RIDDLE ME THIS: What’s an Organism With No Brain, 720 Sexes?
Archive for 2019
October 17, 2019
THE JOURNOLIST IS HOPPING: No More Pretense: Journalists, Dems Use Identical Talking Points on Impeachment (Video).
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with Chyrons, and their lockstep phraseology all makes sense.
AT AMAZON, deals on Device Accessories.
CRACKING DOWN: US to require Chinese officials to report American contacts. “The Trump administration said Wednesday that it will soon require Chinese officials in the U.S. to notify the State Department ahead of any contacts they plan to have with American educators, researchers and local and state governments. The release of the new rules was accompanied by notices to American educational and research institutions and local governments informing them of the reporting requirement. The change is effective Wednesday.”
YOU’D GET STRONGER? Here’s what would happen if you worked out like a strongman.
CORNERING THE MAN-HATING VOTE: At Commentary, Christine Rosen asks, “What does Elizabeth Warren think of men?”
[A]t a recent CNN-sponsored town hall on LGBTQ issues, she let slip an emotion that she hasn’t previously shown toward men: contempt. Answering a question (which turned out to be planted) about how she would talk to someone who is opposed to gay marriage, Warren responded, “Well, I’m going to assume it’s a guy who said that.” She then added, “And I’m going to say, ‘Then just marry one woman—I’m cool with that.’” Then came her contemptuous “zinger”: “Assuming you can find one.” As the Washington Post described, “Warren turned, took a few steps and smiled broadly as the room exploded in laughter.” Soon her campaign team “was crowing that the clip had garnered more than 12 million views on Twitter.”
If this is what Warren’s campaign team thinks is worth crowing about, then they clearly haven’t learned anything since Hillary Clinton dismissed a large swath of the country as “deplorables.”
Casual misandry might play well on Twitter (and among the Democratic base), but it’s insulting to a large number of voters Warren will need to persuade in a general election if she secures the Democratic nomination.
In keeping with the gentle treatment Warren has experienced from the media, few mainstream outlets (with the exception of the Post) even bothered to question whether her remarks were offensive or point out the irony that she was calling out intolerance by being intolerant herself.
“Down With the Clapback,” adds Matt Purple at the American Conservative:
[C]lapbacks don’t even have to be clever anymore. All they need to do is invoke the trendy left-wing wisdom of the moment, especially if it can be encapsulated in a single term: “mansplain,” “gaslight,” “toxic masculinity”—“you mad, bro?” Everything you need is there, except, of course, a point. Call it the Daily Show method of discourse, and indeed, when it comes to clapback culture, Jon Stewart may be a more primordial forbear even than Twitter. Once upon a time, his smackdowns of suspiciously edited Fox News clips were considered entertainment; today his method of grab, sass, and discard is widespread and serves more as cultural enforcement. The purpose of the clapback is to signal that debate ends here, that one needs think no further. Is it possible that Maduro might be both a socialist and a murderous thug, that one might even enable the other? That doesn’t matter. Rand Paul has been “destroyed” and this meeting is adjourned.
Is it any wonder that Joe Rogan has become a minor celebrity? The comedian and YouTube host is a lefty of a sort, but he also prizes probing conversation over brusque dismissals, and on today’s Internet, that feels like a novelty. As for Elizabeth Warren, I don’t mean to pick on her. She really is one of the deeper Democratic candidates, even if she can’t seem to figure out how she’s going to pay for any of her proposals. Still, there lingers the problem of that stubborn third of the country that refuses to embrace same-sex marriage. And Senator, not to mansplain, but you never answered the question. How do you respond to those who say that the definition of marriage is set and must remain between one man and one woman?
As Rosen concludes, “Like many politicians, Warren uses her personal stories and personal history to try to connect with voters. By making half those voters the butt of a contemptuous joke, she signaled that not only does she place honesty about her personal history on a sliding scale, but the dignity of voters she dislikes as well.”
PREDICTION: SF developer joins California high-speed rail board to get it ‘back on track.’
Not sure if congratulations or condolences are in order, but longtime Bay Area housing developer Jim Ghielmetti of San Francisco, has been appointed to the California High-Speed Rail Authority board of directors.
Ghielmetti is the founder Signature Homes, which since 1983 and has been a major player Bay Area housing market. Ghielmetti was a member of the California Transportation Commission until last week.
As for why he took the job, Ghielmetti said, “I’d like to see the train get back on track.”
Prediction: It won’t be.
Yogi Berra was wrong: Some predictions are easy, even about the future.
SHOCKING NEWS FROM THE WORLD OF SCIENCE: Study: Testosterone may help women run faster, longer.
PROGRESSIVISM IS CARING ABOUT THE LITTLE PEOPLE ‘I’m Starting Not To Care That She Is Brutal To Her Staff.’ “I thought every candidate had a good moment or two, though my memory is blurred by the unrelenting pace produced by too many topics and the tug-of-war for control of the conversation. Klobuchar had some smart answers. I’m starting not to care that she is brutal to her staff. (Why do we care so much about that? 99.9 percent of us will never work for her.)”
That’s Larry Sabato from the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics.
CHANGE: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says it’s time to break up Facebook. “It’s addictive, it’s not good for you, they’re after your kids, they’re running political ads that aren’t true … and they’re also acquiring other companies and co-mingling [data those companies have on their users] into theirs.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The age of belated realization.
Problems that were once papered over have burst into the open. . . . The old world order is in shambles. By October 31 the EU will lose one of its most powerful members. In Washington the political class is paralyzed, unable to adapt to changing circumstances. Even Democratic candidates can’t agree on what constitutes a vital American interest in the Middle East. This implies that the trouble in Kurdistan is only symptomatic of greater geopolitical shifts, a small part of a larger fracture. If Turkey was willing to bomb US positions, menace Incirlik’s nukes and threaten the EU the tripwire of US lives was not the sure shield it was assumed to be.
The last few years have been one of belated realization. The cans which for decades had been kicked down the road now constitute a giant metal wall. The realities of the 21st century have outrun the politics of the 20th.
Yeah, pretty much.
BREAKING THE LAST MILE MONOPOLISTS: SpaceX says 12,000 satellites isn’t enough, so it might launch another 30,000. “SpaceX is facing competition in the nascent low-Earth satellite broadband market from OneWeb, Space Norway, Telesat, and Amazon. Broadband delivered by low-Earth satellites should provide faster speeds and lower latencies than traditional satellites, which orbit at much higher altitudes. SpaceX has said it intends to provide gigabit speeds and latency as low as 25ms, but the company hasn’t revealed how much the service will cost.”
IT’S PROBLEMATIC BECAUSE IT’S “WHITENESS MANIFEST.” Kamala Harris Staffer Berates BuzzFeed Editor by Text Over ‘Problematic’ Joke Tweet. Mediaite changed the headline, which was about the staffer “whining,” to “berates” — you can still see the original in the URL — but the original seems more accurate. Also, you should never hire a staffer who sends no-capitalization messages.
The editor’s (it’s Ben Smith) response was, basically, sod off, swampy: “Do you seriously not have real problems? This text makes me think you are totally, totally unready for an actual presidential campaign.”
TO BE TRUSTED, IT HELPS TO BE TRUSTWORTHY: Poynter: Don’t let ABC’s mistake fuel distrust of the media.
As politicians continue to attack the credibility of the press, ABC News suffered a self-inflicted wound that is feeding cynical, misguided notions about how news media operate.
On Sunday evening, in a report about violence in northern Syria, ABC’s “World News Tonight“ included a video clip of a nighttime machine gun exhibition at a Kentucky shooting range, with weekend anchor Tom Llamas describing it as “appearing to show Turkey’s military bombing Kurd civilians.” Early Monday morning, shortly before the video was shown again on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” Wojciech Pawelczyk, a conservative political activist, debunked it on Twitter. By midday — after the incident was further investigated by Beckett Adams (no relation), a columnist at The Washington Examiner — ABC News had issued a statement saying it had removed the video and “regrets the error.”
ABC News has declined to comment on how the error occurred.
Into that vacuum of non-information rushed a familiar barrage of cynical accusations.
“Cynical?” This sort of “mistake” happens with disturbing frequency and the “mistakes” lean heavily in one direction. Then when they’re caught, they get stealth corrections, deletions, or in this case, a stonewall. Why should people trust a media that acts this way? The Poynter crowd wouldn’t give any other big corporations the benefit of the doubt we’re seeing here.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Kim Jong-Un Propaganda Photo Essay Goes Hysterically Wrong. “And… um… we’re not sure what happened to Kim’s legs in this next photo, but we’re certainly very sure for certain that there was no State-level photoshopping going on here at all.”
HEINLEIN’S CRAZY YEARS: College Professor Says SpongeBob Is an Evil, Racist, Colonial Monster.
JOHN MCGINNIS: Reviving the Contract Clause: An Acid Test for Originalism.
IF IT SOUNDS TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE… Near-infinite specific thrust from drive that ignores physics.
The basic idea of the Helical Drive, according to the author of that link, is simple. Imagine that you have a mass in a cylinder that is oscillating back and forth. Every time the mass hits the end of the cylinder, it will impart some momentum, accelerating it. Because the mass sequentially collides with each end of the cylinder, the net force is zero, and the only outcome is that the cylinder gets a massive headache.
But, what if—you’re going to love this—you could magically increase the size of the mass when it was traveling in one direction and decrease the mass when it was traveling in the other direction? If the velocity of the mass is kept the same, the force imparted at one end would be greater than at the other. You would have a net force: the cylinder would continuously accelerate in one direction.
Now we just have to fill in the magic part: how do we magically change the mass? The answer here is special relativity. If something is moving at close to the speed of light, its mass will increase. Indeed, the closer the object is to the speed of light, the larger its mass.
So, the answer, apparently, is simple. If we use a very strong magnetic field along the length of the cylinder, then alpha particles (helium atoms with the electrons stripped off) will start to corkscrew around the field. An accelerator in one section can accelerate the ions to as close to the speed of light as possible, while in a different section a countering accelerator will slow them back down. At each end, the ions reflect, imparting momentum to the cylinder.
Even better, the energy lost in accelerating the ions can be recovered when you slow them down, so it’s nearly free acceleration.
There’s just one problem:
Even though the author does a very nice simulation, he has left out the fields that do the accelerating. When we accelerate ions using a magnetic or electric field, the ions push back on the field. There is an equal and opposite force exerted on the electrodes and coils that produce the fields, and those just happen to be in the spaceship, too.
Oops.
WAR ON SCIENCE: Harvard says masculinity and testosterone are not ‘connected.’
KURT SCHLICHTER: Bad Gaslighting Epidemic Sweeps The Elite. “There are three questions that our terrible, terrible ruling class raises whenever it opens its collective kale-hole to lecture us: 1) Does the elite think we are really, really stupid, or 2) Is the elite really, really stupid, or 3) Is the elite all of the above? The last week has been eventful, even by Age O’ Trump standards, and the one enduring takeaway is just how bad these people are at gaslighting us with inept lies that demand we disbelieve what’s happening right in front of us. But it should come as no surprise that our alleged betters are no good at gaslighting because they have proven themselves to be no good at anything.”
Plus: “Here’s a fun test: can you name something – anything – major in the last two decades that our best and brightest have not screwed up? I’ll wait. . . . So, because they have no other way to deal with the damning evidence of their utter incompetence, our elite instead tries to convince us that we are crazy for noticing just how lame they are.”
COME SEE THE VIOLENCE INHERENT IN THE COMMUNISM: Jimmy Sham, leader of Hong Kong democracy group Civil Human Rights Front, attacked on Mong Kok street. “Sham is smashed in the head with hammers and spanners by at least four assailants who then flee in a car.”
IF YOU GIVE ME A WEEK, I MIGHT THINK OF SOMETHING: Biden touts ‘really big’ accomplishments at debate…but Dem voters can’t name any. Well, there’s the punitive bankruptcy bill that he passed for MBNA while his son got a paycheck from them. Or the RAVE Act . . . .