Archive for 2018
August 11, 2018
FASTER, PLEASE: NASA just built the fastest man-made object ever.
NASA’s plans for the probe include multiple orbits of the sun, repeatedly slingshotting itself around the star and gathering vital science data each time it makes its approach. Its handlers will gradually bring the probe closer and closer to the sun over its six-year-plus mission, but by the time it begins its final orbits it’s going to be moving faster than anything mankind has ever built before.
Slingshottting around the sun? Will it end up in 1968 or 1986?
Times readers called the couple heroes. No, the heroes are not these poor fools who stumbled into an ISIS-controlled area; the heroes are the soldiers from the U.S. and elsewhere – most of them a decade or so younger, and centuries savvier, than Austin and Geoghegan – who, while the two 29-year-olds were on a year-long cycling holiday, were risking their lives to beat back ISIS. What, then, is the moral of this couple’s story? In the last analysis, it’s a story about two young people who, like many other privileged members of their generation of Americans, went to a supposedly top-notch university only to come away poorly educated but heavily propagandized – imbued with a fashionable postmodern contempt for Western civilization and a readiness to idealize and sentimentalize “the other” (especially when the latter is decidedly uncivilized). This, ultimately, was their tragedy: taking for granted American freedom, prosperity, and security, they dismissed these extraordinary blessings as boring, banal, and (in Austin’s word) “beige,” and set off, with the starry-eyed and suicidal naivete of children who never entirely grew up, on a child’s fairy-tale adventure into the most perilous parts of the planet. Far from being inspirational, theirs is a profoundly cautionary – and distinctly timely – tale that every American, parents especially, should take to heart.
Ayn Rand didn’t intend for The Return of the Primitive to be a how-to guide for life. Read the whole thing.
EVERYBODY’S INSTAGRAM ADVENTURE PHOTOS LOOK ALIKE. People aren’t as original as they think.
THIS WEEK IN MEDIA BIAS HISTORY: YOU FEEL BAD ABOUT WINNING WW II?
Before he became the disgraced Brian Williams known for making stuff up, the NBC journalist was best known for some outrageous examples of media bias. On August 5, 2005, the then-Nightly News anchor interrogated Enola Gay navigator Dutch Van Kirk about dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima: “Do you have remorse for what happened? How do you deal with that in your mind?”
Shouldn’t Williams be asking himself that?
OUT OF YOUR LEAGUE? A massive new study of online dating finds that everyone dates aspirationally—and that a woman’s desirability peaks 32 years before a man’s does. Plus:
A more educated man is almost always more desirable, on average: Men with postgraduate degrees outperform men with bachelor’s degrees; men with bachelor’s degrees beat high-school graduates.
“But for women, an undergraduate degree is most desirable,” the study says. “Postgraduate education is associated with decreased desirability among women.”
Hmm.
WHO KNEW? MILLENNIALS LIKE SNAIL MAIL.
I think the cool kids disdain the words “snail mail” though, replacing it with the phrase, artisanal escargot mail.
ANSWERING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Why So Many Diners Look Like Train Cars.
NEW SOCIALIST “IT GIRL” CONTINUES TO PAY DIVIDENDS: Oops, Che did it again! Old tweet exposes Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s debate hypocrisy.
WHY ARE THE NEWS MEDIA ORGANIZATIONS THAT POSE AS OUR MORAL SUPERIORS SUCH CESSPITS OF SEXUAL ABUSE? NEW: Daily Beast Working on Major NBC News Sexual Harassment and Misconduct Story.
PAUL BEDARD: On record-breaking pace of approving judges, Grassley urged to go faster.
It’s the pace of approving judges despite Democratic opposition that has some heads spinning on Capitol Hill. In just one week this month, for example, Grassley pushed through more than one nominee a day, including five female judges. Four were district court judges: Emily Coody Marks of Alabama, Holly Lou Teeter of Kansas, Maryellen Noreika of Delaware, and Jill Aiko Otake of Hawaii. The fifth was Britt Cagle Grant of Georgia, who was approved as a circuit court judge for the Eleventh Circuit.
Since Trump took office, Grassley’s committee has pushed through 45 judicial picks, including Supreme Court Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch. Of those, a record 24 were circuit court of appeals judges, the most by a modern president at this stage.
“Grassley works, Grassley delivers,” said a Senate insider.
“The Senate continues to be hard at work to confirm President Trump’s highly qualified judicial nominees,” Grassley said. “Just last week, we confirmed seven more nominees, including five women. There should be no disputing that their credentials make them well suited for the federal bench.” . . .
“He should be commended to standing up to the Democrats,” said Severino, as well as pushing his committee staff to move quickly on investigating nominees.
But, she added, the pace needs to pick up because the courts still have over 100 vacancies. “It has to be even faster,” she said, noting that vacancies are being created than judges approved.
While the Kavanaugh nomination is taking up a lot of Grassley’s and his staff’s time this August, they are also considering other Trump judges. Grassley hopes to get a committee vote on Kavanaugh next month. And when he eventually votes to confirm the Washington, D.C. judge, it will be on his 15th Supreme Court nominee since 1981.
There’s no guarantee the GOP will hold the Senate after the next election. It’s smart to get as much done as possible now.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Watch Ivy League Students Try To Explain First Amendment.
(Via Maggie’s Farm.)
SUBMARINE SWIM IN THE PACIFIC: Literally.
JOURNALISTS OR ACTIVISTS? CNN, WHICH ADMITTED THEY WERE RESPONSIBLE FOR GETTING ALEX JONES DEPLATFORMED FROM YOUTUBE, APPLE, AND FACEBOOK, NOW ADMITS IT’S ALSO PRESSURING TWITTER TO DEPLATFORM HIM.
Related: “Prerequisite ‘Alex Jones ain’t my thang’ statement, but Nick Monroe has a very interesting thread going about CNN’s seeming involvement* in his removal. Worth a read. I can think of one thing more dangerous than Alex Jones’ speech… the collusion of giant corporations to silence.”
* Read obsession with his removal.
HERE’S THE LATEST ON THAT SEATAC INCIDENT: ‘Just a broken guy,’ man who stole plane in Seattle tells air traffic controller before crash.. “I’ve got a lot of people that care about me. It’s going to disappoint them to hear that I did this…Just a broken guy, got a few screws loose, I guess.” Here’s Alaska Airlines’ statement.. Glad he chose to commit suicide by crashing into the sound, and not a building or a stadium.
MICHAEL BARONE: Still Not Clear Which Party Will Lose The House.
Another way to put it: Republicans got the worst showings of both of their last two nominees, losing even further ground among college-graduate-whites, while failing to duplicate Trump’s gains among non-college-whites.
That pattern was discernible in earlier special elections and makes it easy to see how Democrats could win a House majority. It’s widely attributed to Trump’s combative and provocative style.
There’s something to that, of course, but not everything. The voter shifts from Romney 2012 to Trump 2016 by historic standards were actually small, and the variations of Republican and Democratic percentages in the two-plus decades since 1994 have been historically small, with a steady increase in straight-ticket voting until 2016.
What we’ve also seen in congressional elections since the middle 1990s is a resistance to one-party control. With close presidential elections, only a few voters need defect in the off-year to produce this result and, except for the election just after 9/11, enough voters have done just that.
Former President Bill Clinton faced Republican Houses and Senates for six of his eight years in office. Former President George W. Bush’s Republicans gained seats in 2002, but he faced a Democratic House for two years and a Democratic Senate for three-and-a-half. Former President Barack Obama faced a Republican House for six of eight years and a Republican Senate for two.
You can ascribe the losses of each president’s party as the predictable result of some combination of extremist overreach, legislative fecklessness, personal scandals and suspicion of insiders. But for one reason or another, they keep happening and could again this year, when Republicans could lose their majority in the House and might conceivably, despite their advantage in seats up for re-election, in the Senate too.
But there’s reason to be cautious about predictions. Republicans’ big gains weren’t visible at this point in the 1994 cycle (I wrote the first article predicting they might win a majority, in July of that year), nor were Democrats’ big gains in 2006 or Republicans’ sweep of Senate seats in 2014.
Nor are polls this far out always a reliable guide to November.
Nope. Just pick a candidate you like who needs help and help them.
JIM GERAGHTY: WHAT TO EXPECT THIS AUTUMN.
