THE DEEP ONES ARE UP TO SOMETHING: Gigantic mystery ‘skeleton’ found washed up on beach by Storm Ciara baffling locals.
Archive for 2020
February 12, 2020
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Is Liberal Media Finally Fed Up with Woke Hollywood?
What changed?
Hollywood hypocrisy got so big, so brazen, that you can’t help notice it. Alternative media voices, along with conservative podcasts, web sites and social media accounts, grew robust enough to pierce the mainstream.
The stars themselves, with their shocking lack of self awareness, made matters worse.
Toto concludes with a tweet from Jane Fonda, who’s busy posing at being arrested every week “to save the planet,” while tweeting this:
Well, it’s ethically harvested comedy gold, to say the least.
SUPER GAFFE-O-MATIC ’76! “‘It is important that Iowa and Nevada have spoken,’ Joe Biden says, presumably meaning New Hampshire as Nevada hasn’t yet spoken.”
And file under Annals of Leftist Autophagy: “Joe Biden’s Campaign Was a Disaster for Liberalism and the Democratic Party.” Jonathan Chait of New York magazine absolutely tears into Biden, before concluding that his “campaigns in 1988 and 2008 ended in disaster for Biden. His 2020 campaign is going to end in a disaster for the whole party.”
UP NEXT: A TAX ON THINGY. Connecticut Democrats Want to Tax Insulin… Oh, Wait. It’s a Fee, Not a Tax. Or Something.
THEY SHOULD HAVE BEEN THERE FOR THE LAST 50 YEARS: NASA commits to returning astronauts to the moon by 2024.
A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK COMMENTS: “We lack verb tenses to describe waiting to see if something is going to have happened a thousand years ago.” Betelgeuse might explode soon and next few weeks are critical.
I’D MISSED THIS NEWS: The Lion Sleeps Tonight. “Bummed to hear of the passing of the founder of Ladysmith Black Mombazo. Here’s them teaming up with an all-girl acapella group for a great version of The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”
Like most Americans, I’d never heard (or heard of) Ladysmith Black Mombazo until Paul Simon brought them to fame here on Graceland. But I did get to see them live (at the Fox Theater in St. Louis, IIRC) and on video as part of Simon’s excellent “Graceland: The African Concert.” They always put on a great show, and Joseph Shabalala will be missed.
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: CNN goes full conspiracist on Twitter user who posted viral Bloomberg audio.
[Cristina] Alesci, who, by the way, is an alumna of the Bloomberg News empire, added, “We don’t know how he got the sound to begin with.”
It is right there on YouTube! It has been there for five years! Google the damn thing! Also, what do Dixon’s alleged political affiliations have to do with anything? Surely Alesci is not suggesting that this could be a non-story because, well, a Bernie Bro tweeted about it.
“A lot of questions are being asked especially on the timing of this,” the CNN reporter said, “so, the timing here and the mission here all calling into question.”
Alesci then added for good measure that President Trump had already “seized on” Bloomberg’s remarks.
None of this is relevant. None of this has anything to do with the actual news story at hand, which is that a top-polling Democratic candidate is on record endorsing racist, anti-Second Amendment, big-government policies.
The audio, by the way, is pretty bad.
“Arendt had it right,” the late Sen. Pat Moynihan once told an interviewer. “She said one of the great advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.”
HARD TO KILL: U.S. Air Force Stealth F-22s and F-35s Battled F-16s in Mock Combat.
This part deserves breaking out:
The F-35 and F-22 could face an even more advanced threat in future war games, if the Air Force can convince Congress to let it proceed with plans to convert early-model F-35s into aggressor planes.
The Air Force in May 2019 announced it would re-establish a defunct F-15 aggressor squadron to operate the roleplaying F-35s. The service in 2014 shuttered the 65th Aggressor Squadron as a cost-saving measure.
The 65th Aggressor Squadron in its new form would operate nine early-model F-35A stealth fighters that the Air Force considers unsuitable for combat. The “red air” F-35s would help the Air Force to copy the tactics of Russian and Chinese squadrons respectively flying Su-57 and J-20 stealth fighters.
Smart. Except Congress has explicitly forbidden the Air Force from transferring any F-35s to the aggressor role (for a least this year), which seems like a dumb place to all parsimonious all of a sudden.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Elizabeth Warren Tells How a Broke College Student Donates $3 to Keep Her Failing Campaign Alive. “You’re a millionaire, why the hell are you taking $3 from someone who only has $6? What kind of monster are you?”
MINNESOTA IS CONSIDERING A CONSTITUTIONAL AMENDMENT GUARANTEEING EVERYONE A “QUALITY EDUCATION”: But there’s a boatload of misunderstanding about what gets called “education inequity” these days. Minnesota probably needs to work on understanding the facts a bit better before it goes off and amends its constitution.
THE POLITICS OF DANCING: “The vast majority of people worldwide, as well as millions in the UK, do not have their needs met – let alone live lives of luxury from which air travel and weekly shopping sprees could be painlessly stripped out and replaced for example with dance lessons.”
To fight global warming of course. David Thompson reads the London Grauniad, so you don’t have to.
Another British leftist proposes a far more radical solution, to which PJM alumnus Michael Walsh punches back hard: Want to Stop Climate Change? Kill Yourself! “So the next time you’re tempted to swallow the myth of ‘man-made climate change’ that’s going to kill us all, remember that the queer-theory atheist feminist vegans want you dead anyway, so why bother to indulge their lunacy? Them first — the rest of us are happy to take our chances, just as mankind has been doing for thousands of years and will continue to do so for thousands more.”
CHANGE: Senate Republicans confirm Trump’s 51st federal appeals court judge.
Quoth Mitch McConnell: “My motto for the year is ‘leave no vacancy behind.'”
THIS WOULD SEEM TO INDICATE ENTHUSIASM AMONG TRUMP’S BASE:
WHY IS THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXISM AND THIN SKINS? Obama White House was full of slighted women.
YES: Comparing the coronavirus to the flu is stupid.
In contrast to Ebola, which was discovered decades ago, the coronavirus strain behind the outbreak that began in China is brand-new to scientists. So far this pathogen has claimed 638 lives, and we simply don’t know how it will behave in weeks and months to come. By telling people not to worry—or that we should worry “more” about the flu—we may end up eroding public trust in the media. What happens if this coronavirus proves much worse than we expected? The Chinese government is already under scrutiny for downplaying the risks. Why would US news outlets want to repeat the error?
Even taken on their own terms, the flu comparisons rely on wonky and myopic math. Flu can kill Amercans by the tens of thousands, but that’s because it’s been around so long and has had so much time to spread. Millions get the virus every year, and fewer than 0.1 percent of them perish from it. What’s the rate of death from the new coronavirus? No one can say for certain, but estimates have hovered at around 20 times the rate for influenza, or 2 percent. Some virologists assert this is an overestimate, because milder cases might be getting overlooked; others counter that, given lack of access to diagnostic testing, many deaths may be uncounted. In short, it’s too soon to say. It’s also unclear how efficiently this coronavirus spreads from person to person. The total number of confirmed cases has grown from 282 on January 21 to 31,211 on February 7. It’s possible the spread will slow. Or else it might accelerate. In light of this uncertainty, perhaps we shouldn’t be so quick to counsel everyone to “get a grippe” on their concerns.
The difference is, we know the general scope of seasonal flu. An epidemic of a new disease is different because we don’t know what the limit is. If you want to bet, based on history, that even a scary new disease will probably fizzle out, you have an excellent chance of being right. But history also shows that not all such outbreaks fizzle out, and that some of them are catastrophic. You’re not wrong to worry about that, either.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: We Are Wall-E – California Gov. Newsom Wants To Halt School Physical Education Tests.
(Via Maggie’s Farm, which has a cornucopia of links for your reading pleasure.)
NOT IMPRESSED WITH THE HILL STAFF OR BERNIE POSTS? Then how about a good old-fashioned debate on whether final causality in Quantum Mechanics points to the need for God to give the universe its purpose?