GENTLEMEN, YOU CAN’T DO REPORTING HERE — THIS IS A NEWS SHOW! Journalists, Leftists Trash NBC’s Dasha Burns for Highlighting John Fetterman’s Mental Handicaps.
Reminder: It’s Not Ableist To Wonder If Fetterman Can Do His Job.
Archive for 2022
October 12, 2022
PLANETARY DEFENSE: DART mission successfully shifted its target’s orbit.
MILBLOGGER LAUGHINGWOLF has a new series on nuclear preparedness, starting here with “60-40.”
JAW, JAW IS BETTER THAN WAR, WAR: Trump, Gabbard Warn of Nuclear Armageddon.
PRIME DEAL: Calphalon Premier Space Saving Nonstick 12qt Stock Pot with Cover. #CommissionEarned
MINI-FUHRER JUSTIN TRUDEAU IS NO RESPECTER OF BORDERS OR OF RIGHTS: Canadian law enforcement surveilling American gun show in Montana? “Having a law enforcement agent from another country surveilling Americans at a gun show in Montana should be problematic at a minimum. . . . But the fact that we apparently had a free-range foreign law enforcement agent hanging around outside of a Montana gun show and conducting unsupervised surveillance of American citizens is very disturbing.”
VIDEO: Huge Ukrainian Offensive in Luhansk? “Svatova is the supply hub of the Russian army here in the Luhansk border.”
Once again, if you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a video, BattleSwarm’s Lawrence Person has done a great job of breaking out the bullet points.
DISPATCHES FROM THE NATIONAL FELONS LEAGUE: Raiders’ Davante Adams charged with assault after shoving photographer in Kansas City.
Davante Adams has been charged with misdemeanor assault after shoving a photographer to the ground on Monday night, according to multiple reports citing Kansas City police.
The Raiders wideout pushed the photog to the ground on the way to the locker room after his team lost a heartbreaker, 30-29, to the Chiefs at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City.
According to KCTV5, the Kansas City Municipal Court issued a citation on Wednesday alleging that Adams “did, by an intentional, overt act, inflict bodily injury or cause an unlawful offensive contact upon [the victim] by pushing [him] to the ground using two hands causing whiplash and head ache. possible minor concussion.”
Just another day for the Raiders:
THE NEW BICAMERALISM AND PRESENTMENT: “The executive branch proposes a rule, a district court judge can block it, then one member of the Supreme Court determines if Congress would have approved of that rule.”
That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
HOW IT STARTED: UN Deletes Article Touting ‘Benefits’ of World Hunger: ‘Hungry People Are the Most Productive People.’
An article appearing on the United Nations Chronicle website as recently as Wednesday that touted the “benefits of world hunger” has seemingly been taken down.
Screenshots of the post, which web archives appear to show was first published in 2009, began to circulate on Twitter Wednesday.
A link to the article, which now takes visitors to an error page.
It was archived before it was apparently scrubbed from the website by the agency on Thursday.
In it, former University of Hawaii professor George Kent wrote,
We sometimes talk about hunger in the world as if it were a scourge that all of us want to see abolished, viewing it as comparable with the plague or aids. But that naïve view prevents us from coming to grips with what causes and sustains hunger. Hunger has great positive value to many people.
Indeed, it is fundamental to the working of the world’s economy. Hungry people are the most productive people, especially where there is a need for manual labour.
Kent went on to ask, “How many of us would sell our services so cheaply if it were not for the threat of hunger?” he further noted, “For those who depend on the availability of cheap labour, hunger is the foundation of their wealth.”
—Mediaite, July 22nd.
How it’s going: Head of the United Nations weather agency says the war in Ukraine may be “a blessing” for climate change efforts.
Petteri Taalas said that the war in Ukraine “may be seen as a blessing” because it has accelerated the investment and development of “green” energy sources over the long term.
Petteri Taalas is the secretary-general of the World Meteorological Organization, which is a specialized agency of the United Nations responsible for promoting international cooperation on atmospheric science, climatology, hydrology and geophysics.
The World Meteorological Organization website says it is “a specialized agency of the United Nations, WMO is dedicated to international cooperation and coordination on the state and behaviour of the Earth’s atmosphere, its interaction with the land and oceans, the weather and climate it produces, and the resulting distribution of water resources.”
Currently, Europe is running out of energy sources and is facing an energy crisis in part due to the war in Ukraine and self-inflicted policy decisions prior to the war.
—Westphalian Times, yesterday.
Apparently, as far as the UN is concerned, the Ukraine War going nuclear would bring all of the pieces of the puzzle together quite nicely.
UPDATE: Politico Green 28 class of 2023: Vladimir Putin — the invader making the EU green.
It took a war criminal to speed up Europe’s green revolution.
By invading Ukraine and manipulating energy supplies to undermine European support for Kyiv, Russian President Vladimir Putin has achieved something generations of green campaigners could not — clean energy is now a fundamental matter of European security.
The political response from the EU was swift: Within weeks of the February 24 invasion, a plan was sketched out aimed at unhooking the Continent’s energy ties from Moscow. It leaned on three pillars: cutting oil, gas and coal supplies from Russia; getting gas and other fossil fuels from elsewhere; and massively speeding up the roll out of renewable power and energy saving measures.
“Renewables give us the freedom to choose an energy source that is clean, cheap, reliable, and ours,” EU Green Deal chief Frans Timmermans said less than two weeks after Putin’s tanks rolled in.
Seven months on, a POLITICO survey of data on clean energy, energy savings and policies shows that the first signs of that green surge are appearing. Analysts are in little doubt that the change is structural, permanent and historic.
“We will look back at this situation in 10 years time and see, OK, that was the moment where we really got serious about the green transition and we really had the big green acceleration,” said Simone Tagliapietra, a research fellow at the Brussels-based think tank Bruegel.
Hey, you know who else was big on environmentalism?
(Updated and bumped.)
AGE IS JUST A NUMBER:* Eight skydivers over 80 execute formation above Florida.
*Well, until you break a hip, anyway.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: More soldiers are leaving the Army National Guard at a faster rate than they are enlisting.
DAVID BARON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Mountain lion seen in Madison County in Iowa.
TIME TO KILL THE LSAT? I have a hard time imagining that I did better on it after college than I would have before college, or that it measured anything different from the SAT – but with all the crummy lawyers out there, I am not sure making it still easier to become a lawyer is a great idea.
However, it’s undeniable that the law has become FAR too complicated for average people to navigate without constantly risking being totally bamboozled. It may be time for us to license a class of “lawyer techs” that can charge prices people will actually pay for routine yet complicated issues.
STRIKE A POSE, THERE’S NOTHING TO IT: DHS Secretary Mayorkas Was Informed ‘Whipping’ Incident Was Bogus Hours Before He Condemned Border Patrol Agents.
SHOCKER: 90,000 ‘Irrecoverable’ Russian Losses in Ukraine.
Longtime Sharp VodkaPundit Readers™ know I’ve been erring on the cautious side since the beginning of this stupid war, discounting Kyiv’s claims, like that “63,380 dead” in the infographic above. Last week, I was willing to concede that as many as 20,000 Russians might be KIA.
The real number could be indeed be much higher, so bear with me while I do some back-of-the-envelope math for you.
Much more at the link.
PUSHBACK WORKS: Yale Law School Dean’s “Message to Our Alumni on Free Speech.”
Via Eugene Volokh, who comments, “I should also note that, while I disagree with the calls to boycott Yale Law School graduates because of the school’s past lack of support of free speech, I have to acknowledge (as a practical matter, whatever one might think of the purely ethical questions) that those calls might have helped prompt this message—though one can only speculate—on that and might prompt Yale to adhere to these principles in the future.”
As Al Capone said, you get more with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone. We might hope to see our institutions headed by people who will do the right thing because it’s right, but experience — especially recent experience — suggests otherwise. Fear of consequences will have to do the work that conscience should.
“Disinformation” and “misinformation” are just doubletalk terms for “things that contradict the preferred elite narrative.”
CREATING YOUNG DISCONTENTS: Why Does Fort Worth ISD Want To Teach ‘Gender Identity’ To Pre-K Children? “Simply because the victimhood identity politics hard left simply can’t wait to corrupt your children to their worldview.”
MARK JUDGE: News junkies: Margaret Sullivan’s new memoir and the media’s addiction problem.
For an entire generation of young journalists, the Watergate scandal of the early 1970s was like a powerful drug. The toppling of Richard Nixon provided a high. Called by Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee “the longest shot in the history of American journalism,” Watergate altered the political and media landscape the way heroin rewires the brain. The point of journalism went from covering the news to destroying the president — especially if such a figure were a Republican or a conservative. The language of addiction, a “rush,” came to define the media’s behavior whenever there was a political scandal. They even created fake scandals to feed their habits.
Sullivan was in high school in her native town of Lackawanna, New York, when Watergate hit. A kid who loved language, by the time Nixon resigned, she was the editor of her school newspaper. Here she is on Woodward and Bernstein: “They were badass, the essence of swashbuckling cool, especially when confused in my teenage mind with Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman … I wanted to be them, or at least immerse myself in that newsroom culture. Righteousness could be achieved, according to the self-important journalism adage, by ‘afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted.'” (Why the comfortable should be afflicted is never explained.)
That’s easy – they had an (R) after their names:
Among the funniest parts of Newsroom Confidential are Sullivan’s reports of the freakout in the Washington Post newsroom when Donald Trump was elected president. Editor Marty Baron had to keep reminding the staff that they just had to “keep doing their jobs.”
This was not possible. Trump was fentanyl, an insanely powerful drug that was equally dangerous. The media went crazy. They simply could not let the man do his job. The press suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop story , defended the security agencies they had ferociously distrusted after Watergate, and speed-balled the idea that there was a seven-hour “gap” in President Trump’s White House phone logs. Bob Woodward, the original scandal dealer, was rolled out to huff and puff and proclaim that this was, yes, worse than Watergate. The story turned out to be false.
Read the whole thing.
IS CHRISTIANITY STILL RELEVANT? J. Warner Wallace of “Cold-Case Christianity” renown thinks the answer to that question is absolutely on the positive side.
WISH YOU WEREN’T HERE: An Open Letter to Roger Waters (and Joe Rogan).
(Classical reference in headline.)