WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Chinese spacecraft makes first landing on moon’s far side. “The pioneering landing demonstrates China’s growing ambitions as a space power.”
Archive for 2019
January 3, 2019
January 2, 2019
OPEN THREAD: Discourse eloquently. Fill the comment section with your intelligence.
FLECCAS TALKS: THE BEST OF 2018 PROTESTERS (Video). “So Austen Fletcher aka Fleccas Talks does what the media will not. He asks the far left to talk on camera and, for the most part, just lets them roll their answers right into a ditch. It’s so simple and so effective you have to wonder why none of the serious reporters at major news organizations will do it. Here’s his collection of highlights from 2018:”
Watch the whole thing — Fletcher is carrying on in the tradition of Andrew Breitbart’s masterful ability to take left’s “cognitive dissonance and [do] magic tricks with it,” as Jim Treacher once said of Andrew.
IN A PULPIT CRITIQUE OF DONALD TRUMP, HANK JOHNSON (D-GA) INVOKES ADOLF HITLER:
Johnson made his point from the pulpit at Friendship Baptist Church, during a celebration to mark the 156th anniversary of the implementation of the Emancipation Proclamation. He urged vigilance against tyranny.
“Americans, particularly black Americans, can’t afford to make that same mistake about the harm that could be done by a man named Hitler or a man named Trump,” Johnson said.
In the future, every Republican president will be Hitler — and that future began in 1944. But in Johnson’s defense, the two men share at least one common detail: both knew that Guam could not capsize.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Brains of 3 People Have Been Successfully Connected, Enabling Them to Share Thoughts. “Neuroscientists have successfully hooked up a three-way brain connection to allow three people to share their thoughts – and in this case, play a Tetris-style game. The team thinks this wild experiment could be scaled up to connect whole networks of people, and yes, it’s as weird as it sounds.”
Perhaps the social-media hive mind is just a warmup for what’s next.
STRANGE NEW LIBERTARIAN RESPECT FOR DONALD TRUMP: Trump’s Right About ‘Ridiculous’ Misuse of U.S. Troops: The withdrawals from Syria and Afghanistan reflect a welcome willingness to question endless military commitments.
Because most libertarian intellectuals are part of the Gentry class, they tend to identify culturally with Gentry Liberals more than with Trump or his supporters. But they’re beginning to notice that his actions are more libertarian than any other president in our lifetimes.
CONFLICTS OF INTEREST: The incentives of grant funding and career advancement, even the potential for fame, can influence researchers.
A number of recent news articles have brought renewed attention to financial conflicts of interest in medical science. Physicians and medical administrators had financial links to companies that went undeclared to medical journals even when they were writing on topics in which they clearly had monetary interests.
Most agree such lapses damage the medical and scientific community. But our focus on financial conflicts of interest should not lead us to ignore other conflicts that may be equally or even more important. Such biases need not be explicit, like fraud.
“I believe a more worrisome source of research bias derives from the researchers seeking to fund and publish their work, and advance their academic careers,” said Dr. Jeffrey Flier, a former dean of Harvard Medical School who has written on this topic a number of times.
How might grant funding and career advancement — even the potential for fame — be biasing researchers? How might the desire to protect reputations affect the willingness to accept new information that reverses prior findings?
Substantially.
CHARLIE MARTIN ASKS, WHY DID MATTIS FORCE TRUMP TO FIRE HIM? “Like George Peppard, Mattis loves it when a plan comes together. I don’t know what Mattis’ plan is. I bet it doesn’t include following MacArthur’s example and just fading away.”
Read the whole thing.
LEGAL FAIL OF 2018: “IT’S NOT HER FAULT, IT’S NEUROBIOLOGICAL.” OK, OK, I get it, some companies make dangerously defective products, and yes, at the same time there are lawyers who look for anyone from which to squeeze a dime. But then again, sometimes plaintiffs are just plain stupid and will go to extraordinarily lengths to say “not my fault.” Followed by “gimme money.” From the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit:
This case asks us to decide whether, under Texas law, a driver’s neurobiological response to a smartphone notification can be a cause in fact of a car crash […] According to Appellants’ amended complaint, Ashley Kubiak was driving her pick-up truck on April 30, 2013 when she received a text message on her iPhone 5. Appellants allege that Kubiak looked down to read the text, after which she turned her attention back to the road. At that point it was too late to avoid colliding with a vehicle carrying two adults and a child. The adults died, while the child survived but was rendered paraplegic. Kubiak was convicted of two counts of criminally negligent homicide.
But I had to look at the text! I’m conditioned that way! Nope, says the Fifth Circuit: “Because we decline to consider “neurobiological compulsion” a substantial factor under Texas law, we conclude that the iPhone 5 could not be a cause in fact of the injuries in this case.”
All I can say is Apple is lucky they didn’t get sued in California.
**Corrected to clarify that suit was brought by lawyers for estate of crash victims, who argued the driver was compelled to look at her phone.**
SAD STORY: Mother dies shielding son from falling tree in Smoky Mountains. “A pediatrician and mother of three was killed while shielding her 3-year-old son from a falling tree last week while hiking in Tennessee’s Great Smoky Mountain National Park, officials said. Laila Jiwani, a 42-year-old doctor at Cook Children’s Northside Neighborhood Clinic in Fort Worth, Texas, died Thursday after being struck by the tree that was knocked down due to high winds along the Porter Creek Trail inside the 800-square-mile park as she walked with her husband and three children.”
A friend of mine was hiking the same day and said a tree fell across the trail just a dozen or so steps ahead of her, making her glad she wasn’t faster.
STOCKHOLM SYNDROME: Mitt Romney will give first post op-ed TV interview today on CNN.
Related: “I wish Romney had defeated Obama in 2012, but does anyone think this Massachusetts technocrat, who gave us the state-level version of Obamacare in the Bay State, signed up for a regional climate change cap-and-trade scheme, who appointed the egregious Gina McCarthy (Obama’s second EPA administrator) to be his environmental adviser, and appointed state judges who struck the first judicial blows for same-sex marriage, would have governed as a serious conservative had he won?”
RUN ALL THE CANDIDATES! Jay Inslee Is Running For President — You Know, the Governor of Washington. And he’s a one-issue man:
Inslee says he has one priority: global warming. It’s not theoretical, or a cause just for tree huggers anymore. Putting off dealing with it for a year or two or kicking it to some new bipartisan commission won’t work, he says. He plans to focus on the threat that climate change poses to the environment and national security—the mega-storms and fires causing millions in damages, the weather changes that will cause mass migrations, the droughts that will devastate farmers in America and around the world.
As Jim Geraghty responds, “if Jay Inslee stumbles and never gets any traction, the environmental movement will have to grapple with the fact that despite all of their dire warnings about climate change, many Americans are comfortable prioritizing other issues and waiting for someone else to take action.”
And note this statistic from Geraghty: “Interestingly, environmentalism itself is less popular than it used to be — in 2018, only 42 percent of Americans self-identified as an environmentalist, when 78 percent did in 1991.”
That’s because the definition of environmentalism became much more radicalized beginning with Al Gore’s feverish adoption of the issue in 1989, before tacitly declaring Mission Accomplished by selling out to Big Oil in 2013. Everybody wants clean air and water; it’s a much smaller minority that wants to make life hell for middle and lower class Americans to achieve it.
YOU CAN ONLY BE AVANT-GARDE FOR SO LONG BEFORE YOU BECOME GARDE: The Avant-Garde’s Slide into Irrelevance.
(Classical reference in headline.)
WHY SOME PEOPLE GET SICK at the sight of blood.
AT AMAZON, save on Vitamins and Dietary Supplements.
AS G.K. CHESTERTON NEVER SAID, “HE WHO DOES NOT BELIEVE IN GOD WILL BELIEVE IN ANYTHING:” From Astrology to Cult Politics—the Many Ways We Try (and Fail) to Replace Religion.
THE DANGERS OF HORMONAL CONTRACEPTION ARE UNDERAPPRECIATED, IN MY OPINION: I almost died after my contraceptive pill caused a blood clot in my lung.
HARRY REID TRIES TO DESCRIBE PRESIDENT TRUMP AND ENDS UP DESCRIBING HIMSELF:
What struck me about this was both the flash of insight (Trump is, I’d agree, amoral in the same means-to-an-end way that the Democrats are, the difference is that he doesn’t mouth pieties about all the people he’s helping) with the total lack of introspection that one finds somewhat shocking at a time when he’s looking Death in the face and should be taking stock of his life and perhaps regretting the evil he’s done. There is really nothing Reid said about Trump that can’t be laid at his own doorstep. I don’t think there was a single person in DC, of any political party, who thought you could rely on Reid’s word or honor. I’m not sure there are very many…including Chuck Schumer and Dick Durbin and, famously, Claire McCaskill…who thought he was ever a competent caucus leader.
Where I really think he gets Trump wrong, however, is in saying he’s “oblivious to the real world.” I don’t see the man that way. I think he’s very aware of the world but is dismissive of processes and traditions that constrain his ability to act. To a great extent, I think Reid was pretty much the same. He slandered Mitt Romney on the floor of the Senate because he thought it gained him an advantage. He imposed the “nuclear option” for federal judges because the immediate outcome, in his mind, outweighed any future downside.
Truth be told, a lot of Reid’s criticism of Trump as president comes directly from Trump not hesitating to play hardball rather than be the Republican piñatas he was used to dealing with.
Harry Reid’s immorality and craven love of power politics for its own sake is precisely how we got Trump — and ironically enough, how we got Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh.
IF THREE’S A CROWD, WHAT’S THIS? Your Obligatory 2020 Democratic Party Presidential Horse Race Roundup.