YOU DON’T SAY: Recounts Rarely Change Elections Results, But When They Do, They Favor Dems. “Republicans are right to be skeptical of these recounts.”
Archive for 2018
November 12, 2018
FOR ONE THING, THE RIDERS WEAR MORE SPANDEX AND ARE MUCH MORE ANNOYING: How bicycles have changed in the last 25 years.
21ST CENTURY CRIME: L.A. Band Threatin Faked a Fanbase To Land a European Tour No One Attended. “New details of this story have emerged including the existence of a fake record label, a fake press outlet, a fake award and more.”
WE’RE ALL GOING TO HAVE TO WEAR THOSE STUPID GUY FAWKES MASKS, AREN’T WE? Can Anyone Stop Our Slide Into Face-Scanning Dystopia?
LET’S GET FRACKING: Saudi Export Cuts, OPEC Committee Hints on Production Send Oil Sharply Higher.
CAMILLE PAGLIA ON #METOO: It’s Time for a New Map of the Gender World.
What I see spreading among professional middle-class women is a bitter resentment toward men that is in many cases unjust and misplaced. With divorce so easy since the sexual revolution, women find themselves competing with younger women in new and cruel ways. Agrarian women gained power as they aged: young women were brainless pawns whose marriages, pregnancies, childcare, cooking, and other chores were acerbically supervised and controlled by the dictatorial crones (forces of nature whom I fondly remember from childhood).
In short, #MeToo from a historical perspective is a cri de coeur from women who are realizing that the sexual revolution that many of us had once ecstatically embraced has in key ways devalued women, confused their private relationships, and complicated their smooth functioning in the workplace. It’s time for a new map of the gender world.
It’s Camille Paglia, so read the whole thing.
DIGITAL HEALTH: New Findings Add Twist to Screen Time Limit Debate.
For years, the American Academy of Pediatrics had suggested a limit of two hours a day of TV for children and teens.
But after screen time started to include phones and tablets, these guidelines needed an update. So last year, the American Academy of Pediatrics changed its recommendations: No more than one hour of screen time for children ages 2 to 5; for older children and teens, they caution against too much screen time, but there’s no specific time limit.
This may give the impression that preschoolers are the only ones who need specific limits on screen time, with monitoring less important for older children and teens. Then a study came out last year suggesting that the imperative to monitor screen time for preschoolers may be overblown.
However new research conducted by me and my co-author Keith Campbell challenges the idea that vague directives and loose guidelines are the best approach.
Not only does this study suggest that specific time limits on screen time are justified for preschoolers, it also makes the case for screen time limits for school-age children and teens.
In fact, these older kids and teens may be even more vulnerable to excessive screen time.
Every minute in front of a screen is a minute spent not actually doing something.
TAMARA KEEL: ORIGAMI GLOCK.
COMPLETELY NONPARTISAN INVESTIGATIONS, JUST AIMED AT GOOD GOVERNMENT AND THE TRUTH: Democrats load “subpoena cannon” with 85+ Trump targets. Luckily for Trump, Obama established the precedent that you can just ignore those subpoenas. Unluckily for Trump, the press will pretend the Obama precedent never happened.
RUN, HILLARY, RUN! Hillary Clinton will run for White House again in 2020, says former adviser. The Avenatti/Hillary debates in the primary will be lit!
BRUCE BAWER: Camille Paglia Is Still Provoking.
Isn’t she always?
RIP: DOUGLAS RAIN, VOICE OF HAL 9000 IN 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, DIES AT 90:
Rain rarely spoke about the work in 2001 that made him an aural immortal. He left that to others, including 2001 star Keir Dullea.
“He’s the main character of the film as far as I’m concerned,” the actor, who played Cmdr. David Bowman, said in a 2016 interview. “It was brilliant casting. Something about his voice, it was perfect. It was unusual.”
As Kubrick himself said, “some negative critics…felt that it was a failing of this section of the film that there was more interest in HAL than in the astronauts:”
In fact, of course, the computer is the central character of this segment of the story. If HAL had been a human being, it would have been obvious to everyone that he had the best part, and was the most interesting character; he took all the initiatives, and all the problems related to and were caused by him.
Some critics seemed to feel that because we were successful in making a voice, a camera lens, and a light come alive as a character this necessarily meant that the human characters failed dramatically. In fact, I believe that Keir Dullea and Gary Lockwood, the astronauts, reacted appropriately and realistically to their circumstances. One of the things we were trying to convey in this part of the film is the reality of a world populated — as ours soon will be — by machine entities who have as much, or more, intelligence as human beings, and who have the same emotional potentialities in their personalities as human beings. We wanted to stimulate people to think what it would be like to share a planet with such creatures.”
HAL, Skynet, and M5 smile.
REMY: I LOVE L.A.! (Video.)
VETERANS DAY PHOTOS: A remembrance of things past and present.
1: USS Nebraska, 1918. She’s wearing an experimental camouflage paint scheme.
2: Six WW2 aircraft in formation over Nellis AFB.
3: Tired GIs in the woods near Wiltz, Battle of the Bulge, WW2.
4: Marines in Korea withdraw from Koto-Ri, 1950.
5: Worn out in the battle for Hue, Vietnam, 1968.
6: USS Zumwalt in transit, 2016.
7: USMC fire mission, Syria, 2017.
8: U.S. Air Force bomber show, 2017.
BRAVE SIR ROBIN: U.K. refuses asylum for Asia Bibi, fearing Muslim ‘unrest.’
Britain has rejected an appeal for asylum from Asia Bibi, the Pakistani Christian acquitted of blasphemy last week who is under the threat of death from Islamic leaders who struck a deal with her government to block her exit.
The British government said allowing Bibi to enter the U.K. would cause unrest among Muslims, according to an advocate, the Huffington Post reported.
Wilson Chowdhry, chairman of the British Pakistani Christian Association, said he’s been led to believe that the British government “had concerns that her moving to the UK would cause security concerns and unrest among certain sections of the community and would also be a security threat to British embassies abroad which might be targeted by Islamist terrorists.”
How many Muslim “migrants” does Britain admit every year?
JASON LEWIS: Who Lost The House? John McCain. “His July 2017 vote killed ObamaCare repeal and made Democratic lies impossible to refute.”
The problem was—and still is—that under ObamaCare all policyholders are charged as if they are sick. If restoring a modicum of traditional underwriting by loosening the Affordable Care Act’s strict age-rating rule discriminated against the old, then ObamaCare was—and is—discriminating against the young. The AHCA would have relieved this problem by allowing states to opt out of ObamaCare’s most onerous mandates and instead cover the most difficult-to-insure with $138 billion worth of high-risk pools. That would have arrested the ObamaCare “death spiral” and, as the Congressional Budget Office admitted, reduced both premiums and the deficit.
Emerging in response to World War II-era wage and price controls, health insurance has been tied to employment. When older workers lose their coverage along with their job, it creates a serious barrier for entering the individual market, as pre-existing conditions are often the result of age. This is primarily due to an unfair tax code that gives employers but not individuals tax breaks for buying insurance.
Again, the AHCA sought to even the playing field by offering a refundable tax credit anyone could use to buy an individual plan. The bill also would have expanded tax-deferred health savings accounts to help cover deductibles, copayments and over-the-counter expenses.
All these provisions were an attempt to alleviate the pre-existing condition problem, not exacerbate it. To be sure, instead of running away from health-care reform after it failed, Republicans should have leaned in on the plan’s most important aspects. But because the AHCA didn’t pass, it was impossible to refute the lies about it.
McCain claimed to have been voting his conscience, but in reality he was just sticking it one last time to Trump — and his fellow Congressional Republicans.
OH, THAT LIBERAL FASCISM: Part two of James Lileks’ review of the infamous 1933 film, Gabriel Over the White House.
Exit quote: “The good news: he reduces unemployment, lifts the country out of the Depression, battles gangsters and Congress, and brings about world peace. The bad news: he’s Mussolini.”
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