BRAVE NEW WORLD: Researchers create viable mice eggs from scratch for the first time.
Archive for 2021
July 17, 2021
ABIGAIL SHRIER: “Want to Save America? Don’t Act Like a Conservative.”
AN ARMY OF DAVIDS: The Undergrad Who Found China’s Nuclear Arsenal: What a Hobby.
A couple of weeks ago, word arrived that 120 new missile silos had been discovered in the desert of Northern China. While the press made much of this evidence that China is busy expanding its nuclear weapons program, they did not look at who found the silos and how he did it.
As it happens, the silos were spotted by Decker Eveleth, an undergrad at Reed College. He spent weeks poking around on satellite imagery until he happened upon the silos’ distinctive inflatable dome coverings. (Which, in turn, has led some people to describe them as “bouncy houses of death.”)
In what I believe is his only interview about the incident, Eveleth told me about his process, and we covered it here in a larger story about all the goings on in the private space industry and what is now possible in Low Earth Orbit.
Expanding capabilities.
HUBBLE BACK UP AND RUNNING AFTER SWITCHING TO BACKUP #2 OF 3. Backup #1 didn’t work. The James Webb Space Telescope is on the way, but it’s mostly infrared, not visual light, and was originally scheduled for launch in 2007.
IT’S COME TO THIS: Three Texas Democrats test positive for COVID-19 in Washington, D.C.
Exit question: “Is it wrong to laugh?”
UPDATE:
Heh, indeed.™
THE CONSTANT DEMOCRATIC EXISTENTIAL CRISES: Faux-heroism powers the engine of the American left.
Maybe these issues — global warming, mask-wearing, voter suppression, filibusters, social media disinformation — are uniformly as deadly and dangerous as hysterical liberals purport. But if that were the case, wouldn’t the Texas lawmakers spend more time working and less time tweeting out pictures of their airport caesar salads and sink washed underwear? At a certain point, Americans are going to need a conclusive answer: is the sky falling, or do we have time to stop off and grab a case of Miller Lite?
As Thomas Sowell told an interviewer in 2004, “There’s something Eric Hoffer said: ‘Intellectuals cannot operate at room temperature.’ There always has to be a crisis–some terrible reason why their superior wisdom and virtue must be imposed on the unthinking masses. It doesn’t matter what the crisis is. A hundred years ago it was eugenics. At the time of the first Earth Day a generation ago, the big scare was global cooling, a big ice age. They go from one to the other. It meets their psychological needs and gives them a reason for exercising their power.”
OLD AND BUSTED: First Case of Coronavirus Reported In Dallas County.
—CBS-DFW, March 10, 2020.
The New Hotness? Monkeypox infection confirmed in North Texas.
Dallas County Health and Human Services (DCHHS) on Friday reported the first case of monkeypox in a resident of Dallas County, a case believed to be the first monkeypox virus infection in a Texas resident.
Officials said the individual infected with the virus is a Dallas resident who traveled from Nigeria to Dallas and arrived at Love Field Airport on July 9, 2021.
“While rare, this case is not a reason for alarm and we do not expect any threat to the general public. Dallas County Health and Human Services is working closely with local providers, as well as our state and federal partners,” said Dallas County Judge Clay Jenkins.
The person is hospitalized in stable condition and isolated to prevent the spread of the virus.
—Waco’s CBS affiliate, KWTX, yesterday.
THEY’RE KILLING PEOPLE:
Here’s a mashup of VACCINE MISINFORMATION from Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
Does Jen Psaki want Big Tech to CENSOR this?pic.twitter.com/vqnucmZjnj
— Kyle Martinsen (@KyleMartinsen_) July 16, 2021
THE W.H.O. SAYS LOCKDOWNS DON’T WORK, SHOULD ONLY BE A SHORT TERM EMERGENCY MEASURE AT MOST, BUT: Covid-19 news: England unlocking is ‘unethical’, say 1200 scientists. “More than 1200 scientists have now backed a letter in the journal The Lancet saying that the UK’s plan to lift most coronavirus restrictions in England on 19 July is an ‘unethical experiment,’ which poses a serious threat to the rest of the world. The letter argues that lifting restrictions at a time when infection rates are rising could increase the chance of new vaccine-resistant coronavirus variants emerging.”
This is twaddle. And the W.H.O. disagrees with lockdowns, so why are these scientists so anti-science?
Senior WHO official: “stop using lockdowns as your primary control method.” “We in the World Health Organization do not advocate lockdowns as the primary means of control of this virus. The only time we believe a lockdown is justified is to buy you time to reorganize, regroup, rebalance your resources, protect your health workers who are exhausted, but by and large, we’d rather not do it.”
Study: Lockdowns ‘Single Biggest Public Health Mistake, Possibly Of All History.’
Lockdowns were not effective in slowing COVID spread, engineering professor concludes.
People of color more adversely affected by COVID-19 lockdowns, study finds.
The rich and powerful thrived as the rest of us suffered in the year of lockdowns.
HOW IT STARTED: Atlanta mayor says city has been ‘defunding the police’ for the last few years.
—Reporter Newspapers, June 11th, 2020.
How It’s Going: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms to create office charged with reducing crime.
—Atlanta Journal-Constitution, yesterday.
Atlanta’s only Republican mayor left office in 1872.
FASTER, PLEASE: New research finds common denominator linking all cancers.
Related: And the hits just keep on coming!
It’s going to be awkward when the White House press secretary is banned from all social media platforms: Psaki: If You’re Banned On One Social Media Platform, You Should Be Banned On All Others.
ONE LESS THING TO WORRY ABOUT: Heart problems in children with COVID-19 resolve within months, study finds.
OUR SOURCE WAS THE NEW YORK TIMES*: 1619 Project founder believes Cuba has ‘the least inequality’ and has brought about the ‘end of codified racism.’
* Or was it? “Nikole Hannah-Jones’ byline has not appeared in the New York Times or the NYT Magazine in over a year. An interesting fact, curiously undiscussed.“
BIDEN’S “RETURN TO NORMALCY” PRESIDENCY IS GOING SWIMMINGLY:
MASKS ARE BACK IN L.A. COUNTY BECAUSE LIBS ARE REALLY ANTI-VAXXERS, TOO: “Unless millions of toothless Republican rubes from the icky flyover hinterlands moved to Los Angeles in the last month, it would appear that a whole bunch of libs aren’t getting their vaccines either.”
Flashbacks:
● Huffpost Gets Shamed for Peddling Anti-Vaxx Hysteria.
● Today Show Earns All-Time Ratio For Tweeting There’s ‘Debate’ Over Vaccines.
● Obama’s History Of Pandering To the Anti-Vaxxers.
UPDATE: From CNN in May: Why politicians won’t reach the vaccine hesitant. “The most recent Kaiser poll helps illustrate that the vaccine hesitant group doesn’t really lean Republican. Just 20% of the group called themselves Republican with an additional 19% being independents who leaned Republican. The clear majority (61%) were not Republicans (41% said they were Democrats or Democratic leaning independents and 20% were either pure independents or undesignated).”
(Updated and bumped.)
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Here’s How Critical Race Theory Activists Try to Pull The Wool Over America’s Eyes.
THE 21st CENTURY IS NOT TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: Hey kids! Bare-bottomed monkey man with fake penis teaches kids to read.
No word yet if David French views this as “one of the ‘blessings of liberty.’”
JUST DON’T MENTION THE CULTURE WAR: Lufthansa airline adopts gender-neutral ‘guests’ greeting.