis.
IT’S GOTTEN SO BAD THE BBC HAS NOTICED: The rise of left-wing, anti-Trump fake news.
UNEXPECTED HEADLINES: Germany Is Running Out of Beer Bottles.
SORT OF LIKE PAPER BALLOTS: Google’s Secret to Protect Its Employees From Hacking Is Physical Keys.
NEW CIVILITY UPDATE: Pickax-Wielding Vandal Smashes President Trump’s Hollywood Walk of Fame Star to Pieces.
He didn’t use media-disapproved clip art, so everything is copacetic — and apparently, the vandal’s moral outrage is quite narrowly selective: as Stephen Miller notes, “The best thing about Trump’s star being cratered is Kevin Spacey’s star is literally right next to it and remains in perfect condition.”
BILL ROGGIO: Afghan military suffers significant casualties since end of government’s ceasefire.
US Army Major General Andrew Poppas, Resolute Support’s deputy chief of staff for operations, claimed on July 21 that Afghan operations resulted in the killing or wounding of over 1,700 Taliban, Islamic State, and other insurgents. Poppas’ figures are derived from the Afghan ministries of Defense and Interior, which are notorious for inflating casualties. Even if Poppas’ stated figures for insurgent casualties are accurate, he did not explain how the body count equated to progress on the ground. Afghan forces have not wrestled districts from Taliban control during this time period, and the Taliban remains on the offensive. [See LWJ report, NATO command touts body count of ‘Taliban irreconcilables’.]
The estimated 150 Afghan security personnel killed since July 12 was derived from press reports on significant attacks by the Taliban on Afghan bases, security checkpoints, and district centers. A significant attack defined as one where more than five Afghan security personnel were killed. Smaller scale attacks, such as roadside bombings and assassinations, were not included.
We’ve spent most of two decades training up the Afghan National Army.
EZRA LEVANT IS PRYING OPEN THE MEMORY HOLE: Canadian media hides Toronto shooter’s links to Islamic terror (video).
LET’S GET FRACKING: Could oil prices skyrocket to $200 a barrel … or more?
21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: When You Have Three Boyfriends, Getting An IUD Is Complicated.
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Connecticut is drowning in debt. Should the rest of us have to pay?
EXPLODING MORE FAKE NEWS: Maddow is wrong. The White House didn’t edit a video or a transcript to remove a question posed to Putin.
If you don’t want Trump telling people not to trust what they’re told by the news media, try not telling people things that aren’t true, just because you want them to be.
The press’s unwillingness — or inability — to address its own failings is a key to Trump’s power, and yet the press remains unwilling or unable to admit that it sucks, and to try to do better. In fact, they’ve doubled down on crazy and misleading because of Trump Derangement Syndrome.
WHY ARE LEFTY ACTIVISTS SO RACIST? Journalist CONFIRMS report that Abolish ICE protesters in Portland ‘spewed racist insults at nonwhite officers.’