REMINDER: Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power.
Yes, but renewables were never actually meant to work.
Archive for 2019
May 8, 2019
May 7, 2019
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JUST GOT COPIES OF MY THE SOCIAL MEDIA UPHEAVAL IN THE MAIL. It’s out in 3 weeks!
“CLEARLY ANTISEMITIC” STATEMENTS MADE AT WILLIAMS COLLEGE STUDENT GOVERNMENT MEETING: As I noted previously, the Williams College student government denied official recognition to a pro-Israel student group, Williams Initiative for Israel, even though the group met all criteria for recognition. The decision had obvious antisemitic undertones, but a source just sent me the minutes of the next student government meeting (which I also found online here). At that meeting, a student named Lance acknowledged that when he took the minutes of the previous meeting, he didn’t “type down” “clearly anti-Semitic things.” Open antisemitism at an elite college. Why is the college administration silent?
Lance: Hi there, I’m the minutekeeper. My name is Lance. Anyways, thank you so much for your thoughtful email. If you’d like to tell me… so, just a procedure from CC, because I want to be done with it too, I understand. If you say that a certain thing was misattributed to the wrong person, I was handling 12 different guests that were sitting in geographically different locations, I had to look down while typing, right? So it is a bit challenging, but for instance, I don’t remember which guest number you were and I don’t remember which guest number you were. I also don’t know which guest number I attributed your guest number to, right? But if you want to send me a quick correction, because clearly you know which ones are misattributed, I can easily change those numbers real quick. That is always how we do it, that is why we approve them in the next week’s minutes. As for ‘in shambles’, I only didn’t type down two things: 1) personally identifying information – if someone who said something that was deeply personal, I tried to limit that to preserve anonymity; 2) clearly anti-Semitic things I didn’t type down. I want [sic, won’t?] repeat them, but I didn’t type those things down. So those are the only two things I didn’t type. If that is a mischaracterization that you are uncomfortable with, I don’t know what to tell you. Those are the only two things I didn’t type. Again, there is an audio recording. I can’t actually, accurately 100% transcribe things, though I do try my best. But that is really all I can say. If there are specific edits, I’d love to hear them. I can just edit them real quick, we can vote on it, and we can move on to this training.
OPEN THREAD: Do that comment voodoo that you do so well.
LOW-GRAVITY LANDSLIDES: Boulders on Diamond-Shaped Asteroids Hint at Dusty Landslides.
THEY CAN’T STEER THE SHIPS, BUT THEY’VE GOT THIS: Navy Leader Who Told Sailors to ‘Clap Like We’re at a Strip Club’ Has Resigned.
TWITTER IS RUN BY LYING LIARS WHO SUCK: Twitter Suspends Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Parody Account for ‘Spammy Behavior,’ Which Seems Dubious.
UPDATE: Twitter suspends Jack Posobiec’s @MAGAphobia account for tracking violence against Trump supporters. “The latest incident is likely to fuel conservative ire at Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, who is accused of applying double standards when it comes to applying the platform’s rules to right-leaning accounts.”
Related (From Ed): Twitter temporarily suspends conservative activist David Horowitz. “The suspension, initially reported by OANN host Jack Posobiec, came the same day as Mr. Posobiec’s account devoted to documenting assaults on trump supporters, @MAGAphobia, was suspended.”
THIS IS ONE OF THE WORST EXAMPLES OF NEWSROOM FASCISM: I’ve never met now-former Baltimore TV local news anchor Mary Bubala, but I am outraged as an American and a journalist over her firing for a question that clearly wasn’t remotely related to the fact the city’s two most recent (corrupt) mayors were both Black and women.
Note in particular that Loyola University of Maryland Professor Karsonya Wise Whitehead claimed to know Bubala was asking a racist question because she knows Bubala’s heart. Either this kind of totalitarian rationalization ends or liberty isn’t long for anybody in this country except those with approved opinions.
WELL, FOR HALF A CENTURY THEY WAGGED THEIR FINGERS IN SUPPORT OF DIETARY RECOMMENDATIONS THAT WERE NOT JUST WRONG, BUT DEADLY: Doctors, Is It O.K. if We Talk About Why Finger-Wagging Isn’t Working? So maybe it’s better that they don’t.
MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ABOUT BOB ZUBRIN’S THE CASE FOR SPACE, WHICH IS A MUST-READ. Robert Zubrin makes ‘The Case for Space:’ Sure we should go to space for the knowledge and the challenge, but it will also ensure our survival and protect our freedom.
YOU CAN BET THAT ANTIFA ISN’T BEHIND THIS: ‘Pothole Vigilantes’ are covertly fixing Oakland roads in the middle of the night.
YOUR DAILY TREACHER: Pete Buttigieg Thinks God Is a Democrat Because God Doesn’t Pick Sides.
God doesn’t pick sides, and also God is on Buttigieg’s side. You shouldn’t use religion as a weapon, and also religion is Buttigieg’s weapon. God loves everyone, except Republicans.
Pete is famous for learning new languages, but maybe he should concentrate on mastering English.
Heh. Read the whole thing.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: There’s a Pea-Sized Brain Region for Pokemon Characters If You Played A Lot as a Kid.
“Because Pokémon are very small and viewed with our central vision most of the time, they occupy a small portion in the central retina when we’re looking at them,” said Gomez. “Faces are a bit bigger, so they occupy a slightly larger portion of the central retina. Scenes, as we navigate through them, are very large and extend all the way into our peripheral vision.” So the information from each type of stimulus ends up being sent to slightly different locations in the brain.
“These findings suggest that our brain is capable of developing more specialized brain regions for recognizing objects than we previously thought,” said Gomez. “So we’re likely not limited by our brain, but instead by how much we can experience in childhood.”
For the benefit of parents who might be concerned that playing such games is “rewiring” children’s brains, Gomez emphasizes that any substantial experience we have will affect the brain; it’s designed to be adaptive to accommodate new experiences, especially when we’re young. In fact, “Most of the Pokémon experts I scanned are getting their PhDs in science or working at companies like Google, so there’s no evidence to suggest being a Pokémon expert had any adverse impact,” he said. “They’re all doing very well.”
Well, that’s good to know.
RIP: JOHN LUKACS, ICONOCLASTIC HISTORIAN AND HOLOCAUST SURVIVOR, DIES AT 95.
“John Lukacs is well known not so much for speaking truth to power as speaking truth to audiences he senses have settled into safe and unexamined opinions,” John Willson wrote in The American Conservative in 2013. “This has earned him, among friends and critics alike, a somewhat curmudgeonly reputation.”
Lukacs completed more than 30 books, on everything from his native country to 20th century American history to the meaning of history itself. His books include “Five Days in London,” the memoir “Confessions of an Original Sinner,” and “Historical Consciousness,” in which he contended that the best way to study any subject, whether science or politics, was through its history.
He considered himself a “reactionary,” a mourner for the “civilization and culture of the past 500 years, European and Western.” He saw decline in the worship of technological progress, the elevation of science to religion, and the rise of materialism. Drawing openly upon Alexis de Tocqueville’s warnings about a “tyranny of the majority,” Lukacs was especially wary of populism and was quoted by other historians as Donald Trump rose to the presidency. Lukacs feared that the public was too easily manipulated into committing terrible crimes.
“The kind of populist nationalism that Hitler incarnated has been and continues to be the most deadly of modern plagues,” he once wrote.
Read the whole thing. A decade before Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism, Lukacs’ self-described “biography of biographies,” The Hitler of History correctly positioned Hitler as a revolutionary leftist, and warned, “We are all national socialists now:”
Of course the proportions of the compound of nationalism and socialism vary from country to country; but the compound is there, and even where social democracy prevails, it is the national feeling of the people that ultimately matters. What was defeated in 1945, together with Hitler, was German National Socialism: a cruel and extreme version of national socialism. Elsewhere nationalism and socialism were brought together, reconciled and then compounded, without violence and hatred and war.
Without violence and hatred? Well, the 1990s were more innocent times.
JOHN STOSSEL AT REASON TV: The Rise of Citizen Journalists.
[Tim] Pool leans left and supported Bernie Sanders. But he reports whatever he sees.
Earlier this year, the media jumped on a video of a grinning Covington High School kid wearing a Trump hat, claiming he was taunting a native American man—but Pool was skeptical.
“All of these big news outlets, even the Washington Post, CNN, they immediately made the assumption ‘he must be a racist,'” Pool told Stossel.
“I didn’t make that assumption … I said, I have no idea what this is. I just see a guy banging a drum and a kid with a weird look on his face. So I looked at some other videos,” Pool said.
On YouTube, Pool found a longer clip of the encounter and used that to show that the Native American elder approached the kids as they waited for a bus—not the other way around, as had been claimed. There was no evidence that the kids were racist.
“No one watched the longer video?” Stossel asks?
“Nope,” Pool says. “Here’s what happens. One left-wing journalist says, look at this racist. His buddy sees it and says, wow, look at this racist. And that’s a big ole circular game of telephone where no one actually does any fact-checking. And then—New York Times, Washington Post, CNN all publish the same fake story.”
Pool, along with Reason’s Robby Soave, told the real story.
Related: If Deplatforming Hoaxsters Is OK, the News Media Should Be in Big Trouble.
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Will Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Baby Have an Accent?
FIRST HE CAME FOR THE FRATERNITIES… Now Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana shows up to a sit-in protesting African-American law professor Ronald Sullivan. Sullivan is allegedly unfit to be “faculty dean” of Harvard’s Winthrop House because he, a defense lawyer, agreed to defend Harvey Weinstein in court. And this is after Khurana had already commissioned a “climate review” of the dorm “asking students to rate the house on a variety of metrics like homophobia, elitism, and friendliness.” At Dean WormerKhurana’s Harvard, everyone who crosses political correctness is on Double Secret Probation, forever.
REVIEW: FN America FN 509 Tactical.
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MY USA TODAY COLUMN IS ABOUT BOB ZUBRIN’S THE CASE FOR SPACE, WHICH IS A MUST-READ. Robert Zubrin makes ‘The Case for Space:’ Sure we should go to space for the knowledge and the challenge, but it will also ensure our survival and protect our freedom.
A LETTER TO WILLIAM BARR: “Emmet T. Flood, special counsel to President Trump, has sent a letter to Attorney General Barr. Although Barr is the addressee, Robert Mueller is the main target. The letter is a blistering attack on Mueller’s report with a shot at James Comey thrown in.” Flood is an excellent lawyer.
From the letter: “The criminal investigation began with a breach of confidentiality executed by a very senior administration official who was himself an intelligence service chief. This leak of confidential information, personally directed by the former Director of the FBI, triggered the creation of [the special counsel’s office] itself — precisely as it was intended to do.”
Stay tuned. Battlespace preparation is underway.