FAUXCAHONTAS UPDATE: Michael Walsh on Elizabeth Warren’s Political Trail of Tears.
Archive for 2018
December 8, 2018
THIS IS HOW THE MOVIE BEGINS: Ancient, unknown strain of plague found in 5,000-year-old tomb in Sweden.
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OLD AGE HAVING A GO AT YOUTH: Democrats’ 2020 Field Shaping Up to Be an Entertaining ‘Old vs Young’ Slugfest.
(Classical reference in headline.)
FASCISM IS FOREVER DESCENDING ON THE UNITED STATES, BUT SOMEHOW IT ALWAYS LANDS ON EUROPE:
GETTING HIS KICKS: Mark Steyn on A Hundred Years of Bobby Troup.
HMM: Uterine cancer rates rising, particularly among black women. “Rates of uterine cancer were once lower for black women than white women. Black women are now twice as likely to die from the disease.” Why? Here’s one possibility: “The National Cancer Institute says women who are overweight or obese are twice to nearly four times as likely to develop uterine cancer. That’s more than 82 percent of black women in the U.S.”
CAMILLE PAGLIA: ‘HILLARY WANTS TRUMP TO WIN AGAIN.’
Paglia’s always worth reading, but note this contradiction:
Screechy Elizabeth Warren has never had a snowball’s chance in hell to appeal beyond upper-middle-class professionals of her glossy stripe. Kirsten Gillibrand is a wobbly mediocrity. Cory Booker has all the gravitas of a cork. Andrew Cuomo is a yapping puppy with a long, muddy bullyboy tail. Both Bernie Sanders (for whom I voted in the 2016 primaries) and Joe Biden (who would have won the election had Obama not cut him off at the knees) are way too old and creaky.
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Does the ‘deep state’ exist? If so, what is it?
The deep state is no myth but a sodden, intertwined mass of bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy that constitutes the real power in Washington and that stubbornly outlasts every administration. As government programs have incrementally multiplied, so has their regulatory apparatus, with its intrusive byzantine minutiae. Recently tagged as a source of anti-Trump conspiracy among embedded Democrats, the deep state is probably equally populated by Republicans and apolitical functionaries of Bartleby the Scrivener blandness. Its spreading sclerotic mass is wasteful, redundant, and ultimately tyrannical.
I have been trying for decades to get my fellow Democrats to realize how unchecked bureaucracy, in government or academe, is inherently authoritarian and illiberal. A persistent characteristic of civilizations in decline throughout history has been their self-strangling by slow, swollen, and stupid bureaucracies. The current atrocity of crippling student debt in the US is a direct product of an unholy alliance between college administrations and federal bureaucrats — a scandal that ballooned over two decades with barely a word of protest from our putative academic leftists, lost in their post-structuralist fantasies. Political correctness was not created by administrators, but it is ever-expanding campus bureaucracies that have constructed and currently enforce the oppressively rule-ridden regime of college life.
In the modern world, so wondrously but perilously interconnected, a principle of periodic reduction of bureaucracy should be built into every social organism. Freedom cannot survive otherwise.
I’m not sure if you support Bernie Sanders, you’re in a strong position to rail against out of control bureaucracies. To paraphrase Orwell, if you want a picture of the future under Bernie or his acolyte Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, imagine a bloated, self-replicating bureaucracy expanding exponentially, forever.
LONGEVITY UPDATE: Giant tortoise genomes provide insights into longevity and age-related disease. “Giant tortoises are among the longest-lived vertebrate animals and, as such, provide an excellent model to study traits like longevity and age-related diseases. However, genomic and molecular evolutionary information on giant tortoises is scarce. Here, we describe a global analysis of the genomes of Lonesome George—the iconic last member of Chelonoidis abingdonii—and the Aldabra giant tortoise (Aldabrachelys gigantea). Comparison of these genomes with those of related species, using both unsupervised and supervised analyses, led us to detect lineage-specific variants affecting DNA repair genes, inflammatory mediators and genes related to cancer development. Our study also hints at specific evolutionary strategies linked to increased lifespan, and expands our understanding of the genomic determinants of ageing.”
Faster, please.
HUMAN PROGRESS: Introducing the Simon Abundance Index.
Marian Tupy, editor of Human Progress, and Professor Gale Pooley from Brigham Young University – Hawaii have used 37 years’ worth of data for 50 foundational commodities covering energy, food, materials, and metals to develop a new framework to measure resource availability. The authors contend that instead of making resources scarcer, population growth has gone hand in hand with greater resource abundance.
The report builds on the famous wager between biologist Paul Ehrlich and economist and Julian Simon on the effect of population growth on the Earth’s resources. While Ehrlich warned that population growth could deplete resources and lead to global catastrophe, Simon saw humans as the “ultimate resource” who could innovate their way out of such shortages. The Ehrlich-Simon wager tracked the real price of a basket of five raw materials between 1980 and 1990, finding as Simon hypothesized, that all measured commodities decreased in price by an average of 57.6 percent, despite a population increase of 873 million.
Tupy and Pooley expand on Simon’s original insight by increasing the basket to 50 commodities and analyzing a longer time period; between 1980 and 2017. Over this time, they find the real price of their basket of commodities decreased by 36.3 percent.
Read the whole thing.
DNC CHAIR COMPLAINS THAT VOTERS ARE INFLUENCED BY THE ‘PULPIT ON SUNDAY.’
Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez lamented Wednesday the supposedly malign influence of Christianity on voters’ political preferences, comparing the influence of preachers to that of conservative media outlets.
“We all have to make sure that we are fluent in what’s happening across our ecosystem so that we can come to each other’s defense,” Perez said while speaking at Demand Justice’s “The Court In Crisis: What’s Next For Progressives After Kavanaugh” Summit in Washington, DC. “Because we need to build a bigger orchestra. They’ve had a big orchestra for some time and they’ve got the megaphones to amplify it, whether it’s Sinclair at a local level or Fox at a national level. I’ve learned this from the outreach we’ve done at the DNC. . . .And I had someone in Northwestern Wisconsin tell me, ‘You know what, for most of the people I know, their principal sources of information are Fox News, their NRA newsletter, and the pulpit on Sunday.’”
Or to put it another way, they’re “largely poor, uneducated, and easy to command,” as they say at the Washington Post.
THE WISCONSIN ‘COUP’ THAT WASN’T: Untoward, not undemocratic.
Following a state-wide electoral rebellion against New Jersey Governor Jim Florio in 1991, the Democratic Party lost control of both legislative chambers. On the eve of decennial reapportionment and with New Jersey set to lose a congressional seat, that would have left Republicans in control of the consequential federal redistricting process. That simply would not do, and so legislative Democrats spent the lame-duck session ceding legislative redistricting authority to an independent commission.
When Republican Bruce Rauner won an upset victory over Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, legislative Democrats moved in the lame-duck session to truncate the length of the term to which the governor could appoint a comptroller from four years to two. Democrats, Quinn included, claimed that this actually made the system more democratic, since it put the vacancy to a vote of the public sooner. “I think democracy is always better when the people call the shots, when the people are in charge,” Quinn said. “Not only is the action planned for tomorrow unconstitutional,” House Republican leader Jim Durkin countered, “it’s nothing short of a power grab by the Democratic majority in a lame-duck session.”
Read the whole thing.
TO BE FAIR, WHAT DOESN’T? Bill Barr AG Nomination Causes Democrat Fireworks.
LIFE IN 2018: Dear Boys, We Hate You.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: University offers queer-themed coloring books. I hope they come with matching sippy cups.
BREAKING BADENOV: Russian chemistry teacher accused of setting up a drug lab.
HERE’S THE JAMAL KHASHOGGI YOU PROBABLY DON’T KNOW ABOUT: Writing in The American Spectator, Joseph P. Duggan describes a fascinating lunch conversation he had in 2012 with the recently murdered Saudi “journalist.” There is so much more to Khashoggi than the mainstream U.S. media has reported. Read the whole thing.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Christian college bashes pro-life speech by guy conceived by rape. The complaint is that his comments “made many students, staff, and faculty of color feel unheard, underrepresented, and unsafe on our campus.”
Translation: “We can’t stand the thought that someone, especially someone black, disagrees with our politics.”
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TODAY IN AUSTIN, TEXAS: The Humanities Texas Holiday Book Fair. Book signing December 8 from 10 AM to 1 PM in the restored Byrne-Reed mansion, 1410 Rio Grande (corner of Rio Grande and West 15th Street). I’ll be signing copies of Cocktails from Hell: 5 Complex Wars Shaping the 21st Century. (bumped)
LIGHTING UP THE ALASKAN NIGHT: Soldiers in the 4th Infantry Brigade Combat Team (Airborne), 25th Infantry Division, fire an M120 120 mm mortar.