SPACE: Rocket Lab launches 7 satellites to orbit; Rocket Lab has now delivered a total of 104 satellites to Earth orbit. Rocket Lab has basically become SpaceX Lite, which isn’t really all that “lite” at all.
Archive for 2021
March 23, 2021
IN NEW YORK, SCRAPPY LOCAL NEWSPAPER ATTACKS AMERICA’S PAPER OF RECORD: The New York Times Attacks the Babylon Bee Once Again, Probably Now Wishes They Hadn’t.
(Classical allusion in headline.)
NEWS YOU CAN USE: A strong coffee half an hour before exercising increases fat-burning.
OR MAYBE IT’S ALL FOR SHOW: Pelosi’s Attempt Overturn Election of a GOP Congresswoman Meets Resistance from Moderate Dems.
CANCEL CULTURE STRIKES AGAIN: Michael Eignor is Professor of Neurosurgery and Pediatrics at State University of New York, Stony Brook and a Senior Fellow at the Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence.
Joshua Swamidass is a computational biologist who is also the founder of Peaceful Science and an associate professor of laboratory and genomic medicine and biomedical engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
Both smart guys, one assumes. But Eignor argues that Swamidass, who claims to respect Christian colleges “unique character” but wants to hold them to “higher standards,” is actually arguing for a new form of censorship aimed at stamping out all approaches to origins science that is not neo-Darwinian. You decide which one is correct.
HE FOUGHT IN IRAQ AND AFGHANISTAN. NOW HE’S FIGHTING IN VIRGINIA: If you happen to be in Northern Virginia near Fredericksburg and are looking for a place to eat, check out Matt Strickland’s Gourmeltz.
Why? Because a Virginia judge just awarded Strickland a victory against Gov. Ralph “Blackface” Northam’s Covid restrictions. Strickland has refused to require either employees or customers to wear masks or socially distance.
“I’m not afraid of the state. I’m not afraid of the federal government. I spent most of my adult life fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have no problem coming home and fighting here in Virginia,” Faithwire quoted him telling a local tv station.
EXCLUSIVE: Cigna Responds to Claims That It Excludes White Men in the Hiring Process. “When PJ Media asked the spokesperson to clarify the statement with an explicit denial, the spokesperson did not respond.”
WELL, DEMOCRATS HATE IT: Is There Anything Actually Wrong With “Christian Nationalism”?
ROGER SIMON: Biden’s Border Policy: Virtue Signaling for Dummies.
TIME OUT: Let’s be real and put that euphemistic desecration of the English language “undocumented workers” to rest. The people crossing the border are illegal aliens, no quotes.
Any country that allows both legal and illegal immigration is creating chaos, authorizing and encouraging crime, and really major crime at that.
We have just learned from Tucson Border Patrol Chief Roy Villareal, retired this December after thirty years on the force, that “criminal organizations trafficking women, children, families and single adults over the U.S.-Mexico border earned as much as $14 million a day.” [bold mine]
Think about the people involved with that, the human suffering it entails, not to mention the 15,000 children, if that’s even the correct number, evidently enticed by the administration and wearing Biden t-shirts, being housed in cages until they can find a Motel 6 or similar to put them in. Besides the massive disorganization this indicates on the part of the administration, imagine the futures these kids will have. Dickens already wrote it.
So what is the administration doing about all this? We don’t know because they won’t allow the media to see, not even their complaisant mainstream pals. (I thought Biden promised the most transparent administration ever. Oh well…)
Instead, in the grand tradition of Susan “Benghazi” Rice, they sent out Department of Homeland Security Chief Alejandro Mayorkas to lie about the situation on the Sunday shows, reassuring us the border is “closed” and whatever problems exist are, needless to say, Trump’s fault.
But it’s not just the border. All Biden policies can be reduced to a form of virtue signaling.
But invariably with painful real-world outcomes: Photos Leaked by Texas Dem Reveal Inside of Overcrowded, Makeshift Border Patrol Facility.
MAKING MARTYRS: Once Again, Colorado Baker Jack Phillips Is on Trial for Being Christian. “If the name Autumn Scardina sounds familiar, that’s because this person has been hounding Jack Phillips for years. The same day that the Supreme Court decided to hear Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission in 2017, Scardina called to request that cake. He’s a target.”
Plus: “Did you notice that Scardina isn’t hounding a Muslim bakery? I don’t know how many people have gone to Muslim-owned bakeries and asked for gay wedding cakes and gender transition cakes and whatnot, but it never makes national news. It’s almost as if only certain religions are considered easy prey.”
Muslims have martyrs too, but it’s . . . different.
#RESIST: Seen in Glen Rose, Texas yesterday. Note CCP flag:
A BARGAIN AT TWICE THE PRICE: How CEOs Can Effectively Bounce Their Woke Staffers: If All Else Fails, Pay Them to Leave.
I KIND OF WANT ONE: Preview: Hatsan Blitz Air Rifle.
CHARLES LIPSON: Baghdad Bob at the Southern Border. “If the problem at press briefings is deceit, the problem at the southern border is far worse. The hard truth is that there isn’t just one crisis, there are three — all intertwined and mutually reinforcing. One is the humanitarian disaster on the border and in Mexico, where migrants pay criminal gangs to lead them north from Central America. En route, they are exploited, some horrendously: raped, robbed, starved, left to die in the desert, or drowned trying to swim across the Rio Grande. The carnage is horrific.”
It’s a crisis by design.
MICHAEL WALSH: Are the Courts Moving to Require a More Responsible Press?
In short, the dam may be breaking. James O’Keefe’s gadfly Project Veritas won a small but significant victory against the Times the other day when a New York State Supreme Court judge ruled against a Times motion to dismiss a defamation suit against a report that called a Veritas video of possible election chicanery in Rep. Ilhan Omar’s congressional district in Minnesota “deceptive… with no verifiable evidence… probably part of a coordinated disinformation effort” and attempted to link the video to the Trump campaign, of course.
“Stating that the video is ‘deceptive’ and stating ‘without verifiable evidence’ in a factual way in a news article certainly presents the statement as fact, not opinion,” wrote Justice Charles Wood. He said the Times may have been motivated by “actual malice” and had acted with “reckless disregard.”
Good for him. Freedom of the press is a wonderful thing—especially now, when the “progressive” left has all but called for its abolition of the first amendment in its quest for a one-party socialist state.
For more than half a century, the mainstream media has abused its powers under the protective shield of the Sullivan decision. At this point, however, with the national media now weaponized against traditional American law and values, the ruling is no longer a shield, but a sword.
Read the whole thing.
SCHADENFREUDE: SHE’S THE ONE WHO THREW JOSH BLACKMAN UNDER THE BUS WHEN STUDENTS MOBBED A SPEECH OF HIS AT CUNY. CUNY Law School Dean Resigns After Referring To Herself As A ‘Slaveholder’ At Faculty Meeting; She Pleads With University To Immediately Appoint An Interim Dean.
COVID ONE YEAR AGO: Boris Johnson announces strict lockdown across country — as it happened.
Flashback: What Neil Ferguson’s booty call tells us about modern politics. “It is actually incredibly important news that Ferguson, the Imperial College modeller who said it was possible 500,000 Brits would die if we didn’t lock down, defied the lockdown. It deserves the frontpage treatment it is getting today. For Ferguson’s booty call with his married lover actually reveals a great deal about the 21st-century elites and how they view their relationship with the masses. It’s one rule for them and another for us.”
QED: Dr. Fauci Admits He Has Treated The American People Like Children.
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: U. San Diego Law Prof. Thomas Smith Harshly Criticized Chinese Gov’t, Now Faces False Claims Of Ethnic Bias (Update).
PERVERSE INCENTIVES: Insurance Companies, Reaping Benefits from Protests, Get in Line with Black Lives Matter. “The country’s largest insurance companies stand to benefit from the chaos they’re praising.”
For the past four presidential administrations, I have accompanied U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents and photographed their encounters with migrants as they enforced immigration policy. No longer. Last week, when I documented migrant detentions in El Paso, I had to do so from the Mexican side of the border, taking long-range shots. Until now, journalists haven’t had to stand in another country to cover what is happening in the United States.
Most asylum seekers cross the Rio Grande into South Texas on land controlled by federal agents. For decades, the U.S. government has let journalists accompany Border Patrol agents and other officials as they surveil the land. But since the change in administration, those agents have been physically blocking journalists from the riverbank. For example, after being turned down for official access on a trip in February, I followed a Border Patrol transport bus in my own vehicle to where agents were detaining migrants. They stopped me before I got close enough to take pictures. They called a supervisor, and ordered me to leave immediately.
We have gone from the Trump-era “zero tolerance” policy toward immigrants to a Biden-era “zero access” policy for journalists covering immigration. This development is unprecedented in modern history.
The Biden administration understands that the vast majority of their operatives with bylines will happily play along, and as a result, this crisis will fairly quickly be dispatched to the memory hole, once a new, Biden-created disaster comes along to take it off the front page.
And here we go! Boulder mass-murder suspect identified as White House signals gun-control response.
Do Biden’s handlers know how Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress in 1994? “Democrats passed an assault-weapons ban in September 1994. Even Bill Clinton credited that decision as one of the chief reasons the GOP took back the House two months later.”