GOOD: US scientists close to producing super-wheat resistant to deadly-rust variants.
We should be working on cold-resistant and short-growing-season strains, too.
Archive for 2021
June 16, 2021
IT’S GOOD TO BE THE NOMENKLATURA: Biden Hosting Huge July 4th Party After Telling States, Citizens Not to Hold Large Gatherings.
THE ROMANS’ CONTAINED POWDERED LEAD: Study: Many cosmetics contain unlisted, toxic ‘forever chemicals.’
[Harrison] Ford is 78 years old, so naturally his age is showing. He’s hardly the same man he was when Indiana Jones was first introduced to the public in 1981’s “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Of course, nobody is expecting him to be the young and vigorous Indiana Jones, but seeing a worn-out man wearing a regulatory pandemic mask fits all too poetically into our current age of malaise and lack of creativity.
Growing up in Bosnia (former Yugoslavia) and being completely obsessed with American culture and movies, I loved watching the adventures of Indiana Jones. Those repeated musical notes indicating Indy’s triumph over the bad guys (Nazis, to be precise), his leather jacket, fedora, and whip, his insistence that all the artifacts that he seeks “belong in a museum!”—all of these were part of my excitement as a young girl seeing the signs of American optimism. I still watch the movies and I still love them, despite the fact that now I can notice filming inconsistencies. None of it matters because the original trilogy captures the American spirit that destroys the bad guys.
Whether the latest “Indiana Jones” film will be good or not is beside the point. What’s interesting is that our artistic elite is not creating new forms of film, or any other art form for that matter, to capture that spirit. By no means am I denying the past, which we should always be aware of, but at some point, films like these become yet another journey into nostalgia and presumably (and mostly!) the search for more money.
The late Gene Siskel once wrote that for him, the test of a whether or not a movie was any good was, “Is this film more interesting than a documentary of the same actors having lunch?” Unlike 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, hopefully the upcoming Raiders of the Lost Ark sequel will at least clear that low bar.
BREAKING UP IS EASY TO DO: Atlanta May Be Headed for a Final Divorce as Communities Nationwide Seek to Redraw the Lines. “Buckhead, a portion of Atlanta, Georgia, is looking to break free from the rest of a city in rapid decline. After decades of increased safety that started ahead of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, it took one woman and a single summer to ruin it. Not even New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio can beat Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ time for running a city into the ground. It took de Blasio two terms. Bottoms has been so spectacular she’s announced she won’t even run for a second one.”
WHEN I WAS A TEENAGER THEY GAVE ME DARVON AND WYGESIC, NEITHER OF WHICH DID A LOT: Study finds wide range of effective migraine treatments, but not opioids. I don’t get migraines nearly as often any more (in my teens I got two or three a week), but when I do a big slug of ibuprofen seems to work better than any fancy migraine medicines.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR DAILY INSANITY WRAP: California’s $100 Million Bailout for… POT SELLERS? Yes, Pot Sellers.
Plus:
- Geopolitical manspreading
- Face masks are even grosser and more dangerous than you thought
- Biden orders airlift of families of illegals into the US
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
TATER, MASHED: CNN’s Brian Stelter draws smallest audience of 2021 as Reliable Sources gets crushed by MediaBuzz. “Fox News’ ‘MediaBuzz,’ which is Stelter’s direct timeslot competition, averaged 1.1 million viewers to beat the struggling CNN show by a whopping 41 percent. Fox News aired 12 different programs on Sunday alone that attracted a larger audience than ‘Reliable Sources.’”
AT GOVERNOR ABBOTT’S INVITATION: Trump to Visit Southern Border to ‘Shine a Spotlight’ on Biden’s ‘Crimes Against Our Nation.’
POINTS AND FIGURES: Pins And Needles For Fed Meeting. “Unfortunately, policymakers didn’t think out of the box on Covid. They didn’t follow data, and were imprisoned by bureaucracy and old ideas. They were unable to critically think in a hyper-politicized environment.”
HMM: CDC: Few Pregnant Women Received COVID Shot. Well, most pregnant women are in a low-risk demographic.
WHAT THE DEMOCRATS INTEND FOR MIDDLE AMERICA UNDER THE “GREEN NEW DEAL:” Joel Kotkin: The Killing of Kern County.
YOU MIGHT NOT BE INTERESTED IN THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG BUT THE GLEICHSCHALTUNG IS INTERESTED IN YOU: U of Oklahoma volleyball player shut out of program due to rejection of ‘social justice.’
GRANNY-KILLER CUOMO: Report Confirms: Yes, Gov. Cuomo Killed the Elderly.
HYPERSONIC MISSILE CASUALTY: The Navy’s Railgun Is Finally Dead.
The U.S. Navy’s push to create a $500 million electromagnetic railgun weapon—capable of slinging projectiles at hypersonic speeds—appears to have come to an end. The service is ending funding for the railgun without having sent a single weapon to sea, while pushing technology derived from the program into existing weapons.
The weapon is a victim of a change in the Navy’s direction toward faster, longer-range weapons that are capable of striking ships and land targets in a major war.
Just because it’s very cool technology doesn’t mean it was the right technology. Still, I’d love to see some other application for it.
MANDATORY INDOCTRINATION: Top-ranked law school to mandate critical race theory course for graduation.
CANCEL CULTURE IS ALL IN YOUR MIND: A Young Composer Condemned Arson and Then the Mob Came for Him. Hard.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Archives Reveal Wuhan Lab ‘Captured Bats From The Wild’ For Lab Experiments, Filed Patents For Bat Cages Despite Denials.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: The Chrissy Teigen Cancel Choir Is Singing a Beautiful Tune. “Teigen is one of those people who is famous for being famous more than anything else. She married a famous guy, but there’s not much on the résumé beyond that.”
THE WRONG SORT OF VIOLENCE: What’s Really Behind the Reported Spike in Anti-Asian Hate Crimes? We’re told it’s “white supremacy” and Trump’s — correct — blaming of China for the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. (See, e.g., Jon Stewart.) But in fact:
Take, for example, the vicious murder of 84 year-old Thai retiree Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco this January. In the New York Times, it was portrayed as a kind of culmination of anti-Asian hate, with the Times putting the tragedy in the context of “President Donald J. Trump repeatedly referring to the coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus.’” which it touted as being linked to crimes such as that which was committed against Ratanapakdee.
And yet, the facts do not at all conform to this narrative. The perpetrator, 19-year-old Antoine Watson, was vandalizing a car when Ratanpakdee spotted him and began walking in the opposite direction. That caused Watson — who allegedly yelled, “Why ya looking at me?” before barreling into Ratanapakdee — to knock the elderly man over, resulting in the brain hemorrhage that would kill him. The motivation seems to have had nothing to do with race, then, as Watson comes from a biracial family that includes Asians, and Ratanapakdee’s race was likely indiscernible thanks to his being covered up head-to-toe for the winter weather.
His death was likely the product not of racial animus stoked for political reasons, but of minor criminality turned major in a moment of panic and uncontrolled rage; Watson had been cited by police already on the day of the attack for reckless driving after a dispute with his family.
San Francisco saw another attack on an Asian-American resident when a female police officer approached 33 year-old homeless man Gerardo Contreras and asked him to comply with a pat-down on Memorial Day. Suddenly in the middle of the interaction, Contreras attacked the officer, overpowering and choking her before the intervention of bystanders and other officers prevented the worst. Contreras’s history of mental-health struggles and prior arrests strongly suggest that it was circumstance, not the recently revived lab-leak theory that motivated the attack.
In fact, homelessness and recidivism have both proven to be recurring themes in many of these assaults. That same day on the opposite coast, 48- year-old Alexander Wright walked up to and punched an Asian woman in New York City’s Chinatown. Wright was living on the streets and had already accumulated 40 prior arrests at the time of the attack, including a number of them for violent crimes like assault. Video of his arrest shows Wright shouting “he hit me!,” and synthetic marijuana was found on his person.
Other attacks show similar fact patterns. Earlier that month, 37-year-old homeless woman Ebony Jackson wielded a hammer against two Asian women after they refused to shed their face coverings on the sidewalk in New York at Jackson’s request. No evidence has yet emerged that the troubled attacker was motivated by race, much less the lab-leak theory. Similarly, in San Francisco, Patrick Thompson, a 54-year-old man with mental-health issues arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in 2017, approached and stabbed two elderly Asian women from behind in February.
Another February stabbing of an Asian victim, this one by 19-year-old Salman Muflihi was ruled not to have been motivated by anti-Asian bias. Muflihi, who had previously been arrested for assaulting his own brother, ran up to a nearby security guard after committing the act, telling him, “I just stabbed someone” before asking, “Where are the police at?”
That’s okay, the press reports will tell you what you’re supposed to think.
Plus: “These attacks are a part of a larger breakdown in the social order. The de facto decriminalization of offenses such as shoplifting in California, along with the demonization of law-enforcement agencies, combines to embolden criminals, giving them a false sense of invincibility. The aforementioned Patrick Thompson? He was released into the general public after his arrest and failed to show up for his original arraignment date.”
How about that?
GOOD: Federal judge blocks Biden’s ban on leases for drilling on public lands.
But it will frustrate the Democrats’ goal of higher gas prices at least a bit. Now if we could just undo the Keystone Pipeline decision.