TWO CHEERS FOR AVATAR? ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’ Offers Subversive Defense of Nuclear Family.
Archive for 2022
December 14, 2022
THE REAL WAR ON WOMEN: Cambridge Dictionary changes its definition of “woman” to … well … you know.
IT’S ABOUT ALL ABOUT REQUIRING EQUAL OUTCOMES, NOT EQUAL OPPORTUNITY: On this day in 1970, Griggs v. Duke Power Co. was argued before the Supreme Court. To understand just how awful this opinion was, read “Title VII Disparate Impact Liability Makes Almost Everything Presumptively Illegal.” I suppose in theory it’s possible for the Supreme Court to write a worse decision, but I’m not sure I’ve ever actually seen one.
HEROES NOT WANTED: Detroit School District Votes to Remove Dr. Ben Carson’s Name From High School. “Dr. Carson grew up in a Detroit housing project before going on to become a ground-breaking neurosurgeon. He became the youngest chief of pediatric neurosurgery in the nation at the age of 33. In 1987 he led the surgical team that performed the first successful separation of conjoined twins. Carson is famed in his field for developing new surgery techniques and successfully managing some of the most difficult pediatric neurosurgery cases in the nation.”
READER FAVORITE: Klipsch Heritage Wireless The One II Tabletop Stereo Walnut. #CommissionEarned
AMERICANS LIKE OWNING GUNS A LOT MORE THAN THEIR RULING CLASS LIKES THEM TO: Strong Majority of Americans Approve of Supreme Court Decisions That Expand, Protect Their Gun Rights.
HOW’S THAT MISSILE DEFENSE SYSTEM COMING ALONG? Beijing’s nuclear strategy has long been surprisingly modest. So why did it just double its nuclear arsenal? “China has been stepping up its nuclear ambitions. In 2016, China elevated what is now known as the People’s Liberation Army Rocket Force (PLARF), which controls China’s land-based missile arsenal, to the status of fourth service branch, alongside the army, navy and air force — a signal of the growing prioritization of the country’s nuclear deterrent.”
I’M SO OLD, I REMEMBER WHEN JOE BIDEN WAS GOING TO RESTORE COMPETENCE TO GOVERNMENT: 9 million people received emails that mistakenly said their student loan forgiveness was approved.
Meanwhile: Supreme Court to hear 2nd dispute over Biden’s student loan forgiveness plan.
I’M GOING WITH “CHICKY MCCHICKFACE:” Tulsa Zoo asks the public to vote on names for penguin chick.
AHEAD OF THE CURVE: Trump Was Right: Bipartisan Push in Congress to Ban TikTok Underway.
DIVING BY YOURSELF WITHOUT A BUOY FLAG IS A BAD IDEA: Scuba diver’s near miss with a boat caught on camera.
HOW IT STARTED:
During a rally yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke to a crowd in Derry, N.H., a town that many miners call home. He acknowledged the economic setbacks and job insecurity that coal miners face these days, and gave them some advice: learn to code.
According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, Biden said, “Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!”
According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.
—“Biden tells coal miners to ‘learn to code,'” The Hill, December 31st, 2019.
How it’s going: Expect coding class enrollment surge following WaPo publisher’s announcement that layoffs are coming.
None of these people give a single shit that their preferred policies result in countless jobs lost in the oil and coal industries. https://t.co/Gb4RCjNWTr
— Sunny (@sunnyright) December 14, 2022
—Twitchy, today.
A TRUMP INITIATIVE CONTINUES TO GATHER STEAM: Nigeria, Rwanda become first African countries to join NASA’s Artemis Accord.
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Everything is a scam: COVID/Light rail edition.
The latest light rail boondoggle is called the Southwest LRT project. It connects downtown Minneapolis with the western suburbs, and has never been a favorite of the tonier sort of people. They love light rail, except when it comes to or through their neighborhood.
The project has spiraled out of control, vastly outstripping its already bloated budget. As usual. Light rail is hideously expensive, and especially so when going through expensive neighborhoods. The line is only 14 miles long and will cost $2.7 billion.
That’s $190 million a mile. You can build a lot of roads with that kind of money. A typical lane of highway costs $1-2 million a mile. And would carry a lot more people*.
OK, so it’s expensive and over budget. Over budget as in $1.1 billion over budget. That’s quite an error. $1.6 billion to $2.7 billion. And despite a lot of effort looking under couch cushions and in the pockets of jackets, lots of money still needs to be found to fill that budget hole.
So guess where a bunch of the money is going to come from?
A plan to close the yawning budget gap for the $2.7 billion Southwest light-rail line was put in motion Monday, but the proposed infusion of $211 million still would not be enough to see the troubled project to completion.
The Metropolitan Council’s Transportation Committee on Monday unanimously recommended moving $111 million to the Southwest project, most of it taken from federal COVID-19 relief funds. That plan will require approval by the full council, which will build and maintain the line, in a vote expected next week.
Meanwhile, the Hennepin County Board is slated to vote Thursday on a measure to transfer an additional $100 million to the Southwest project, an extension of the Green Line that will link downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie.
But with project funding currently falling short by $450 million to $550 million, the Met Council would still need to find an additional $240 million to $340 million to finish the job. And it’s unclear at this time where the extra money will come from.
COVID. Is there anything it can’t do?
Honestly, this is just the icing on the cake. The project is government in a nutshell. Plan something totally ridiculous. Grossly mislead people on how much it will cost. Get started before the deception is too obvious to ignore. Screw things up. Plead “sunk cost.” Use “emergency” to steal more money.
* Yes, but building roads provides insufficient opportunities for graft: “A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.”
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas School District Takes a Stand for the Kids, Votes to Allow Guns for Trained Staff.
ALSO PEOPLE WITHOUT COPD: Not being isolated helps people with COPD maintain good mental health.
TWITTER IS FUN AGAIN, JUST NOT FOR THEM: Liberals struggle to find viable Twitter alternative after Musk takeover.
Some of Twitter’s disaffected have closed their accounts. Many more have kept their Twitter handles while adopting new ones on other sites, thronging the virtual gates of previously unheralded platforms Mastodon, Hive and Post.
Now, social media colonists are laboring to rebuild their networks on new sites while keeping an eye on the old one, to see how the Twitter wars play out.
“I think Twitter is falling apart,” said David Karpf, a political scientist at the George Washington University. “I’m also going to be one of the last people to leave Twitter.”Karpf joined Twitter in 2008. He amassed a following one tweet at a time until 2019, when he penned a post that likened conservative columnist Bret Stephens to a bedbug. Stephens complained. The exchange went viral. Karpf’s following exploded.
After Musk swept in, Karpf followed the lead of many in academia. He opened an account on Mastodon, a decentralized social network launched in 2016. All but unknown last spring, Mastodon now claims more than 2 million users, a milestone announced, ironically, on Twitter.
Not ironic — necessary. Otherwise, no one would notice outside of Mastodon’s minuscule echo chamber.
HE’S RIGHT, YOU KNOW: No, the Military Dragged Itself into Politics. “Even though the American public has greater trust in their military than most nations have in theirs – and there is a lot of institutional capital there to burn through – the drop along all political persuasions is significant. As reported by Gallup, they are returning to levels not seen in over 35 years as it recovered from the decade after the fall of Saigon. Note the most dramatic fall is from what traditionally been the “pro military” side of the spectrum. That is where the story is.”
Burning through capital, institutional and otherwise, is a centerpiece of lefty governance.
Plus: “In the last few years we have seen the most senior uniformed members of the military from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Milley, USA and the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Gidlay, USN happily jump forward to weigh hip deep in to the most divisive domestic political cultural war topics – specifically racial essentialism. . . . We have to understand that too much of our defense nomenklatura have become “of” DC, and not just stationed “in” DC – absorbing all that comes from that isolated and unbalanced intellectual environment. Outside the beltway, racial essentialism is seen for what it actually is – racism – something that is rightfully disgusting to Americans of all stripes. Part of the military’s problem is classic elite capture.”
And: “The American public see senior leadership who refuse to defend their own institution. Our military reflects its nation, so of course will have many of the same ills. There are the usual suspects who will use any topic to bash the military they will never like and will attempt to paint the military with a very thick and broad brush – often using questionable metrics to describe a military full of racists, sexists, and rapists – and when confronted our senior leaders either remain silent or accept the worst descriptions of the personnel they lead. Service members see that. Family members see that. They also see a senior uniformed leadership who will discipline enlisted personnel, company grade and field grade officers with aplomb, but do nothing but defend, excuse, or even look the other way from abject failures from fellow General and Flag Officers (GOFO).”
If they won’t defend their own institutions, why should we trust them to defend the nation?
THE RULES HAVE CHANGED: Young Voters Losing Enthusiasm for Democrats — But So What? “The only thing that matters in the age of mail-in voting is getting the ballots out to your people and harvesting them back in, in numbers greater than the other side.”
JEFFREY CARTER: The Dots Might Connect Themselves. “That is unless you are a person like Jon Corzine or Hillary Clinton. Then, the scales of justice turn a blind eye and you get to walk free among us.”
BYRON YORK: The Coming War Over Biden Family Corruption.