DAVID THOMPSON: He Just Wouldn’t Stop Banging On. “Those of you who keep track of these things will know that today is this blog’s fifteenth birthday. I started doing… this, whatever it is, on the same day that the original iPhone was announced, back when the Blackberry Curve was a desirable thing, and 200 million people had a MySpace account. After close to sixteen million pageviews, it seems I’ve joined the ranks of the Old Guard, at least as measured in internet years. Happily, I have moisturiser.”
Archive for 2022
February 9, 2022
JAMES LILEKS’ WEDNESDAY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT:
Who’s responsible for the culture wars? The right, of course. Everything was proceeding as it should, climbing the staircase of enlightenment, everything getting better and better on our way to the best of all possible worlds. Then the ogres appeared, their brows thick and knotted, their mien dull and perturbed, and they set about to fight with the angels on the staircase. They knew not why, only that they were not angels, and felt ashamed at their own rude forms and incoherent grunts.
NPR interviewed a fellow who wrote a book on this, and I was interested in his take. These excerpts also draw from this. He said:
I think there was a specific set of circumstances in the early 1970s, where the culture wars sprung up, because finally the evangelical right felt galvanized into doing something.
And what was that? What did they do? What was that specific set?
Did anything happen in “the early 1970s” that might have produced a cultural flashpoint to which religious might might be drawn?
Read the whole thing.
IF YOU’RE ANTI-NUCLEAR YOU DON’T REALLY WANT TO FIGHT “CLIMATE CHANGE.” The Nuclear Industry Argues Regulators Don’t Understand New Small Reactors: Advocates say the plants offer a climate fix, but opponents decry them as dangerous.
The nuclear power industry is betting its future on a new generation of reactors small enough to fit on a truck—an emerging technology that mostly uses alternatives to water for cooling, runs at lower pressure than traditional units, and costs far less than the behemoth power plants and cooling towers that define the nuclear landscape today.
But advocates of the idea insist that the folks in Washington who police their business have no idea how to assess it. Today’s rules are “really a square peg in a round hole for these advanced reactor designs,” says Amy Roma, a partner with the law firm Hogan Lovells who’s worked on dozens of license applications. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission, she says, is “largely divorced of actually understanding—in depth—the technology.”
Well, they’re bureaucrats.
Congress has ordered the NRC to write rules to replace a regulatory framework that dates to the 1950s. The new guidelines aren’t expected until at least 2025, so for now the agency is operating as it has for decades, evaluating plants that bear scant resemblance to those the regulations were meant to assess. To prove the safety of designs, for instance, the commission demands data from similar plants, but none of the smaller installations have been built in the U.S., so there’s no performance history. And the rules are geared toward so-called light-water reactors, which split uranium atoms to create steam that drives turbines. The newer technology typically uses substances such as molten salt and lead, or gases like helium, to keep the core from overheating. No company employing these technologies has won a construction license, and only one design—a water-cooled model from NuScale Power LLC—has been approved. The NRC declined to make any commissioners or staffers available for an interview on the subject.
That’s because they don’t know anything and don’t want it to become clear. And environmentalists are opposing these mostly out of habit, and because ignorant Boomers will donate.
STANDING UP AGAINST BIGOTRY: A petition to end discrimination against men at Cornell University. “The complaint has been signed by 207 individuals so far — including think tank presidents, authors, professors, lawyers, activists. Signatories include Jordan Peterson, Warren Farrell, Christina Hoff Summers, Marc Angelucci, Cassie Jaye, Peter Wood, Cynthia Garrett, Harvey Silverglate, Paul du Quenoy, Amy Wax, Andrew Miltenberg, Janice Fiamengo, Lawrence Alexander (among many others).”
Related: A Title IX Complaint Against Columbia University.
Background: Higher education discriminates against men, but Title IX complaints may change that.
Also related, from Andrew Yang: “Boys and men across all regions and ethnic groups have been failing, both absolutely and relatively, for years. This is catastrophic for our country.”
PERSONNEL IS POLICY: Sarah Bloom Raskin, Biden’s Latest Anti-Freedom, Anti-Energy Nominee. “Raskin doesn’t see her potential new role merely as supervising a smooth-running economy and banking system. She sees her role as prophet and navigator of America’s future.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Vaccine Pusher Gov. Kathy Hochul’s Daughter-In-Law Is Top Lobbyist for Big Pharma.
NOW OUT: Knee Ability Zero. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Leftists Deeply Afraid Things Could Go Back To Normal.
Just look at the New York Times, which as mask mandates wind down, are reverting to their Luxury Beliefs from the Before Times: “Anxiety Over Climate Changes Lands on the Therapist’s Couch.” (Link safe; goes to NewsBusters.)
I’M SHOCKED IT’S THAT MANY: Ouch: Just 8% watch CNN ‘every day.’ “Many more, 48%, said they never or rarely tune in, and a combined 71% said they are in the ‘occasional’ to ‘never’ category.”
FIGHT THE POWER, STICK IT TO THE MAN: ‘Stand firm in your beliefs’: They tried — and failed — to cancel this conservative student.
THE TRIPLE LINDY OF PIVOTS: Democrats and the Corporate Media Are Trying to Rewrite the History on Their COVID-19 Response.
HE DID THAT: Study finds Biden’s climate policies added $1,000 to Americans’ energy bills in 2021. “Mr. Biden’s climate change policies coupled with rising inflation contributed to the highest single-year increase in energy costs in decades, found the analysis by the Heartland Institute.”
BE PREPARED: Augason Farms 30-Day 1-Person Emergency Food Supply. #CommissionEarned
WE’LL BE DOING SOME WORK ON THE SITE IN A BIT. You may want to access it at www.instapundit.com instead of pjmedia.com/instapundit.
THESE ARE THEIR PRINCIPLES AND IF YOU DON’T LIKE THEM… WELL, THEY HAVE OTHERS: Illinois College Students Want Hate-Crime Culprit Expelled — Until They Find Out Who She Is.
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: SpaceX loses 40 satellites to geomagnetic storm a day after launch.
YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH: GOP Ad Yanked From Airwaves Due to Images of Illegal Border Crossings. “Karrin Taylor Robson, a Republican immigration hawk running for governor of Arizona, was notified Monday by FS1, a subsidiary of Fox Sports, that her ad could no longer air until she proved migrants shown crossing the border in it were in fact illegal immigrants. The channel informed her campaign that it must supply ‘an affidavit that the ad was filmed along the border, as well as proof of the citizenship status of any individuals depicted,’ she said in a statement.”
IT’S THE CULMINATION OF A LONGSTANDING TREND: Former ACLU leader Ira Glasser slams organization’s ‘progressive’ new agenda. During the ACLU’s heyday, from the 1950s to the mid-1970s, it was a liberal organization, but one with a genuine commitment to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and due process. It’s been on a long, gradual decline since then into just another lefty pressure group. In my 2003 book, You Can’t Say That!, I identified significant slippage in the ACLU's commitment to civil liberties. I heard through the grapevine that then-ACLU president Nadine Strossen said that my depiction of her organization was inaccurate. I sent word back through my source that if she could identify any factual errors, I would be happy to publicly apologize and correct them. I never got a response.
OUCH: Requiring anyone to swear an oath to anything beyond to tell the truth in a legal proceeding is unAmerican.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEF: Dems, MSM Busy Tossing Their COVID Failures Into the Memory Hole. “The Democrats have been pivoting so forcefully on various COVID-related things this past week that I’m surprised they aren’t all dizzy and nauseated, the poor dears. Ivermectin, natural immunity, the efficacy of cloth masks, you name it, they’ve been Team 180. And being the party of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, they’ve been trying to erase the memory of their previous, horribly wrong policies.”
Remember in November.
WHY IS THE LEFT SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACISM? Project Veritas Exposes ESPN’s Ugly Racist Reality.