Archive for 2019
April 16, 2019
MAX EDEN: “Racial Resentment As Pedagogy.”
OF COURSE SHE DOES: “Woman Who Assaulted Kellyanne Conway Skates.”
DAVID FORSMARK: Lori Loughlin Merely Took Advantage of a Government-Incentivized Title IX Scam: Women’s Rowing. “Women rowing is the perfect place to pad women’s scholarship numbers to satisfy Title IX demands.”
REPORTS FROM AIRSTRIP ONE: Police detectors to warn mobile phone-using drivers.
The Thames Valley and Hampshire forces are rolling out the technology to show when motorists are using their phones.
A sign will flash at the driver telling them to stop using their mobile – but the detectors cannot tell if it is a driver or passenger using the phone.
Flashing signs to distract drivers who might not be the ones using their phones? What could go wrong?
WEIRD HOW MANY MORE BREAKTHROUGHS COME FROM ISRAEL THAN FROM THE NATIONS SURROUNDING IT: Israeli scientists 3D-print heart with human tissue in world first.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Even little more exercise can extend lifespan: study.
HMM: Secret tapes linger over Buttigieg’s meteoric rise.
An Indiana judge will rule soon on whether to release five cassette tapes of secretly recorded conversations between South Bend police officers that led to the 2012 demotion of Police Chief Darryl Boykins, the city’s first ever black police chief.
The South Bend City Council subpoenaed Buttigieg to win release of the tapes, which were at the center of a police department shake-up and a series of lawsuits.
Buttigieg’s critics say he’s gone to great lengths to conceal the contents of the tapes, which some believe could include racist language by white police officers.
There is roiling anger in South Bend over the allegations of racism. Black leaders in the city say that if there is evidence of racism, it could call into question scores of convictions that stemmed from white police officers investigating black suspects in a city that is 25 percent black.
There’s no telling yet if there’s any there there, but Buttigieg’s “meteoric rise” has so far been a media frenzy having very little to do with actual polling. His recent “bust out” in Iowa has him with single digits in a distant third place.
THIS ISN’T GOOD: U.S. measles outbreak grows to highest level in 25 years.
AS MY GRANDMOTHER USED TO SAY, THERE’S NO SAFETY THIS SIDE OF THE GRAVE: A 23-Year-Old Woman Was Partially Paralyzed After Cracking Her Neck The Wrong Way. “Doctors eventually discovered that she had burst her vertebral artery, a major artery in her neck. That rupture caused a blood clot to form in her brain, which then triggered a stroke.”
THAT’S… ENTERTAINMENT? ‘Late Night with Seth Meyers’ to run long Thursday for deep dive into Mueller report.
BACK AND TO THE LEFT. BACK AND TO THE LEFT: Victor Davis Hanson on The Progressive Revolution: From Democratic to Liberal to Progressive to Socialist.
Read the whole thing.
AT AMAZON, Spring Deals on Cookware.
OUT TODAY: Julie Albright’s Left to Their Own Devices: How Digital Natives Are Reshaping the American Dream. I wrote a blurb for it, which you can see at the link.
WRITING: Why Robert Caro Keeps His Typewriter. I interviewed Neal Stephenson years ago about The Baroque Cycle, and he said he wrote it with pen and ink to feel more in sync with the period. He also said he went to the British Museum and read Isaac Newton’s original manuscripts and they were still legible centuries later, while his study was full of old floppy disks that he could no longer read.
BLUE CITY BLUES: Mapping San Francisco’s Human Waste Challenge – 132,562 Cases Reported In The Public Way Since 2008.
San Francisco hosts an estimated homeless population of 7,500 people. Affluent sections of the city have become dangerous with open-air drug use, tens of thousands of discarded needles, and, sadly, human feces.
Since 2011, there have been at least 118,352 reported instances of human fecal matter on city streets.
New mayor, London Breed, won election by promising to clean things up. However, conditions are the same or worse. Last year, the number of reports spiked to an all-time high at 28,084. In first quarter 2019, the pace continued with 6,676 instances of human waste in the public way.
The last Republican mayor of San Francisco, George Christopher, left office in 1968.
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Go to a Cheap College — or None at All.
SCIENCE MARCHES ON: A Former Green Beret Rethinks the Standard-Issue Tourniquet: The story of U.S. Patent Number 9,168,044. The former Green Beret is Jeff Kirkham, InstaPundit reader, brother of sports car builder David Kirkham, and one of the founders of Black Rifle Coffee.
THINGS MAY GET A WHOLE LOT WORSE BEFORE SUDDENLY FALLING APART: Blackouts threaten death blow to Venezuela’s industrial survivors.
The government said on April 4 that the power rationing plan meant Valencia would spend at most three hours a day without electricity.
But a dozen executives and workers there said outages were still lasting over 10 hours. Generators are costly and can only power a fraction of a business’s operations, they said, and many factories have shut down.
“The game is over. Companies are entering a state of despair due to their inviability,” said an executive of a food company with factories in Valencia, speaking on condition of anonymity.
Industrial companies this year are operating below 25 percent of capacity, according to industry group Conindustria. It estimated companies here lost about $220 million during the days in March without power, and would lose $100 million more in April.
Nestle’s factory, which produces baby food, halted production during the first blackout in early March and operations again froze two weeks later, with employees sent home until May, according to Rafael Garcia, a union leader at the plant.
Plus: “The outages have idled more than just factories. In the countryside, lack of power has prevented farmers from pumping water to irrigate fields.”
AS THEY SHOULD BE: Jewish voters are furious at Dems’ defense of Ilhan Omar.
#NotAllMedia: “WHAT THE PRESIDENT GETS WRONG ABOUT THE PRESS.” My latest column in The Daily Caller…
“Enemy” is a strong word, and when it comes from the bully pulpit of the White House, I suspect it’s taken a little too far in these polarized times. Nonetheless, the damage to public trust in journalism — which is its lifeblood — should be laid at the feet of the political pundit class.”
Guest appearance by Andrew Klavan, who makes unsurprisingly sharp and accurate points.