OH, TO BE IN ENGLAND NOW THAT APRIL’S THERE: ‘I am shocked!’ Turns out ‘knife amnesty bins’ in the UK are attractive targets for criminals.
Archive for 2019
April 3, 2019
SO YOU RUN AND YOU RUN TO CATCH UP WITH THE SUN BUT IT’S SINKING. RACING AROUND TO COME UP BEHIND YOU AGAIN: “Rutgers University’s Brittney Cooper… an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies… says that the very concept of time itself is racially biased. In an interview with NPR last week, Cooper said that the way we ‘position ourselves in relationship to time comes out of histories of European and Western thought’; in other words, ‘white people own time.’”
PRIVACY: Wrecked Cars Are Now a Treasure Trove of Personal Information.
It sounds conspiratorial, but there’s a series of events to hang the tinfoil hat on. In 2017, General Motors announced it had successfully monitored the listening habits of 90,000 motorists in a study aimed at improving marketing insights. It also rejiggered OnStar and introduced the Marketplace app for seamless in-car purchasing options. Our take was that it was as impressive as it was ominous — and GM is only leading the charge into a what analysts believe will eventually become a multi-billion dollar industry.
Naturally, this led to privacy concerns over how automakers will protect customer data on future models. But we might want to start worrying about the cars we have now. A couple of white-hat hackers (those are the good ones) recently probed the internal computer networks of wrecked and salvaged Teslas and found a mother lode of personal information waiting inside.
According to a report from CNBC, GreenTheOnly and fellow hacker Theo, a Tesla proponent who has repaired hundreds of wrecked Teslas, purchased a wrecked Model 3 for research purposes in 2018. During their time with the vehicle, the pair found it was owned by a Boston-area construction company and had held onto unencrypted data from at least 17 different devices.
FLASHBACK: New Research Shows Smart Light Can Be Used To Steal User’s Private Data Invisibly.
DISPATCHES FROM THE INTERSECTION OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE AND THE NEWSPEAK DICTIONARY: Amherst flirts with Orwellian “language guide.”
Amherst’s Common Language Guide should be viewed as a salvo in the left’s fight to seize control of our language, and hence our culture and politics. The failure to make the Guide stick this time around should not be regarded as a true defeat.
Sooner or later, a college president at a relatively prestigious college will probably be okay with the issuance of a document like Amherst’s, albeit with a few edits. Indeed, sooner or later, someone who helped produce Amherst’s document may find her way into a position where she can impose her Orwellian vision.
JUST AS I LIKE TO CHEER MY SOBRIETY: Liberal Comedy Central Cheers Its Diversity.
Christian Toto:
Diversity … isn’t it a wonderful thing? Actually, it can be. It’s great to open up the creative process, letting fresh voices share their funniest lines. Let the comedy cream rise to the top, no matter where it calls home.
Too bad that never applies to conservatives, their humor, perspective or cravings.
Quick, name a Comedy Central program that routinely shares a right of center view point. How about a comedian who regularly appears on the channel to share Red State musings?
That wouldn’t be real diversity because shut up.
THIS SEEMS LIKE AN IMPROVEMENT, HONESTLY: New Sites Upend Doctor-Patient Relations: ‘It’s Restaurant-Menu Medicine.’
ANALYSIS: TRUE. America’s Biggest Economic Challenge May Be Demographic Decline.
For many years, American economists have spoken of Japan and Western Europe as places where the slow grind of demographic change — masses of workers reaching retirement age, and smaller generations replacing them — has been a major drag on the economy.
But it is increasingly outdated to think of that as a problem for other countries. The deepest challenge for the United States economy may really be about demographics. And our understanding of the implications is only starting to catch up.
A new report from the Economic Innovation Group, a Washington think tank funded in large part by tech investors and entrepreneurs, adds rich new detail, showing that parts of the United States are already grappling with Japanese-caliber demographic decline — 41 percent of American counties with a combined population of 38 million.
At the national level, slower growth in America’s working-age population is a major reason that mainstream forecasters now expect the economy to expand around 2 percent each year rather than the 3 percent common in the second half of the 20th century. As a matter of simple arithmetic, lower growth in the number of people working will almost certainly mean slower growth in economic output.
The debt and the interest on the debt keep growing, however.
DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY: “Democrat-controlled New York is cutting funds to the Special Olympics and giving a raise to lawmakers a week after Democrats in Washington, D.C., expressed outrage after the Trump administration proposed cutting funds to the Special Olympics.”
SNOWFALLS ARE NOW JUST A THING OF THE PAST: Beto O’Rourke Warns: Only 10 Years Left to Act on Climate Change.
Related: Good News! No Need to Have a Mental Breakdown Over ‘Climate Collapse.’
(Classical reference in headline.)
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: House Democrat speaks out: ‘I am offended by this whole conversation about socialism.’ “Rep. Stephanie Murphy declared herself a ‘proud capitalist’.”
ANTI-AGING SCIENCE: Plentiful females keep male crickets young.
JACOB SULLUM: Gravity Knives, Bump Stocks, and Lawless Law Enforcement. “New York cops and the president arbitrarily turn legal products into contraband.”
Last week Cracco, a Manhattan sous chef, won a federal lawsuit he filed after he was arrested for violating New York’s 1958 ban on “gravity knives.” That law makes it a misdemeanor to possess “any knife which has a blade which is released from the handle or sheath thereof by the force of gravity or the application of centrifugal force which, when released, is locked in place by means of a button, spring, lever or other device.”
For years Cracco had been using his Spyderco Endura 4 folding knife, the sort of tool that is sold openly by retailers in New York City and throughout the state, for mundane tasks like opening boxes and bottles. On a Friday afternoon in October 2013, Cracco was standing on a subway platform, heading home to Connecticut, when a police officer spotted the knife clipped to his pants pocket and subjected it to the NYPD’s notorious “wrist flick test.”
According to Cracco and a co-worker who was with him, it took the cop four or five tries before he managed to swing the blade fully open with one hand—a feat that Cracco himself had never attempted. Cracco thus joined the thousands of New Yorkers who are arrested each year for carrying the tools of their trades or hobbies.
“Because the wrist flick test is a functional one, it is difficult if not impossible for a person who wishes to possess a folding knife to determine whether or not the knife is illegal,” U.S. District Judge Paul Crotty noted in a March 27 decision declaring the gravity knife ban “unconstitutionally vague” as applied to Cracco. “People should be able to tell whether their conduct is lawful or unlawful.”
Where’s the fun for lawmakers or police in that?
RELIGION OF PEACE UPDATE: US Islamic Scholar Praises Brunei’s Death Penalty For Homosexuality.
“If you have had a rough week or are feeling down in the dumps, I have just the news to cheer you up. The Muslim country of Brunei is implementing hudud to crack down on sodomites and fornicators!” Haqiqatjou wrote on his website MuslimSkeptic, using the Arabic word meaning “punishments mandated by God.”
“The Sharia protects all of our rights, individually and communally. When rectum-sex enthusiasts are allowed to promote their gender-bending degeneracy openly, that deeply harms all of us,” he added.
Haqiqatjou also mocked politicians and celebrities proposing boycotts of Brunei-owned hotels and businesses, and suggested that Muslims should counteract boycotts by frequenting Brunei. He also suggested that Muslims from western nations go to Brunei to witness public canings so that they could learn what is, in his view, the proper way to implement Sharia.
Charming.
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): Has anybody asked Tim Cook about this? How many Apple Stores are there in Brunei?
WELL, THAT’S BECAUSE IT IS: Nearly Half of Men Believe the Pay Gap Is ‘Made Up,’ Survey Finds.
Ashe Schow explains: New Study Confirms Yet Again Gender ‘Wage’ Gap Due To Women Not Working. Guess How The Media Is Portraying It. “The gap in earnings is due to women choosing lower-paying jobs or taking time off from work to care for family members or raise a child, or working fewer hours during the week, as I have been saying for years.”
Meanwhile, a friend on Facebook comments: “People are still asking this in 2019? Most teenage boys mock this like flat earthers. Even girls do too. Solution? Ask this: ‘Feminists demand equal pay for less work? Equal pay for less risk of failure let alone dying?'” Yes, nobody complains about a “gender gap” in the occupational death/injury department.
I FEEL LIKE BOEING HAS MAYBE GOTTEN SLACK: U.S. Air Force again halts delivery of Boeing aerial tankers.
For the second time in one month, the United States halted delivery of Boeing’s new refuelling air tankers due to “foreign object debris” found in closed compartments of the aircraft, the department’s secretary said. . . .
Later in the day before the House Appropriations Defense subcommittee, Wilson elaborated that the issue was caused by a lack of “manufacturing discipline” on the assembly line.
“If you drop a wrench you have to find a wrench,” she said. “You have to wipe down surfaces so you don’t have pieces of aluminium that over time get in the midst of things and cause serious problems,” Bloomberg reported.
The March 23 halt comes a little over a month since the Air Force first halted deliveries of the aircraft also due to foreign object debris.
Very disturbing, especially in combination with the 737 Max 8 problems. Boeing’s board needs to tell management to get on top of this or be replaced.
OF COURSE SHE DOES. BUT IT’S AN AARON-SHOCK-STYLE ETHICS VIOLATION IN THE MAKING: AOC asks ‘Queer Eye’ star for an office makeover. “The potential for an ethics violation comes in with purchasing furniture or free decorating services. . . . In Schock’s case, the total cost was $35,000 and he has since repaid the amount from personal funds. AOC lives as a reality show star anyway, as lots of Millennials do on social media, so even though the show’s fans would love to see an episode that includes the representative’s office, it looks like that would be a no-no.”
UH OH: Two More Women Accuse Joe Biden of Inappropriate Touching. “This now makes four accusers who have come forward. One of the new women was only 19 years old at the time of the incident.”
Plus: “Biden’s team has started to go on offense, accusing the campaigns of other 2020 Democratic presidential candidates of being behind these women coming forward—particularly the Bernie Sanders campaign.”
Related: Joe Biden is damned by his own ‘harassment’ standard. “According to the standards of culpability that Biden has articulated in similarly conflicted situations, however, it’s an open-and-shut case. Perhaps no major American political figure has so consistently championed the erosion of due process for those accused of sexual misconduct. . . . Biden’s current situation recalls that of former Sen. Al Franken, who bitterly criticized DeVos’ Title IX policies, only to flail about in defending himself against allegations (mostly less serious than what Biden faces) of sexual misconduct. Ideologically boxed in, Franken couldn’t defend himself by challenging his accusers’ veracity, lest he appear to reject the party’s consensus about believing all complainants.”
The #MeToo movement morphed into a moral panic, or actual mass hysteria, with a lot of encouragement from politicians who probably regret that now. But it’s hard to feel too sorry for them.