K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Teacher Hid ‘Missing’ Boy in Her Home for Two Years, Police Say.
Archive for 2022
October 23, 2022
DEAL OF THE DAY: Kitchen Knife Set With Block. #CommissionEarned
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Pro-life students told to ‘kill themselves’ during campus event.
Remember when higher education was justified as promoting civil and intelligent discussion?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Students upset at Stanford U. email advising against participation in violent protests. “Again, the email warned about taking part in violent protests.”
UKRAINE: RUSSIAN OFFENSIVE CAMPAIGN ASSESSMENT, OCTOBER 22. “Russian forces continued to withdraw from western Kherson Oblast while preparing to conduct delaying actions that will likely be only partially effective.”
Plus: “Reports of Russian volunteer and mobilized soldiers facing debt and new difficulties upon their return from fighting in Ukraine have exacerbated domestic dissatisfaction with the implementation of Russian mobilization. The Russian government likely responded to this dissatisfaction by approving a deferment of tax and insurance premium payments for mobilized personnel and business leaders who are the sole owners of their companies on October 22. However, this deferment does not address all cases in which soldiers face punitive measures upon their return. Russian Telegram channels criticized a judge in Nizhny Novogorod on October 22 who sentenced a BARS (Russian Combat Reserve) volunteer soldier to three months imprisonment for failing to perform court-ordered punitive labor while fighting in Ukraine. The channels also claimed the Russian National Bolsheviks Party hung a banner condemning the judge for this and other decisions against the ‘patriotic public.'”
MISSING FROM THIS POLITICO STORY ON THE LOS ANGELES MAYOR’S RACE: Any suggestion that the challenger is doing surprisingly well because L.A. city government has been a dumpster fire. Instead it’s attributed to advertising spends.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: White House Report Card: Heading south at worst time for Biden and Democrats.
WHAT IS IT WITH DEMOCRATS AND CHILD RAPE? A Student Was Sodomized With a Pole at His Public High School. This California Congressional Hopeful Rejected His Damages Claim.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Fanttik Cordless Screwdriver Kit 14pcs. #CommissionEarned
XI HAULING AWAY HIS PREDECESSOR IS SORT OF LIKE WHAT BIDEN’S TRYING TO DO WITH TRUMP: Former Chinese leader Hu Jintao pulled out of his seat and led away during public appearance.
THIS IS BULLSHIT: Ejaculate Responsibly?
Responsibly? Men are so responsible, they’re charged with child support when the ejaculation occurs when they’re raped while unconscious, when it occurs into a condom that is later salvaged from a trash can, or when they’re pubescent boys molested by adult women. See this: Fatherhood by Conscription: Nonconsensual Insemination and the Duty of Child Support.
Nathaniel was a California teenager who became a father in 1995. The mother of Nathaniel’s child was named Ricci, and at the time of conception, she was thirty-four years old. Nathaniel, however, was merely fifteen. Although Nathaniel admitted to having sex with Ricci voluntarily about five times, the fact that he was under sixteen years of age at the time made it legally impossible for him to consent to sexual intercourse. In other words, under California law, Nathaniel was not only a new father, but was also a victim of statutory rape. Nonetheless, in a subsequent action for child support, the court held that Nathaniel was liable for the support of the child who was born as a result of his rape. According to the court, “Victims have rights. Here, the victim also has responsibilities.”
Post-Dobbs, I can see the appeal of trying to shift responsibility for pregnancy to men, but the fact is men have never enjoyed “reproductive rights” as women have known them. If anything, Dobbs narrows that gender gap a bit. The notion that it’s only men who resist condom use because it interferes with sexual pleasure is also a fiction.
But post-Dobbs there’s a market for attacks on men and their sexuality, so this should do well.
But it’s not really new: “The rise of personal genomics has not created this phenomenon, of course. Nonpaternity results can arise even in the course of routine medical testing. What happens if a doctor sees that a baby’s blood type could not have come from its father? (If the baby’s is AB and the father’s turns up O, the doctor knows that something is amiss.) In the last few decades, the medical establishment has decided that these findings should be concealed, to protect the mother’s privacy and avoid unnecessary harm.”
“Unnecessary harm” to whom?
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Biden’s Diesel Fuel Supply Crisis Could Soon Cripple America in Ways Never Before Seen.
Related: Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class.
Expect Biden to make some sort of emergency declaration shortly after the polls close in November.
October 22, 2022
A BING NEWS SEARCH SHOWS NOTHING ON HIM IN THE PAST 24 HOURS: ABC Journalist Missing Since FBI Raided His Home And Allegedly Seized Classified Info.
OPEN THREAD: Don’t worry, be happy.
Yeah, even David Brooks has noticed that Kari Lake is addressing things voters care about.
DARWIN’S RADIO: Ancient Virus Fragments in Our DNA Are Activating Where We Least Expect. “Scientists estimate about 8 percent of a person’s genome is made up of human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs). When alive and active, retroviruses have the ability to insert a template of their genome into the DNA of a host cell, adding to the set of genetic instructions that cell follows. Many HERVs have since gone extinct, but bits of their genomes – while no longer adding up to an infectious virus – can still influence our biology to this day. For both good and bad.”
And yes, activation of Human Endogenous Retroviruses was the plot device in Greg Bear’s Darwin’s Radio. Which was a pretty good book, as I recall. #CommissionEarned
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, VLADIMIR: Russian-installed authorities order evacuation of Kherson in face of Ukrainian counteroffensive.
I CERTAINLY HAVE SOME CHANGES IN MIND: Time for Changes at the FDA, Expert Group Says — The agency’s reputation has “eroded” over the last few decades, a new report suggests. “Batt and Fugh-Berman outlined four areas in which the agency should consider changes to bring it back in line with its mission, including transparency and accountability, commitment to innovation, standards of evidence for drug marketing, and value in the healthcare landscape overall. They said that to improve transparency and accountability, the agency should clarify every advisory board member’s conflicts of interest, increase the diversity of opinions from those members when grappling with politically charged issues, and minimize use of invited speakers with ties to a drug sponsor.”
GOODER AND HARDER: The town John Fetterman ran is in ruins.
After reading about “Braddock’s Defeat,” which seems to be an ongoing saga in this sad place, and spotting only a handful of Fetterman for Senate signs (there were probably twice as many Terrible Towel signs supporting the Pittsburgh Steelers), I visited a small grocery/general store. I asked three men shopping there if they thought Fetterman made their town better while he was mayor. Adam glanced at me with a look that said, “Are you kidding me?”
“Hell no,” he drawled. “Look at this place!”
I have truly never seen a more miserable place than Braddock, Pennsylvania. Google Images gives you the general idea, but until you see street after street of utter neglect, garbage, and decrepitude, you can’t get a sense of how bad it really is.
Yet Fetterman is above it all. Literally. He and his family live in a huge Braddock loft they spent nine months renovating. Adam told me he’s lived in Braddock his whole life and evidently is a regular on Braddock Ave. (When he was paying for his iced tea, the cashier presented him with a pack of cigarettes, and he took one for the road.) “How come I’ve never seen Fetterman or met him?” Adam wondered.
And the hits just keep on coming: Alrighty Uncle Fester! John Fetterman dragged for comparing murderers he voted to release to Morgan Freeman.
I’VE WORRIED ABOUT THIS: The United States is in a Coffin Corner.
“Coffin corner” has a very specific meaning to flyers. It’s the place on any aircraft’s performance chart where g-forces, airspeed, and the weight of the aircraft work against each other, causing the aircraft to stall and become uncontrollable. It’s a position of profound vulnerability for any pilot. Even if they recover control of their aircraft, they will have lost altitude and velocity.
Over the past few days, for those who know what they are looking at, we have realized with stark clarity that the United States is now in a “coffin corner” of its own, facing a window of strategic vulnerability unlike any it has experienced in the past two generations.
On Tuesday, the conservative Heritage Foundation released its annual “Index of U.S. Military Strength.” For the first time in the near-decade-long history of the index, it rated the U.S. military as “weak.” Implicitly criticizing multiple administrations, Heritage’s analysts charged that U.S. military forces are under-strength, under-trained, and under-funded, and thus are not ready to meet the current challenges of great-power competition. Heritage highlighted in particular the small size and poor material condition of the U.S. Navy and Air Force, which will be critical in facing a potential conflict in the Asia–Pacific region.
Following on the heels of Heritage’s alarming study came the earnings report of the Lockheed-Martin corporation, the largest defense company in the world. In it, Lockheed CEO Jim Taiclet reported that the company had expanded its efforts to produce more High Mobility Artillery Rocket System (HIMARS) missile launchers. Twenty of the HIMARS have already been sent to Ukraine, and another 18 have been promised to that beleaguered nation, draining U.S. stocks of these launchers. Support for Ukraine has also drawn down the nation’s supplies of the Javelin anti-tank weapon and large-caliber artillery rounds. The implication of Lockheed’s earnings report is that it will take years for the U.S. to restore its inventories of these weapons to the levels at which they sat before Russia invaded Ukraine. The takeaway is that supplies of the weapons central to the American way of war, dependent as it is upon precision-guided munitions and asymmetric technological advantage, are low — and the nation no longer has the robust defense-industrial base necessary to rapidly replenish them.
As if Heritage’s alarm bells and Lockheed’s dispiriting earnings report weren’t bad enough, the Biden administration announced on Tuesday that it would withdraw another 15 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which was created following the 1973 OPEC oil embargo to provide the nation with enough oil to survive both internally and externally driven crises. Once those 15 million barrels are released, Biden will have withdrawn nearly 180 million barrels from the nearly 700-million-barrel reserve to offset the political pressures that accompanied the rising prices at the pump touched off by Executive Order 13990, which he signed on the day of his inauguration to decrease the nation’s dependency upon fossil fuels, promote green energy, and combat climate change. The nation no longer produces enough energy at home to meet its own needs, and disagreements with other oil-producing nations have tightened global supplies, increasing the average price per barrel. If war comes soon, we will not have the internal reserves to fight on our own, nor do we presently have the strong relationships with key oil producers such as Saudi Arabia that would guarantee supplies in a time of conflict.
Today, the United States faces an active threat in Europe, where our NATO allies have under-invested in their own defense for a generation, only to find Russia invading their next-door neighbor. Those allies are now depending upon us to strengthen NATO in the short term while they rebuild their own forces on the continent. Meanwhile, China, which under the leadership of Xi Jinping has committed genocide against the Uyghurs and viciously suppressed democracy in Hong Kong, is now casting its malevolent gaze upon our traditional ally and partner, Taiwan. Yet we have been starkly reminded that our military is too weak, our industrial base too atrophied, and our strategic reserves too emptied to meet these current threats.
In the past, we planned as a nation to be able to fight two major regional conflicts simultaneously. Today, we find ourselves questioning if we could fight even one. Like the pilots in Top Gun: Maverick at the end of their attack run, we have struggled upward out of the valley only to find ourselves out of speed, energy, and maneuverability — and under attack from all sides. We are in a dangerous strategic “coffin corner” of our own making.
The nation needs to urgently come to grips with its strategic setting and make purposeful decisions on its path forward.
Coffin corners come from pilot error. Our society is piloted by idiots who have never paid a price for failure in their lives, and never expect to.
That said, Lockheed’s bottom line is not an indicator of civilizational viability. I also think that almost every nation in the world faces a coffin corner of its own — Russia and China certainly do — because they’re pretty much all led by idiots. But why?
STOCHASTIC TERRORISM: A game of rhetorical asymmetry.
The ultimate flaw in accusing Sarah Palin of being responsible for the shooting of Gabby Giffords was that concrete details were provided to support it. When concrete details are provided, they are able to be held up to scrutiny.
By focusing on specific actions of Sarah Palin, whether by proxy through her political action committee releasing the target map, or her tweets using gun analogies for political battles, the fact that the shooter was not only disconnected from their influence but disconnected from reality overall interrupts that narrative.
But the term “Stochastic Terrorism” eliminates this problem. Someone can be ‘guilty’ of “Stochastic Terrorism” without any attacks even occurring.
Stochastic Terrorism is a truly clever piece of rhetoric that one can admire for its pure propagandistic potency.
The concept itself is certainly coherent. In almost any population of sufficient size, there will be people — commonly considered “crazy” or at least considered “unhinged” — who get caught up in political emotions in a way that is more extreme than the average citizen, and are set on a course that ultimately results in them committing violent acts.
This possibility is not often predictable in specifics (e.g. ‘Mark Stouffers’ will shoot ‘Debbie Brownstone’ on June 12th) but predictable in the sense that someday, someone, will commit some act. This randomness, the inability to know when, who, or what will be involved but knowing eventually something will, is the ‘stochastic’ part of Stochastic Terrorism.
If one assumes people motivated to carry out an attack are not attacking purely at random (that is, attacking just anybody who happens to be nearby at the time), they will attack with targets in mind. That suggests someone with broad reach can count on somebody listening to them can be activated like a Manchurian Candidate and that Manchurian Candidate will focus on the targets the Stochastic Terrorist wants.
The lack of direct call for violence is then framed as being strategic — it creates plausible deniability. The Stochastic Terrorist gets “the best of both worlds.” They get to “mathematically” rely on their targets being the victims of an attack with no record to be found of them ever actually asking anyone to do so.
By labeling someone as a Stochastic Terrorist you can influence others to associate some of the most immoral and violent acts imaginable with the person being labeled regardless if any violent acts have occurred.
Read the whole thing.
UM: Pfizer plans to sell COVID-19 vaccines for up to $130 per dose because of its ‘value.’
Related: Health experts concerned over low demand for COVID boosters.
And here we see what’s really going on: Analysis: Falling demand for COVID boosters puts price hikes on the table. “With most Americans delaying or skipping new COVID-19 booster shots, analysts and investors are now predicting far fewer will be given each year, pushing the number of shots well below annual flu vaccinations. With fewer shots needed, vaccine makers including Pfizer Inc , partner BioNTech SE , rival Moderna Inc (MRNA.O) and Novavax Inc (NVAX.O) could have to hike prices as much as three times current levels if they hope to meet Wall Street revenue forecasts for the shots for 2023 and beyond, several analysts said.”
Demand is falling, let’s jack up the price! isn’t usually a viable strategy, but I guess they’re banking on the number of folks who are forced to get the booster to cover their revenue issues.