Archive for 2018
September 3, 2018
SUCKING IN THE SEVENTIES: Seven Ways Life Is Better Now Than It Was 40 Years Ago.
As James Lileks once said, “This really is the future I wanted. Although I expected longer battery life.”
IS THE LEFT COMING FOR YOUR CONTACT LENSES NEXT? Mother Jones: Flushing Your Contacts Does Terrible Things to Our Land and Oceans.
Pol Pot smiles.
BIG, IF TRUE: Snopes Rates Babylon Bee World’s Most Accurate News Source.
JUST NBC THE GASLIGHTING: Andrea Mitchell Cites Farrakhan as Evidence of ‘Inclusive Group’ at Aretha’s Funeral.
As her Andrea Mitchell Reports show gave live coverage of the event, at 12:06 a.m. [sic] Eastern, the MSNBC host listed several of those appearing on stage. She began: “It’s interesting to see the panoply of civil rights leaders. Of course, right there at the church, we see Reverend Al (Sharpton), we see the Reverend Jesse Jackson who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease but was so close to Aretha Franklin and is part of that legacy.”
She then got to Farrakhan and noted that he is “very controversial,” but then, rather than doing the obvious thing and commenting on how astonishing or hypocritical it is to see him invited to such a high-profile public event and to have a former President appear with him, she merely called his presence evidence of inclusion.
Mitchell: “Bill Clinton there, of course, and is going to give one of the eulogies. And also the Reverend Farrakhan — a very controversial leader from the Nation of Islam who is also there. So it’s an inclusive group.”
Mitchell never explained why Farrakhan is “very controversial.” No doubt, Al Sharpton will address that topic when he gets back to the studio. In the interim, regarding how “inclusive” Franklin’s mourners were, as fellow Insta-co-blogger David Bernstein tweeted on Saturday, “Imagine the establishment’s reaction if Willie Nelson had David Duke sitting in a place of honor at his funeral, with George W. Bush 2 seats away. Now consider the lack of reaction to Aretha Franklin, Farrakahn, and Clinton. This is why the establishment has lost credibility.”
GET WOKE, GO BROKE: Tourism Still Suffering in Lexington, VA After Red Hen Kicked Out Sarah Sanders.
IT’S LIKE IT’S ONE BIG SCAM TO ENRICH THE HIGHER ED INDUSTRY: The Incredible, Rage-Inducing Inside Story Of America’s Student Debt Machine.
IN THE MAIL: From Tim Ferriss, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich.
Plus, Today’s Gold Box and Lightning Deals.
MICHAEL WALSH: A Tale of Two Funerals, and Two Waves.
Read the whole thing.
WHY ARE DEMOCRATIC-LED INSTITUTIONS SUCH CESSPITS OF VIOLENCE? Jeff Dunetz on Labor Day: How Unions In America Embraced Violence.
LIGHTNINGS ALIGNED: Four USMC F-35B Lightning IIs fly in formation. The planes are “somewhere in the Pacific” with the Essex Amphibious Ready Group (ARG).
STEPHEN L. CARTER: It’s strange that Americans make it cheap and easy to clog their own cities with cars. But very American.
Planners hate cars; drivers love them. Drivers have more votes than planners, so parking stays cheap.
At least, cheap in dollars. In congested cities, we ration parking by restricting the number of spaces. The problem is, it doesn’t really work — not if the intention is to reduce the number of drivers. Okay, yes, limits are bound to have an effect at the margin. But according to city-by-city measurement by the Federal Highway Administration, streets remain as congested as ever. A committed driver will burn fossil fuels for half an hour circling the block to search for an opening, not so much to save money as to proclaim the remarkable synergy between himself and his beloved automobile.
The love affair is easy to relate to. Small surprise, then, that we turn out to be weirdly territorial about parking. Here’s Vanderbilt again: “Studies have shown that people take longer to leave a parking spot when another driver is waiting, even though they predict they will not.” True, if you glance at the underlying study, the added wait is only an average of 7 seconds, but those precious seconds raise the time to exit a space from about 32 to about 39 seconds — a jump of 21 percent, bound to be noticed if you’re the one waiting. The same study also found that male drivers move faster when a car perceived as “high status” is waiting; for women there was almost no difference. This might suggest that women are, in parking lots at least, more territorial than men; or it might suggest that men, even when ensconced behind the wheels of their big mean machines, more readily yield to indicia of status and power.
Which brings us back to my parking ticket. Nobody has more status and power than the state, so why didn’t I pay my ticket at once? Because the state’s status and power are not strongly signaled. The face value of the ticket was relatively low — $20 — and paying late increased the fine only by $5. Now imagine increasing both by a factor of 100. Were the fine $2,000 and the late fee $500, most of us would pay on time. As a matter of fact, we’d go out of our way never to be ticketed. We might even forego our beloved cars and turn to public transportation.
Except that we wouldn’t. We’d rise in revolt instead, demanding a return to cheap parking. We’d be wrong, but we’d win.
Good.
“DIVERSITY IN THE TECHNOLOGY INDUSTRY…. IMAGINE THAT:” Seattle Seahawks owner Paul Allen gives $100,000 to help Republicans keep control of U.S. House.
TENNESSEE: Bill Lee, Karl Dean differ on arming teachers, constitutional carry. Our outgoing incumbent Republican governor, Bill Haslam, agrees with the Democrat, but he’s always been kind of a squish.
TRUE, AND INTERESTING TO SEE IT IN THE NEW YORK TIMES: The Supreme Court Ought to Back Off: The nomination of Brett Kavanaugh might not be so contentious if the justices stopped jumping into disputes better left to the political process.
I predict that when Trump replaces Ruth Bader Ginsburg with Ted Cruz, arguments for judicial restraint will get lots of Strange New Respect.
DOJ IS TRYING TO RUN THE CLOCK OUT, HOPING THAT THE DEMOCRATS WILL RETAKE CONGRESS AND PROTECT THEM: Congress waits, waits, waits for Sally Yates documents.
But if Dems do take Congress, the precedent is set for noncompliance with document requests.
LATE-STAGE SOCIALISM: Hyperinflation is affecting how Venezuelans have sex. “One of the drivers for extreme inflation is soaring demand – in Venezuela there are far more people trying to buy goods from shops than there are goods out on the shelves.”
That’s shrinking supply, not soaring demand. But never mind that for the moment:
“In Venezuela, some people are using old-fashioned ways to avoid getting pregnant and when I said old-fashioned ways, it’s like the withdrawal method or the rhythm method, which is tracking your menstrual history to predict when you’ll ovulate.”
With this has come a rise in unplanned pregnancies, STDs and HIV, she adds.
Because contraceptive pills have become so expensive, there has been a spike in the number of women taking more permanent measures to ensure they don’t have any more children.
Zuniga spoke to a clinic in Caracas which sterilised 400 women in 2017: it reached that number by May this year. On so-called ‘sterilisation days’ run by local health programmes, the appointments for 40 free sterilisations per day have been snapped up, with waiting lists of up to 500 women.
“Before, the women that were sterilised in Venezuela were more than 30 [years old] and with more than three children,” Zuniga says. “Now you can find women [aged] around 19, 20, 24 that are looking to be sterilised because they can’t afford to have another [child], because they can’t find pills on the market anymore and it’s just desperation, they are desperate.”
I had been assured by the highest authority that socialist sex was the best sex.
WAIT, I THOUGHT SCRAPPLEFACE WAS SUPPOSED TO BE SATIRE: Pope to Purge Priests Who Drink from Plastic Straws.
SO MANY LIES PASS FOR NEWS: US accounts for just 1% of mass shootings, not media-hyped 31%.. “Lankford’s study reported that from 1966 to 2012, there were 90 public mass shooters in the United States and 202 in the rest of world. We find that Lankford’s data represent a gross undercount of foreign attacks. Our list contains 1,448 attacks and at least 3,081 shooters outside the United States over just the last 15 years of the period that Lankford examined. We find at least fifteen times more mass public shooters than Lankford in less than a third the number of years,.”