CONSIDER THIS A WARNING REGARDING ONLINE VOTING: National Bar Exam Leader Defends Online Test Amid Reports Of Tech Failures And Poorly Written Questions.
Archive for 2020
October 13, 2020
WORLD HIT BY PANDEMIC, WELL-OFF WHITE WOMEN HARDEST HIT: The Virus Moved Female Faculty to the Brink. Will Universities Help?
TAL BACHMAN REMEMBERS EDDIE VAN HALEN: Three Weeks in ’86.
I was a seventeen year old nobody. He was the world’s biggest rock star. It was spring 1986. My dad’s band, Bachman-Turner Overdrive (BTO), was opening for Van Halen on their “5150” tour. I was in high school at the time, but as Dad could never see the point of school when there was rock-and-rolling to be done, he called one day to ask if I wanted to ditch school to fly out and hang with him on the Van Halen tour for a few weeks.
It was the easiest question in human history to answer: Yes, I want to ditch school and go on tour with Van Halen. Just thinking about it felt like a dream. I’d spent most of the past few years trying to learn how to play Edward’s guitar parts on “Eruption”, “Spanish Fly”, “Hot for Teacher”, “Ice Cream Man”, “Cathedral” (which I played at the church talent show), and dozens of other pieces. And Van Halen was the biggest band in the world at the time; every 20, 30, 40,000 seat date on the tour was sold out. The new album with Sammy was Number One on the Billboard charts. The three singles off the album were either smashes already or on their way.
Even better, this was the eighties—you know, when the world was still fun. There was light. There was laughter. There was big hair and acid-washed denim, just because, dammit. You could still make jokes without a Twitter mob destroying your life forever. You could try a backyard bike stunt without your friend videoing your subsequent crash on his smartphone, then uploading it on to YouTube for your grandchildren to watch fifty years later. Even with its occasional dips, the Reagan economy boomed along. Girls were still mostly cheerful and cute and sexy; they weren’t the lost, hard, paranoid, alternately self-loathing/self-worshipping communist nihilists they are now. It was clear even then—not just in retrospect—the world was in a pretty fun phase. Hell yeah, I wanted to go.
Read the whole thing.
YOUR TERMS ARE ACCEPTABLE: Fleetwood Mac’s Stevie Nicks says she would choose to ‘live on another planet’ if Trump wins again.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Democrat Proposing To His Girlfriend Says He Won’t Reveal Position On Adultery Until After The Wedding.
TO BE FAIR, CLOTH MASKS AREN’T THERE TO PROTECT YOU, THEY’RE THERE, AT MOST, TO PROTECT OTHERS. THOUGH FRANKLY I THINK ANYTHING LESS THAN A NONWOVEN SURGICAL MASK IS OF ONLY MODEST BENEFIT. New CDC Study Finds Majority of Those Infected with COVID-19 ‘Always’ Wore Masks.
ELECTRIC PICKUP: 2022 GMC Hummer EV: What We Know So Far.
NEWS YOU HOPEFULLY WON’T NEED TO USE: How Packing the Supreme Court Would Endanger Liberty and Erode Our Constitutional Order, Explained.
BLEG–WINDOWS MOVIEMAKER WON’T CONVERT FROM WLMP FORMAT [SOLVED!]: Windows MovieMaker is an old, discontinued, easy to use program to make videos and slideshows. I used it two years ago, it was glitchy, but I was familiar with it, so I used it again to create a montage, mostly pictures with a few short video clips, about 9 minutes long. It made the montage (with some captions and a musical background) just fine, but absolutely refuses to convert the project into a usable format. I’m posting the problem here because I couldn’t find a solution, and an answer would help me and others. I am using Windows 7. I tried loading a new copy of the program. I tried deleting the video clips in case MM was having trouble with the .mov format. I tried saving to .MP4. I tried saving to .WMV. I tried saving to Facebook and Youtube. The program just acts like it’s going to do something, but gets stuck at 0/100%.
I tried downloading converters that claim, falsely, that they accept WLMP format. I tried an online program that did convert the file to .MP4, but not in a way that will actually allow it to play.
At this point, I’ve spent more time trying to resolve this than it would take to create a new montage with a different program. But if anyone has a solution, let me and the rest of the world know in the comments. Thanks.
THE SOLUTION: For whatever reason, MM didn’t like the music files I had added to the montage. Having deleted those files, I was able to save the montage in .MP4, and now I can put the the music back in via another program. UPDATE: I converted my .MP3 files to .WAV, and that solved the problem entirely. So, if you are reading this and have the same problem, first thing to do is to see if you are have any .MP3 files in your video, MM apparently doens’t like them.
TO BE FAIR, IT WAS ALWAYS BULLSHIT: Democrats’ emoluments clause lawsuit against President Trump is dead. “So here we are nearly 3 1/2 years later and despite the best efforts of Rep. Nadler, Sen. Blumenthal, Judge Sullivan and dozens of other elected Democrats, the Supreme Court just let the air out of this balloon once and for all.”
But then, it came from Richard Painter, whose track record is deeply unimpressive.
AT AMAZON, Prime Day Deal, Reusable Cotton Face Mask (Pack of 50).
ANALYSIS: TRUE. The Left Will Find Any Excuse to Compare Amy Coney Barrett to The Handmaid’s Tale.
It isn’t a good novel, and I think the Left would be much happier if they’d read a second, better book. Almost anything, really.
TAKING SIDES: America’s largest police-owned media outlet hit with Twitter ban days after endorsing President Trump.
Related: Twitter Fined for Multiple Campaign Finance Violations. “The irony here is, of course, that Twitter – which has been doing everything it can to crack down on political ‘misinformation’ – is now being dinged for failing to share information about its political advertising operation.”
COLIN KAEPERNICK, ESSAYIST: The Athlete Pens a Series on the Superior Safety of No Prisons or Police.
It’s all about hope and change:
“Despite the steady cascade of anti-Black violence across this country, I am hopeful we can build a future that imagines justice differently. A future without the terror of policing and prisons. … The more that I have learned about the history and evolution of policing in the United States, the more I understand its roots in white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Black Panther Party co-founder Huey P. Newton once said, ‘The police are in our community not to promote our welfare or for our security or our safety, but they are there to contain us, to brutalize us, and murder us.’ … Will you continue to be actively complicit in the perpetuation of these systems, or will you take action to dismantle them for the benefit of a just future? … Another world is possible, a world grounded in love, justice, and accountability, a world grounded in safety and good health, a world grounded in meeting the needs of the people.”
What if a “need of the people” is for murderers to be stopped?
Also, after Newton returned from a visit to Communist China, the Black Panthers developed a serious crush on Communist North Korea:
The article was testament to an unexpected alliance. On one side was the California-based revolutionary socialist movement, declared by FBI director J Edgar Hoover “the greatest threat to the internal security of the country”.
On the other was “hermit kingdom” North Korea, with its ideological tenet of ‘juche’ or self-reliance; a country which then seemed something of a “Stalinist Switzerland”, recalls former Black Panther Kathleen Cleaver, now a law professor at Yale.
The ties between the two are more than a historical curiosity, says Benjamin Young, a contributor to NK News whose Masters research at the State University of New York: the college at Brockport, uncovered surprising details of the relationship.
It is a reminder that North Korea was not always “an economic basket case”, as declared by the Obama administration. At the time it appeared to be an east Asian success story, outperforming the South. The alliance also demonstrates the North’s long term interest in cultivating high profile international visitors and the Panthers’ search for support around the world.
“North Korea at this point was really on a global publicity campaign, even putting adverts in the New York Times and Washington Post promoting juche and peaceful reunification,” says Young.
Passing the juche on the left-hand side requires far more policing than the US has.
ICYMI: New Study Suggests Polls Are Missing Shy Trump Voters. We’ll know soon.
THAT PENNSYLVANIA IS A SWING STATE SPEAKS WELL OF THE ENERGY TRUMP BROUGHT TO THE GOP’S MORIBUND PRESIDENTIAL EFFORTS: ‘Forgotten’ Pennsylvania region holds key to Trump’s fate.
SNUFF ASTROPHYSICS: Witness The Very Last Scream of Light From a Star Devoured by a Black Hole.
POVERTY WON: When government presumes to reshape society, the result is likely to be gory.
Reparations for slavery, you say? Well, we tried that experiment, in the $20-plus trillion spent on welfare, Medicaid, housing, and food stamps for the mostly minority poor since Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty in 1964. As Amity Shlaes shows in her cautionary Great Society: A New History, those trillions only made matters worse. As the clamor swells to compound LBJ’s mistake, Shlaes provides a sobering postmortem, dissecting how and why, when government presumes to reshape society, the result is likely to be gory.
It took LBJ a lifetime to learn that lesson, and he learned it the hard way. He began his government career as an ardent New Dealer, first as a tireless functionary charged with pressing Texas farmers to limit their crops, on Franklin Roosevelt’s cockeyed theory that overproduction caused the Great Depression, and then as one of FDR’s most energetic congressional lieutenants, ramming through New Deal programs—many of doubtful constitutionality. He firmly believed that the New Deal had heroically wielded the power of the federal government to defeat the slump, though as Shlaes showed in her earlier best-selling book, The Forgotten Man (2007), it only prolonged it.
Read the whole thing. My own review of Shlaes’ brilliant look at the slow but massive train crash of the 1960s and ‘70s can be found here.
JOANNE JACOBS: Keeping schools closed risks kids’ futures. “Keeping schools closed risks children’s futures. Schools aren’t spreading Covid, data show. And remote ed isn’t working for most kids.”
THE NEXT PANDEMIC: WE’LL BE READY. I disagree. I believe that the massive failures of the public health apparatus — both in terms of competence, and of credibility — will make the response to the next pandemic worse. Which is unfortunate, because the next pandemic will probably also be worse than this comparatively mild one.