BIDEN STANDS UP FOR CHINA: Microsoft says it was hit by Chinese hackers, but Biden administration won’t point finger.
Who could have seen this coming?
Archive for 2021
May 23, 2021
MARVIN GAYE’S WHAT’S GOING ON TURNS 50 — SECRETS BEHIND THE HIT ALBUM:
Marvin Gaye famously sang that “war is not the answer” in his signature protest song “What’s Going On.”
But for the late Motown legend, football was the answer to help lift him out of a deep depression after the 1970 death of Tammi Terrell — his frequent duet partner on hits such as “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” — and into creating “What’s Going On,” his classic album that was released 50 years ago on May 21, 1971.
“It was during a time when he was trying out for the Detroit Lions and being a football player,” said David Ritz, author of 1985’s “Divided Soul: The Life of Marvin Gaye,” the definitive biography of the singer. “He was a good athlete, and he had this notion of wondering if he could turn pro, but I’m not sure he had the chops. But he certainly had the drive.”
Ultimately, his would-be teammates stepped in. “They told him, ‘Hey Marvin, we’re crazy about you, but go home ‘cause we don’t want to hurt you.’”
They’ve seen this sort of thing before. George Plimpton showed up in 1963 to get the raw material for what would become his 1966 book Paper Lion. A year after its publication, Alan Alda and a film crew arrived for the movie version. Four years later, Marvin Gaye decides that while being an R&B star is cool, why not try out for the NFL instead? It must have been quite surreal to be a veteran of the Lions, or in the front office in the 1960s and early 1970s.
FAUCI’S LATEST COVID-19 FLIP-FLOP MAY BE HIS MOST DISTURBING YET: “He also dismissed the theory that COVID-19 was found in nature, brought to a lab, and then escaped. Fauci, arguably (though not justifiably) the most trusted person when it comes to COVID-19, set the tone for how theories about COVID-19’s origins would be treated. If you suggested it came from a lab or was man-made, you were laughed off as a kook. In retrospect, it seems like Fauci was trying to protect himself, as it turns out that his National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases may have funded ‘controversial ‘gain of function’ research where coronaviruses were made ‘more infectious in humans,’’ at the Wuhan Institute of Virology.”
WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT THE PROPAGANDA WAR AGAINST ISRAEL, EVEN IF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT ISRAEL: Some of the people who don’t want Israel to be able to defend itself are antisemites, or Islamists, or Palestinian nationalists (not that these are mutually exclusive categories). But there is also a cohort of leftists who don’t want any Western-oriented country to be able to defend itself militarily. To them, Israel is small and vulnerable and therefore is an alluring target for a propaganda campaign. The activists can make absurdly tendentious “international law” arguments (that have no real basis in international law) why Israel may not fight back against terrorism. Just for example, I’ve yet to find a single person who claims that Israel’s military response to Hamas violates the international law principle of proportionality who is willing to acknowledge that any level of force would be proportionate. Such arguments are taken seriously only because Israel is small and unpopular; the United States can brush off similar arguments with ease. But once the leftists get the precedents established against Israel, that it violates international law to fight terrorism basically if any civilians get harmed in the process, they will use those precedents against the U.S. and other countries. Israel is the canary in the coal mine here.
WELL, THAT’S WHAT HE’S GOT: As his scandals grow ever worse, Andrew Cuomo offers only lies and rage.
STANDING UP AGAINST BIGOTRY: Parents group files federal complaint against school district over race-exclusive event.
SEGREGATION NOW, SEGREGATION TOMORROW, SEGREGATION FOREVER: University of New Hampshire hosted special graduation celebration for ‘Students of Color’ and other ‘diverse’ identities.
BURIED LEDE: SAN FRANCISCO TRIES SOLVING THEIR DRUG WOES VIA ALPHABET SOUP! Overdose deaths in San Francisco are at an all-time high.
San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Friday announced plans to create a new Street Overdose Response Team to address drug overdoses happening on city streets as overdose deaths linked to fentanyl have reached an all-time high.
The Street Overdose Response Team, or SORT, is the third program the city has announced within the last six months to address people having health-related crises on city streets.
Just last week, Breed announced the new Street Wellness Response Team, or SWRT, for responding to well-being checks and situations that require medical or social assistance, but are not extreme enough to warrant police, including calls regarding people sleeping in the street or having obvious physical injuries. If funding is approved, SWRT could be implemented as early as January 2022.
In addition, the Street Crisis Response Team, or SCRT, launched in late 2020 and responds to non-violent mental health crises on city streets.
Both SWRT and SCRT aim to serve as alternatives to police responses to 911 and 311 calls for non-violent behavior.
The latest program, SORT, would address non-fatal overdoses through a holistic approach, with an immediate response from the San Francisco Fire Department, followed up with clinical team members from the city’s Department of Public Health, including both medical specialists and behavioral health specialists.
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office in 1964. Why are Democrat-monopoly cities such cesspits?
OUR TECH OLIGARCHS DON’T ACTUALLY STAND FOR ANY SORT OF DECENCY: How Apple, Tim Cook give in to China while pushing back against the US.
ME, IN CAPITAL MATTERS: Astroneurs: The Private Sector Goes to Space.
And check out my increasingly relevant recent book, America’s New Destiny in Space.
AYN RAND DIDN’T INTEND FOR THE RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE TO BE A HOW-TO GUIDE: ‘We’re talking spells:’ Teen Vogue explains how to make your menstrual blood even more magical through witchcraft.
THE DEMAND FOR RACISM IN AMERICA FAR EXCEEDS THE SUPPLY:
WEEKLY BIDEN REPORT CARD: Woe in Middle East, Infrastructure Bill.
ZODIAC KILLER SLAYS AGAIN: Ted Cruz Decimates Brian Williams After He Goes Full Dem Operative on Him.
LABOR BOARD Swats Down Biden Appointee.
PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot: Long Slide Looms for World Population, With Sweeping Ramifications.
All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.
—The New York Times, yesterday.
● Chaser: The Population Bomb.
Delayed effects and synergisms further complicate the population‐environment relationship, Population growth has a disproportionate effect on environmental deterioration. We must make great efforts both to change our life style so as to reduce our per capita impact on the environment, and to control our population, or disaster will overtake us. Ecological considerations indicate that only fifty million Americans, living as they do today, could eventually destroy the planet. And it is difficult to imagine any American life style which would prevent three hundred million of us from accomplishing the same end in the long run.
Finally, with characteristic myopia, those breathing a sigh of relief at the prospect of “only” 280 million Americans by 2000 A.D. neglect to consider what will happen in the early years of the next century as their children struggle to survive. For even with luck we are doomed to continued population growth until at least 2045, and the projected population size then will be over three hundred million. Hardly a pleasant prospect for a nation now failing to provide properly for 205 million people.
—Paul Ehrlich, the New York Times, November 4th, 1970.
THE DOCTOR IS IN: Dr.* Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple) explores: A theory of something.
The title of this book is so extremely clever that one suspects that someone would have felt obliged to write an accompanying book once apprised of it. Whoever thought of it had a small stroke of genius.
Nevertheless, it is a slightly misleading title because it promises rather more material to provoke the reader’s moral outrage than it delivers. It is true that publishers in particular took advantage of Stephen Hawking’s tragic situation as the victim of a progressive neurological condition—amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, known in England as motor neurone disease and in America as Lou Gehrig’s disease—to publicize his books and promote his persona. But if this was exploitation, it was the exploitation of someone who was only too willing to be exploited.
The story of Hawking’s life is remarkable, indeed one of the most remarkable that could well be imagined. Like many a brilliantly gifted person, he was not stretched intellectually at school or even as an undergraduate, hiding his boredom and his brilliance with moderately insouciant behavior; it was only when he started original research that his brilliance as a physicist began to manifest itself. At the same time, however, he suffered from the first symptoms of als, which carried a prognosis of death within three years. Remarkably, he outlived his prognosis—which was statistically correct—by half a century, marrying (twice), fathering three children, making important contributions to the science of cosmology, being appointed to the chair in Cambridge that the great Newton held, writing a best-selling book, and becoming by far the most famous scientist in the world—despite the fact that for much of that time he could not walk or talk or look after himself in the most minimal way. He was a public communicator who lacked the normal human means of communication that most of us take so much for granted.
Who would not be moved by this story? What defects of character, such as we all possess, could seriously detract from this example of the triumph of the human spirit over extreme adversity? Hawking himself never gave way to self-pity or complaint; he always insisted that he was not being brave, but merely dealing as best he could with circumstances as they had arisen. He was not being self-deprecatory in such a way as to attract even more praise to himself; he wanted above all to be known as a scientist rather than as a man who had made something of his life despite a handicap that would have defeated most people. Occasionally, he would even claim that his chronic progressive illness had even been an advantage to him, since it had freed him from the obligation to perform extraneous time-consuming tasks such as teaching and allowed him to concentrate on his beloved physics. But his inability to write anything down severely handicapped his capacity to perform complex mathematical calculations, and his phenomenal memory was no substitute for a pencil and a few pages of paper. On one occasion, he let his guard drop: asked if he would exchange h