DID THE EARTH MARS MOVE FOR YOU, BABY? First Direct Evidence of Marsquakes Was Just Revealed Amongst New InSight Discoveries.
Archive for 2020
February 25, 2020
AT AMAZON, canned Boston Brown Bread. Also with raisins.
GROOVY AVOCADO GREEN ‘TIME CAPSULE’ HOME LEFT UNTOUCHED FOR 45 YEARS.
It’s James Lileks’ Interior Desecrations book come to life!
EVERY BABOON DIES. NOT EVERY BABOON REALLY LIVES: Baboon escapes vasectomy op at testing lab and flees with two female monkeys.
IT WOULD CERTAINLY SPOIL ME: Driving a McLaren F1 GTR and a Senna on the same day will make you lose your mind.
PUNCH BACK TWICE AS HARD: Trump Destroys CNN and Jim Acosta After Stupid Question About Russian Interference.
WHY ARE LEFTIST-DOMINATED INDUSTRIES SUCH CESSPITS OF ABUSE? FBI, NYPD raid fashion mogul Peter Nygard’s Times Square office in sex-trafficking probe.
NOT A QUESTION OF IF, BUT WHEN: Americans should prepare for coronavirus crisis in U.S., CDC says. “It’s not so much a question of if this will happen any more, but rather more a question of exactly when this will happen and how many people in this country will have severe illness.”
NEW YORK TIMES PUBLISHES GUEST EDITORIAL BY EMPEROR PALPATINE.
It’s from the Babylon Bee, America’s Paper of Record, but I don’t know if they thought this one through: Why would the Times publish something written by the good guys?
I’M NOT WORRIED ABOUT THE MACHINE THAT PASSES THE TURING TEST, I’M WORRIED ABOUT THE MACHINE SMART ENOUGH TO PRETEND TO FAIL IT: AI Deception: When Your Artificial Intelligence Learns to Lie.
I COULD MAYBE HOLD A PLANK FOR EIGHT MINUTES, BUT EIGHT HOURS? 62-Year-Old George Hood Broke The World Record For Holding A Plank. It gets boring after thirty seconds.
THE ROAD TO HELL: How Barack Obama’s Good ‘Intentions’ Destroyed Libya.
Humanitarian crusaders trot out a variety of excuses to evade responsibility when their military interventions go awry. One frequent excuse is that a failure is because the U.S. and Western commitment to the mission was either inconsistent or insufficiently robust. Another popular explanation for disappointing results is that the effort would have succeeded if not for malign foreign interference. That rationale has become a favorite for the architects of the Syria debacle, who contend that Russia’s intervention beginning in 2015 saved Bashar al-Assad’s beleaguered, evil regime. One striking feature is the absence of diminished confidence that a more determined U.S.-led effort can succeed or that Washington has a moral and strategic obligation to make the attempt, even when the previous meddlesome policy has imploded.
When those excuses are not available, defenders of a failed humanitarian crusade insist that their intentions were good, and that they should be judged according to that standard. The good intentions dodge is perhaps the most maddening. Barack Obama seemed to recognize the inherent deficiency when he first met Samantha Power, an advocate of the “responsibility to protect” (R2P) doctrine, and a passionate proponent of U.S. involvement in multilateral military interventions for humanitarian goals. Obama reportedly praised Power’s book on the Rwanda genocide, but then he observed that it “seemed like malpractice to judge one’s prospects by one’s intentions, rather than making a strenuous effort to anticipate and weigh potential consequences.”
Obama was right, but he didn’t heed his own insights. Not only did he choose Power for a series of high-level policy posts when he became president, culminating in her appointment as ambassador to the United Nations, but he launched several disruptive, catastrophic interventions, most notably in Libya and Syria. The unintended negative results of those crusades continue to reverberate nearly a decade after the initial U.S. actions.
Read the whole thing.
Related (From Ed): Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak, The ‘Pharaoh’ Toppled By The Arab Spring, Dies At 91.
Curiously, CTL-F “Obama” in Reuters’ obit above brings up zero results. But as John Schindler wrote in 2016, “When his regime was collapsing in 2011, Hosni Mubarak, who had led Egypt for three decades as a loyal ally of America, was coldly abandoned by the White House. President Obama, against the advice of his own national security experts, cut Mubarak loose to the mob, refusing to take his panicked phone calls pleading for help.”
ANNALS OF LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: “I’m sorry, what?” Bloomberg adviser hints at mother of all oppo-research drops on Bernie: “Bernie has all of this loopy stuff in his background, saying things like women get cancer from having too many orgasms or toddlers should run around naked and touch each other’s genitals to insulate themselves from porn.”
“That’s not even the most shocking part of this story,” Ed Morrissey adds. “The fact that [CNN’s Alisyn Camerota] got blindsided by this when it’s been in plain sight since 1969 is a massive indictment of the mainstream media, which has covered Sanders for decades without ever bothering to do any kind of actual research on his politics or ideology. This is the same media that made Mitt Romney’s high-school hazing antics a national headline story in 2012, let’s not forget.”
“AGAINST THE WALL, KULAK”?: Bernie Sanders Gives the Worst Possible Answer When Asked About How Much His Agenda Will Cost.
THIS WILL END WELL: Key California reservoir to be drained due to earthquake risk.
Anderson Reservoir is owned by the Santa Clara Valley Water District, a government agency based in San Jose. When full, it holds 89,278 acre feet of water — more than all other nine dams operated by the Santa Clara Valley Water District combined.
In a statement Monday, Norma Camacho, the water district’s CEO said the impacts of draining the largest reservoir in Santa Clara County will be significant.
“With these new requirements, we expect to see an impact to groundwater basins that are replenished with water released from Anderson Reservoir, including South County and southern San Jose,” Camacho said. “Staff is already exploring other sources of water that will have to come from outside of the county. While residents have done an excellent job of conserving water since 2013, another drought during this time frame could require everyone to significantly decrease their water use.”
Camacho also said that draining the reservoir starting in seven months is likely to kill wildlife downstream in Coyote Creek, including endangered steel head trout, amphibians and reptiles. Coyote Creek flows from the dam through downtown San Jose to San Francisco Bay.
Complicating the issue, California may be heading into a new drought. On Monday, amid a dry winter, Anderson Reservoir was just 29% full. Nevertheless, the 26,133 acre feet of water stored there is an important part of the South Bay’s water supply — holding enough water for the annual needs of at least 130,000 people, and what the district considers an emergency supply.
Flashback: Overpopulation, Not Climate Change, Caused California’s Water Crisis.
Though not so much overpopulation, as fallout from the Malthusian enviro-freakouts of the 1970s and the concomitant “regulatory explosion.” Then-Gov. Jerry Brown, dealing with California’s water crisis in the mid-2010s, had to deal with the mid-1970s efforts of then-Gov. Jerry Brown to deliberately hamstring future generations of Californians. Or as Victor Davis Hanson wrote in 2015, “Brown and other Democratic leaders will never concede that their own opposition in the 1970s (when California had about half its present population) to the completion of state and federal water projects, along with their more recent allowance of massive water diversions for fish and river enhancement, left no margin for error in a state now home to 40 million people.”
THE RETURN OF THE ANGLOSPHERE: The possibilities of a US-Indo alliance are YUGE.