Archive for 2022
July 17, 2022
OPEN THREAD: Disport yourselves in the comments.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: ‘Rebooting’ the moon: NASA’s Artemis program aims for lunar sustainability.
THE LID: Leftist Woke Culture Policing Dog Names.
GREAT MOMENTS IN ROCK STAR CRINGE: Roger Waters, 78, Says He’s ‘Far, Far, Far More Important’ Than the Weeknd and Drake.
However, in an interview with Canadian newspaper the Globe and Mail, the always-truculent Waters expressed anger that the Canadian press — and specifically the reporter he was interviewing with — opted to cover the Weeknd kicking off his tour in his hometown stadium rather than Waters’ show, which was the first of a two-night stand at the Toronto arena.
“I have no idea what or who the Weeknd is, because I don’t listen to much music,” Waters said. “People have told me he’s a big act. Well, good luck to him. I’ve got nothing against him. Would it not have been possible to review his show one night and my show another night?”
He added, “I’m not trying to make a personal attack. I’m just saying it seemed odd.”
Then, for reasons unknown other than he was in Toronto, Waters also took aim at the city’s native superstar Drake.
“By the way, with all due respect to the Weeknd or Drake or any of them, I am far, far, far more important than any of them will ever be, however many billions of streams they’ve got,” Waters said. “There is stuff going on here that is fundamentally important to all of our lives.”
You could make a case that people will be listening to Dark Side of the Moon for decades to come — but perhaps not: The Great Forgetting.
Meanwhile, another elderly rocker decides to dump on a well-meaning fan who sent him some artwork as a thanks for his decades of musical enjoyment: Wow, who knew singer David Crosby, 80, was such an a-hole?
THE LEFT IS ABOUT TO PAY FOR THEIR ENERGY INSANITY:
By promoting so-called Environmental, Social and Governance, or ESG, investment standards to choke off fossil fuel investments, by canceling pipelines, and by limiting federal oil and gas leasing, the left has reduced American energy production and left America vulnerable to the rest of the world. All this has come with very little emissions benefit to boot. It has just enabled Russia, Saudi Arabia and others to displace American fossil fuel production with their own foreign fossil fuel production. The result? From Biden’s inauguration to the onset of the war in Ukraine — before the much-discussed “Putin price spike,” in other words — American gas prices went up nearly 50%. Those prices are up another 15% on top of that since the war began.
There have been huge technological strides in solar, wind and other renewable power sources, but primarily due to their intermittent nature and a still-huge gap in energy storage (battery) technology, those forms of energy are not yet ready to make up for lost fossil fuel production without massive extra cost.
Giving away a huge economic and national security advantage is political malpractice. Slowing American energy production while begging the Saudis to increase their own fossil fuel production, as Biden is doing this week, is a botch so foreseeable it should be disqualifying for future leadership. Energy policy under the Biden administration has been insane. With prices booming, everyone now knows it. Those who got us in this mess should prepare to pay a massive political price.
I WISH I COULD DO THIS: Plants Appear to Be Self-Medicating by Producing Their Own Aspirin When Stressed.
EVEN FAUCI IS ADMITTING THAT THE VACCINES ARE UNDERPERFORMING: Vaccine protection against COVID-19 short-lived, booster shots important, new study says.
ROGER SIMON: Free the National Guard … From Scientifically Dubious Vaccine Mandates.
Following on the theme of volunteers, and since I live in the Volunteer State (Tennessee), I would be remiss in not noting that as of now our Republican governor, Bill Lee, has been on the wrong side of the National Guard story, doing nothing, despite many asking, for the ejected Guardsmen. (The Tennessee Star has been covering this closely.)
Also in Tennessee, 5th District congressional candidate Kurt Winstead, a brigadier general in the National Guard himself, has been curiously silent on his beleaguered fellow Guardsmen.
This, although the policy endangers far more than just the National Guard—it seriously endangers the already endangered national security of our country. As Breitbart is reporting, it’s on the brink of engulfing our entire army:
“At least 260,000 American troops—or about 13 percent of the 2.1 million total force—are not fully vaccinated despite a Biden administration vaccine mandate for the military, and many of them could face discharge.
“According to the Department of Defense website, at least 268,858 service members as of July 13 are still not in compliance with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s August 2021 mandate for every member of the military to be fully vaccinated with two doses of a vaccine. That figure does not count the thousands who have not taken any doses.”
I guess Biden is planning on having Ukrainians do all our fighting for us. Sorry, folks, we just don’t have the troops.
Of course, it isn’t just vaccine mandates that are turning away young men and women from our increasingly woke armed services. In “What Are Military Recruits Defending?”, Rod Dreher writes that he told his second son, that “I would support him whatever he did, but that I didn’t want him to have to choose between obeying his conscience as a Christian, and obeying his commanding officer. Plus, after the last twenty years of US history, I told him, I don’t trust the civilian leadership of our country with his life. He’s now headed to trade school this fall instead.”
As Dreher writes, “Conservative Christians are no longer encouraging their children to join the armed forces, and why should they?”
Democratic Washington D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser told CBS “Face The Nation” host Margaret Brennan, Sunday, that she fears people are being “tricked” into getting on buses to D.C.
Brennan cited a story by the Washington Post that she claimed said, “homeless shelters in D.C. were filling up, and groups are getting overwhelmed by these buses that governors of Texas and Arizona are sending here full of migrants.” The story cited doesn’t mention homeless shelters, but was about a Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid Network (SAMU) shelter, specifically for migrants, that was full, according to the Washington Post.
As Margot Cleveland of the Federalist tweets, “WHOA! I didn’t think ploy would work, but it looks like Texas and Arizona are making D.C. live the pain they are causing to ordinary Americans by failing to secure the border.”
UPDATE: “Interestingly enough, Bowser sounded like Governors Abbott and Ducey when she said that local taxpayers should not have to pick up the tab for illegal migrants bused into town. That is exactly the point that Abbott and Ducey are making with the bus rides into D.C. Let Joe Biden figure out how to take care of them. The burden falls on Mayor Bowser as it does the governors when they are bused to the border by cartels and professional immigration advocates. Bowser said the federal government should be paying for it. Again, that’s the point. Texas and Arizona have been picking up the tab for the Biden border crisis.”
KIMBERLEY STRASSEL: The 2022 Referendum on Crime: District-attorney primaries show that voters are fed up with left-wing prosecutors.
Jose Alba made national news when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg outrageously slapped murder charges on the 61-year-old bodega worker who stabbed a career criminal in an act of self-defense. Progressive prosecutors everywhere should be worried.
While most of the press focuses on the midterm referendum on Joe Biden, across the country this election season is also shaping up as a check on the “reform” prosecutors responsible for surging crime. Voters will take part in more than 2,000 elections for prosecutor and sheriff, and the campaigns are proving unusually hot.
They also look to be a bust for a progressive prosecutorial movement that hoped to use this year to entrench itself in jurisdictions across the country. “Decarceration” candidates have flooded primaries, many backed by far-left groups calling for an end to prosecutions. They aren’t finding much success, as Democratic and Republican voters alike grow sick of rising crime. San Francisco’s ouster last month of District Attorney Chesa Boudin may prove the norm rather than the exception. . . .
The riots and protests of 2020 elevated the “defund the police” movement, even as the ensuing public disorder alarmed voters. Those voters rendered judgment in last year’s elections, rejecting the anti-police left. Progressive candidates for mayor lost in cities from Seattle to New York, while Minneapolis voters rejected a ballot initiative to abolish the police department.
But the public was slower to understand the role left-wing prosecutors play in the breakdown of public order. Last year’s horrific Waukesha, Wis., Christmas parade attack—perpetrated by a repeat offender out on bail—was a wake-up call. So have been the more recent travails of New York Mayor Eric Adams, whose attempts to get on top of city crime are being thwarted by prosecutors like Mr. Bragg. What good is a proactive police force if prosecutors simply wave criminals back onto the street—or slap charges against law-abiding citizens who defend themselves? Voters are trying to remove some of the worst offenders from office, whether it be last month’s recall of Mr. Boudin, or the effort to get rid of Los Angeles’s George Gascón.
They are also on guard against electing more of the same, as primaries are showing.
Well, good.
GERMAN GOVERNMENT LIED ABOUT NUCLEAR: Germany’s Economy and Climate Minister, a Green Party leader, lied about nuclear fuel rods.
The German government is moving forward with plans to close its last three nuclear plants this December despite Europe being gripped by the worst energy crisis in 50 years. Robert Habeck, Germany’s Vice Chancellor and Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, said there is no point in operating them because Germany lacks natural gas, not electricity.
“Nuclear power doesn’t help us there at all,” Habeck said on Tuesday. “We have a heating problem or an industry problem, but not an electricity problem — at least not generally throughout the country.”
Besides, Habeck said, only Russia could provide Germany with the uranium fuel rods required to keep the nuclear plants operating, and there was no way to make sure the plants would be able to operate safely.
But none of what Habeck said was true. Coal, natural gas, and nuclear energy all generate electricity. Less nuclear means using more of coal or natural gas, which is why the German Cabinet, led by Habeck, just approved burning more coal.
As for safety, the leading provider of nuclear safety testing said Germany’s nuclear plants could keep operating safely after December. “The plants are in a technically excellent condition,” said Joachim Buehler, managing director of TUEV. Buehler said that an extensive check, which is usually done every decade, could instead be done within a few months.
Good and hard, Germany: German residents make plans amid fears of a winter gas shortage.
THE WORLD ECONOMY IS IMPERILED BY A FORCE HIDING IN PLAIN SIGHT:
Most of the challenges tearing at the global economy were set in motion by the world’s reaction to the spread of COVID-19 and its attendant economic shock, even as they have been worsened by the latest upheaval — Russia’s disastrous attack on Ukraine, which has diminished the supply of food, fertilizer and energy.
“The pandemic itself disrupted not only the production and transportation of goods, which was the original front of inflation, but also how and where we work, how and where we educate our children, global migration patterns,” said Julia Coronado, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, speaking this past week during a discussion convened by the Brookings Institution in Washington. “Pretty much everything in our lives has been disrupted by the pandemic, and then we layer on to that a war in Ukraine.”
It was the pandemic that prompted governments to impose lockdowns to limit its spread, hindering factories from China to Germany to Mexico. When people confined to home then ordered record volumes of goods — exercise equipment, kitchen appliances, electronics — that overwhelmed the capacity to make and ship them, yielding the Great Supply Chain Disruption.
The resulting scarcity of products pushed prices up. Companies in highly concentrated industries from meat production to shipping exploited their market dominance to rack up record profits.
The pandemic prompted governments from the United States to Europe to unleash trillions of dollars in emergency spending to limit joblessness and bankruptcy. Many economists now argue that they did too much, stimulating spending power to the point of stoking inflation, while the Federal Reserve waited too long to raise interest rates.
Now playing catch-up, central banks like the Fed have moved assertively, lifting rates at a rapid clip to try to snuff out inflation, even while fueling worries that they could set off a recession.
Also deeply exacerbated by the lockdowns: Supermarkets, Restaurants Hire Security, Limit Hours to Combat Crime.
Food-oriented establishments and consumers are airing increased concerns over crime as U.S. consumers have resumed shopping in stores and dining out, after governments and businesses lifted Covid-19 restrictions. Forty-four percent of 1,005 adults surveyed earlier this month said they were more fearful to be in public because of bad behavior and rising violence, up from 39% in March, according to a national online survey by food-service research firm Lisa W. Miller & Associates LLC.
Violent crime has been on the rise in the U.S. since the onset of the pandemic, with cities including Seattle, Los Angeles, Chicago and New York reporting a surge in shootings and killings. Murder rates have also soared in rural areas. Local officials and law enforcement point to pandemic-related stress, a proliferation of guns and increased alcohol sales, among other factors.
While violent crimes in restaurants and grocery stores remain a small part of the overall U.S. total, incidents have increased in recent years, according to Federal Bureau of Investigation statistics. The number of aggravated assaults that took place in restaurants increased by 60% from 2018 to 2020, the FBI data showed, and the number in grocery stores increased by 73% during the period.
Becky Mulligan said she answered a call this month from one of her Mod Super Fast Pizza Holdings LLC store managers, who said an armed robber had hit one of the Bellevue, Wash.-based chain’s stores.
Ms. Mulligan, senior vice president of operations for the 520-store pizza chain, said she has had to respond to more incidents of violence, theft and robberies affecting the chain over the past six months, particularly as gas prices have risen and the economy has cooled.
“There seems to be a layer of stress going into the restaurants, more than it used to,” she said. About six weeks ago, after an armed gunman entered one of Mod’s West Coast stores, a manager put herself in front of a young crew member working at the cash register, Ms. Mulligan said.
Mod is installing more panic buttons in its stores, and offering emotional support resources to employees after an incident. Employees are instructed to never leave the back doors of restaurants open, and the company limits hours if working at night feels unsafe, she said.
Why, it’s as if: America’s Cop-Hating Cities Will Soon Face an Ugly Reckoning. “Many of the big ‘defund the police’ cities quickly realized the error of their ways and tried to undo some of the damage they’d done, largely to no avail. It turns out that blaming cops for everything kind of sticks with the cops. It’s a dangerous and difficult profession as it is, why would anyone want to do it in a city run by people who would rather side with criminals?”
DR. BIRX PRAISES HERSELF WHILE REVEALING IGNORANCE, TREACHERY, AND DECEIT:
Recall that for the remainder of the year, the White House was urging normalcy while many states kept locking down. It was an incredible confusion. The CDC was all over the map. I gained the distinct impression of two separate regimes in charge: Trump’s vs. the administrative state he could not control. Trump would say one thing on the campaign trail but the regulations and disease panic kept pouring out of his own agencies.
Birx admits that she was a major part of the reason, due to her sneaky alternation of weekly reports to the states.
After the heavily edited documents were returned to me, I’d reinsert what they had objected to, but place it in those different locations. I’d also reorder and restructure the bullet points so the most salient—the points the administration objected to most—no longer fell at the start of the bullet points. I shared these strategies with the three members of the data team also writing these reports. Our Saturday and Sunday report-writing routine soon became: write, submit, revise, hide, resubmit.
Fortunately, this strategic sleight-of-hand worked. That they never seemed to catch this subterfuge left me to conclude that, either they read the finished reports too quickly or they neglected to do the word search that would have revealed the language to which they objected. In slipping these changes past the gatekeepers and continuing to inform the governors of the need for the big-three mitigations—masks, sentinel testing, and limits on indoor social gatherings—I felt confident I was giving the states permission to escalate public health mitigation with the fall and winter coming.
As another example, once Scott Atlas came to the rescue in August to introduce some good sense into this wacky world, he worked with others to dial back the CDC’s fanatical attachment to universal and constant testing. Atlas knew that “track, trace, and isolate” was both a fantasy and a massive invasion of people’s liberties that would yield no positive public-health outcome. He put together a new recommendation that was only for those who were sick to test – just as one might expect in normal life.
After a week-long media frenzy, the regulations flipped in the other direction.
Birx reveals that it was her doing:
This wasn’t the only bit of subterfuge I had to engage in. Immediately after the Atlas-influenced revised CDC testing guidance went up in late August, I contacted Bob Redfield…. Less than a week later, Bob [Redfield] and I had finished our rewrite of the guidance and surreptitiously posted it. We had restored the emphasis on testing to detect areas where silent spread was occurring. It was a risky move, and we hoped everyone in the White House would be too busy campaigning to realize what Bob and I had done. We weren’t being transparent with the powers that be in the White House…
Read the whole thing.
Related: We must make public health authorities accountable for their COVID lies.
WHAT DID GREENS USE BEFORE CANDLES? ELECTRICITY! Deutsche Bank Says Germans May Need to Switch from Gas-to-Wood for Heating this Winter, is Wood-to-Gas for Cars Next?
BE PREPARED: The Ove Glove – Superior HEAT & FLAME Hand Protection – 2 Pack Glove. #CommissionEarned
I’M PRETTY SURE JOE BIDEN’S ADVICE ABOUT FIRING A SHOTGUN THROUGH THE DOOR IS THE WRONG WAY: There’s a Right Way and and Wrong Way to Handle a Defensive Gun Use.
READER FAVORITE: Floor Lamp. #CommissionEarned
THE REAL-WORLD CONSEQUENCES OF GREEN EXTREMISM:
The results of shortsighted, self-defeating enviro-extremism are bad enough in rich nations. But they are even worse in the undeveloped world. In Sri Lanka, which banned chemical fertilizers in a fit of adherence to global green pressure, crops collapsed and food inflation spiked to 80% in June. The result has been a public revolt, including the overthrow of the president and an occupation of his palace by disgruntled citizens.
The specter of starvation is now being reported from Africa, and the latest analysis from the U.N. World Food Program suggests that 670 million people, 8% of the world’s population, will face hunger by the end of the decade.
The World Health Organization calculates that 439,000 Africans die every year from indoor air pollution because they are forced — for cooking, lighting, and heating — to burn charcoal and cattle dung, which one researcher compared to smoking 400 cigarettes per hour in the home. The reason Africans still use these primitive methods to generate energy is that green ideologues in rich nations won’t allow them to get financing to build coal-fired power stations.
Extreme environmentalism is an ideology that cares little for human life, even regards it as a blight on the Earth that should be reduced. Its instinctive sympathies are against our species. It wants less economic growth, less entrepreneurial spirit, less development, less energy, less safety, less food, less comfort.
Who suffers? Those in poor nations, of course, and we in the rich nations that impose our obsessions on ourselves and on others wherever we can.
Read the whole thing.
THE CORBYNIZATION OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONTINUES APACE: Top Israeli Daily’s Exposé Paints Troubling Picture of New York Times’ Israel Coverage. “Not only does The New York Times seem to pay an inordinate amount of attention to Israel — but, from an examination of its Israel-related articles published in the first half of 2022, the publication seems to hold a predominantly negative view of the Jewish state. Of the 118 pieces written about Israel, 53% portrayed Israel in a negative light, 34% were neutral, and only 13% were positive.”
WHATEVER YOU SAY, CHAMP: Biden: Saudis are lying and stop talking about our fist-bump.