Archive for 2018

JOHN McWHORTER ON “ATONEMENT AS ACTIVISM: Today’s consciousness-raising on race is less about helping black people than it is about white people seeking grace.”

Once Nietzsche declared “God is dead,” the entire “Progressive” project slowly coalesced into cults of secular religions to replace Him.

NON-BIASED SPORTS JOURNALISM, YOU’RE DOING IT WRONG:

● Shot: How a Weakened ESPN Became Consumed by Politics — Arguments over tweets, tension with owner Disney increased anxiety over the network’s future in era of cord-cutting.

—Shalini Ramachandran, the Wall Street Journal, yesterday.

● Chaser: Keith Olbermann Getting Expanded Role at ESPN.

—The Hollywood Reporter, today.

What could possibly go wrong?

Update: “So welcome back, Olbermann. It’s like you never left MSNBC. They just added some occasional crosstalk about golf.”

MEMO RE: EVENTS OF JULY 4, 1776: Is everyone else being buried in emails and notices about Europe’s new data protection regulations (GDPR)? I am sure there are many fine provisions, but “the right to be forgotten” has serious First Amendment problems. I hereby notify readers that FIRE will not be subjecting the information we host to the judgments of EU bureaucrats. Because America.

IT ALWAYS SEEMED TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE: ‘Impossible’ EM drive may actually be impossible after all.

The idea, championed by inventor Roger Shawyer, uses trapped microwaves in a conical cavity. Previous tests by NASA showed that the microwaves bouncing off the walls of the cavity appeared to produce enough force to push the cavity in one direction. However, a group from TU Dresden in Germany has been unable to replicate these results, or at least they have, but not for the reasons NASA originally thought.

The German team copied the NASA experiment exactly, piping microwaves into the cavity, using lasers to monitor movement and a spring to measure thrust. The setup did indeed produce thrust, as indicated by the spring. But when the researchers positioned the microwaves so they definitely could ­not produce thrust in the direction of the spring, the drive pushed just as hard. Furthermore, the same degree of thrust remained even after power was cut in half. So clearly, there are other factors at play.

The team suggests that the thrust may actually be produced by an interaction between the cables that power the microwave amplifier and Earth’s magnetic field. If this is the case, it won’t work in space

Oh, well.

UPDATE (FROM GLENN): You know how to find out it it’ll work in space? Test it in space.

TRUMP TO SEEK MORE TAX CUTS: Hey, if a first helping was good, just think how much better a second one could be! LifeZette’s Connor Wolf has the details.

THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT? Chuck Todd’s Daily TDS. “To watch an episode of Chuck Todd’s show is to see a cavalcade of liberal journalists work through Trump Derangement Syndrome on-air.”