I PREDICT NEW RESPECT FOR MITCH MCCONNELL IF SO: GOP plans to steamroll Dems on Supreme Court pick.
Archive for 2018
June 28, 2018
THAT WAS LIKE, WHAT FOUR OR FIVE MASS-HYSTERIA MORAL PANICS AGO ANYWAY:
GOOD NEWS, BUT ALSO TROUBLING: Genealogists Turn to Cousins’ DNA and Family Trees to Crack Five More Cold Cases: Police arrested a D.J. in Pennsylvania and a nurse in Washington State this week, the latest examples of the use of an open-source ancestry site since the break in the Golden State killer case.
21ST CENTURY MEDICINE: Poliovirus Therapy Shows Early Promise for Treating Aggressive Brain Cancer, but Questions Linger. “An inactivated form of the poliovirus used to treat recurrent brain tumors is showing what researchers called encouraging long-term survival in a Phase 1 clinical trial published Tuesday. The authors reported that 21 percent of patients were still alive three years after the recurrence of glioblastoma, an aggressive and quickly lethal form of brain cancer that is stubbornly resistant to treatment—even the new crop of immunotherapies have proven to be ineffective. Against that bleak backdrop, the early results suggest the experimental poliovirus therapy, invented at Duke Cancer Institute, has some promise.”
WHAT IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN SCORING ON TRUMP? NOT KIDS: Our Immigration Policy is Endangering Children
BUT OF COURSE: Rep @MaxinePWaters: “The next Supreme Court Justice should be an illegal immigrant.” Yes, it’s a parody account, but is it really?
SHOOTING IN AN ANNAPOLIS NEWSROOM. Lots on Twitter but not much real news yet. Local police say it’s not terrorism, but local, but NYPD is sending police to media outlets in NYC. In other words, we don’t know anything beyond the bare fact of the shooting yet.
RIP, HARLAN ELLISON.
HMM. I WONDER IF THEY SHOULD TRY ESTROGEN BLOCKERS AS A PREVENTATIVE: Estrogen could play role in men’s migraines.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Fit at midlife may mean healthier brain, stronger heart later.
If you’re fit in middle age, you might be guarding against not only depression as a senior, but also dying from heart disease if you do develop depression, a new study suggests.
Among nearly 18,000 Medicare patients, the most fit were 16 percent less likely to develop depression, the researchers found. The most fit were also 56 percent less likely to die from heart disease if they developed depression, and 61 percent less likely to die from heart disease if they remained free of depression.
Not exactly a paradigm-shifting discovery.
BLUE ON BLUE: Rural Democrats’ Big Problem In Minnesota: “Nobody Cares About Us.” “City liberals, miners, environmentalists, and union workers make up the Minnesota Democratic coalition. But, like in a lot of the Midwest, it’s getting tougher and tougher to hold together.”
“There’s some things going on in the Democratic Party that divide us,” Medure, who is running for a state legislature seat against a Republican incumbent, acknowledged to a crowd assembled over pulled pork, baked beans, and lemon squares sponsored by the Itasca County Democratic Party. “There’s a lot of friction in the party. We can worry about that when we get there — but we believe in the same things.”
To most people in the crowd, it was immediately clear what Medure was talking about: mining. Here, in and around the state’s long-struggling iron mining region, known as the Iron Range, the tension in the Democratic Party between mining advocates and environmentalists is almost palpable.
The issue, mostly, pits people in Northern Minnesota’s small towns against city environmentalists. And it’s a sign of a broader problem: In Minnesota, tension between urban and rural Democrats has been growing increasingly sharp. Democrats on the Iron Range worry it could cost the party in 2018.
Just enough deplorably irredeemable bitter clingers switched from Obama to Trump in 2016 to put Trump in the White House by a comfortable Electoral College margin. Stories like this one — and there have been many — make it possible or even likely that Trump could improve on that margin in 2020.
THIS DOES NOT SURPRISE ME: Just 23% of US adults get enough exercise, CDC reports.
HERE’S A DOLLAR, BUY A CLUE: The Columbia Journalism Review pushed a piece today that says “Facebook and Twitter still trying to convince conservatives they aren’t biased.” The story goes on to say that the social media and data business giants are “bending over backwards”:
“That accusation keeps coming up, and both Facebook and Twitter seem almost desperate to prove it’s not the case, to the point where they keep meeting with conservative groups and Trump supporters in an attempt to show good faith. This process is fraught with complications, however, since a) it’s not clear right-wing critics actually have a case for making such a claim, and b) bending over backwards to prove they aren’t biased has blown up in Facebook’s face in the not-so-distant past, and in the process arguably made the situation worse.”
IMHO, this is utter rubbish, in fact misses what’s really going on. Nowhere does either Facebook, Google or the CJR ask about other practices many Instapundit readers have experienced: unfounded removal of “offensive” material; shadow-banning; or account suspension (known as “Facebook jail”).
Until Facebook, Twitter and the media who write about them stop and address what’s going on, the companies are going to plunge into a death spiral, and the media critics who fail to see shadow-banning as a real problem (or even know about it) are going to become less and less trusted or relevant.
It’s as if the Titanic were taking on water and the Captain is boasting about how nice the table settings look.
DANG: Webb Space Telescope pushed back again, won’t launch until 2021.
The James Webb Space Telescope would be the most complex imaging hardware that NASA has attempted to put into space. It features a large mirror that will be formed by multiple individual segments moving into place and protected by a sunscreen that would also unfold after launch. Webb’s instruments would be sensitive to a region of the infrared that should allow it to image everything from the Universe’s first galaxies to the atmospheres of nearby exoplanets.
But so far, that complexity has driven extensive delays. Early this year, the Government Accountability Office released a report that suggested that further delays were inevitable. And shortly after its release, NASA disclosed that testing of the spacecraft’s unfolding resulted in damage to some of the systems. That set the stage for an independent review board to give the entire project a new look.
The board’s review and NASA’s response were released today. The board paints a picture of significant dysfunction, even as it provides 32 recommendations for minimizing the impact of further problems in the future.
The problems come largely from the work of Northrop Grumman, which is building the spacecraft and its sun shield. Incidents detailed in the report include using a solvent to clean valves without checking with the valve manufacturer; the improper solvent damaged the valves and forced their replacement. In another case, managers relied on the word of a single technician that test wiring was installed properly. As a result, hardware was exposed to excess voltage.
In a final case, fasteners for the sunscreen weren’t tightened sufficiently prior to testing under simulated launch conditions. Over a dozen of them popped loose, several ended up inside the spacecraft body, and two of them still haven’t been definitively located.
Heads should roll.
THIS SEEMS ABOUT RIGHT: At any point in life, people spend their time in 25 places. “The study showed that people are constantly exploring new places. They move to a new home, find a new favorite restaurant, find a new bar, or start going to another gym, etc. However, the number of regularly visited places is constantly 25 in a given period. If a new place is added to the list, one of the places disappears.” So if you’ve got 25 places you like, there’s no point moving I guess.
BLUE STATE BLUES: Yet another sign that San Francisco’s housing market is out of control. “Are San Francisco families earning $117,400 a year really considered low income?”
Yes:
Every year, HUD sets income limits that determine who can qualify for housing assistance, including Section 8 vouchers, public housing and other assistance programs. The calculation is also used to set eligibility for affordable housing built by developers who receive tax credits.
The formula takes into account an area’s median family income, as well as its housing costs. Those who make 80% of the formula amount are considered “low income,” while those earning 50% are “very low income” and those making 30% are considered “extremely low income.”
In the San Francisco metro area, which includes Marin, San Francisco and San Mateo counties, an income of $44,000 or less for a family of four is considered extremely low, while the upper limit for having a very low income is $73,300.
These numbers are certainly eye-popping — and they have been rising swiftly. In 2014, the extremely low income limit was $33,200, the very low was $55,350 and the low was $88,600.
Home prices have been rising at an impressive clip, too. The median home value in the San Francisco metro area was $947,500 at the end of April, while the median rent was $3,300 a month, according to Zillow, a real estate marketplace.
Only 15% of San Francisco county residents could afford a median-priced home in the first quarter of 2018, according to Paragon Real Estate Group. That compares to 57% in the United States overall.
Anything which can’t go on forever will stop.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: How To Start Surfing.
HASN’T SARAH HOYT’S SHOCKED FACE BEEN OVERUSED ENOUGH ALREADY THIS WEEK? As Membership Continues to Decline, an Epidemic of Embezzlement Plagues America’s Unions.
Michael Walsh dusts off one of Mickey Kaus’s favorite memes to make sense of the DNC-MSM’s perpetual freakout.
ALBERTO GONZALES: Justice Anthony Kennedy’s replacement should be young, conservative and swiftly confirmed.
The president has promised to nominate someone from a list that has been shared publicly. The individuals identified have solid conservative credentials; most have expressed the belief that the words of the Constitution and statutes be interpreted according to the text and that a judge’s role is limited in our constitutional structure.
The president should nominate someone with a record of achievement and excellence in the profession that one would expect of a Supreme Court justice. The president is also likely to nominate someone between the ages of 45 and 55 years, someone old enough to have a record of accomplishments, yet young enough to serve on the court for a substantial number of years and influence the court’s jurisprudence over generations.
Online wagering shows Brett Kavanaugh as the safest bet, who at age 53 is actually one of the older potential nominees. But at just 45 and female, Seventh Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett could possibly sit on the bench even longer.
I’m hoping Glenn will weigh in…