YOU CAN’T DEFEND YOURSELF. THE LEFT LOVES SAVAGES: Jose Alba and assault: update on the NY bodega case.
Archive for 2022
July 19, 2022
I GREW UP WITHOUT AIR-CONDITIONING, IN A MORE TEMPERATE CLIMATE: Those days before air conditioning.
Anyone trying to get me to do that again can take a flying leap.
IT IS THE END OF THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT: Looking around: how the European Commission “rules” the world; media’s attempted “killing with silence”of global populist protests; meanwhile in China…
And I feel fine. (As for the European commission…. yeah.)
MORE OF THIS PLEASE: Pushback: PA school board settles lawsuit and will pay $300K for censoring critics.
THIS MAN RIGHT HERE IS ATTEMPTING SATIRE IN 2022: How to Add More LGBTQ characters to your fiction – a guest post by Frank Fleming.
Brave AND crazy.
WHAT IF THEY JUST IDENTIFY AS DEAD? Anthropologists to be barred from identifying sex of remains?
You know all of these ancient people would be thinking “What in heck is wrong with future humans, already?”
I DON’T KNOW. MY EXPERIENCE IS LEFTISTS CORRUPT FREE INSTITUTIONS: When lefty scholars land in right-wing think tanks.
July 18, 2022
CNN OCCASIONALLY GETS SOMETHING RIGHT: CNN Poll: Most Americans are discontented with Biden, the economy and the state of the country.
OPEN THREAD: Talk among yourselves.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Progressive public school teacher in a blue state: Things are as bad as you’ve heard.
He goes on to describe a couple of meetings where equity concerns were described in very blunt terms. For instance:
I once attended another meeting – lots of meetings when you’re a teacher! – where we were working to approve a new weekly schedule for students. When I said I was concerned that it would require leaving some sections of the curriculum untaught, a colleague said that might actually be a good thing, because most of our students are white and their test scores dropping slightly would help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state. Again, to clarify: I don’t mean my colleague had a a more nuanced approach to testing that a dishonest interlocutor could twist to sound like that. I mean my colleague literally spoke those words. (To be fair, one other teacher did speak up and challenge them this time, albeit very politely.)
Now, do those two anecdotes, no matter how explicitly I describe them, sound like something out of James Lindsay’s fever dreams? Yes! Are these things that did, in fact, happen? Also yes!
He concludes that the left has accidentally stumbled into a set of beliefs so crazy that to describe them accurately sounds like something made up, only they aren’t made up. He concludes, “I can’t keep pretending these ridiculous DEI schemes aren’t hurting the children we owe so much to. They are. It’s happening, right now.”
So instead of championing better performance from black students, his goal is to lower “help shrink the racial achievement gap in our state” by lowering the test scores of whites? It’s like the left is “the Culture of Repudiation,” or something.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China plans asteroid deflection test in 2026: reports.
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Chemists change the bonds between atoms in a single molecule for the first time.
THEY FEAR INSPIRATION AND EMULATION: Here’s Why The Media Don’t Want You To Know About The Massive Protests Going On Around The Globe: Discontent with left-wing policy failures is triggering massive protests all over the world. Just don’t expect to read all about it in the New York Times.
The press knows how to keep people riled up, or sedated, and adjusts its coverage according to which it desires on a particular subject at a particular time.
WHAT DID GREENS USE BEFORE CANDLES? ELECTRICITY! California Power Problems Hit Texas: Another state where unreliable renewable energy leads to power outages.
Temperatures in Texas climbed into the triple digits this week but this isn’t unusual. The problem is that wind power faltered, as it often does during hot spells. Wind accounts for about 30% of Texas’s power supply, but unlike fossil-fuel powered generators, wind can’t provide power when it doesn’t blow. Then gas-powered plants have to pick up the slack.
But gas plants alone couldn’t compensate for wind and meet surging demand for power. Texas’s grid operator had to urge residents to conserve electricity. Bitcoin miners were asked to power down to free up 1,000 megawatts of electricity—enough to power about 200,000 homes on a hot day. Soaring power prices gave them an incentive to do so.
Manufacturers also reported curtailing production owing to grid strains and surging prices. Toyota said Thursday it scaled back production at its San Antonio plant. Reuters reported that Toyota is considering stopping production most days before 2 p.m.—when demand for power increases—and shortening night shifts through mid-August.
One of Texas’s selling points to businesses has been its cheap and reliable energy. Under former Republican Gov. Rick Perry, the state invested heavily in building transmission lines to carry heavily subsidized wind power from West Texas to big cities. For a time, wind pushed down prices in the state’s deregulated power market.
But coal and nuclear plants have struggled to turn a profit running at reduced capacity, causing many to retire. As a result, the grid has become more dependent on gas-fired generators to compensate for unreliable renewables. Meantime, demand for power is increasing as Texas’s population grows. All of this pushed the state’s grid to a near-breaking point.
Gas and power prices are also increasing as regulatory obstacles to building new pipelines constrain supply. Texas’s residential electric rates have surged 70% since last June, costing the typical family $80 more per month.
It’s no surprise that Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke is using this against incumbent Gov. Greg Abbott, who isn’t leading in the polls by as much as he probably imagined. Texas needs to fix its emerging power problems lest it become California.
Yep.
QUESTION ASKED: What Can’t the Newspapers Put on Page One?
Way back in the 20th century, we learned in journalism classes that a news story assembles the facts in order of what’s most important to the public. But in this century, national newspapers too often assemble their information to pack a liberal wallop, and bury the information that, well – doesn’t serve the public, by their most compassionate “social justice” lights.
The July 14 USA Today provided a glaring example with all three of its front-page stories. At the top left was this headline: “Arrest made in rape of Ohio girl: 10-year-old got abortion in Indiana after Roe reversal.”
The story of a young girl crossing state lines for an abortion “quickly went viral,” the paper said. Her travel to Indiana “led to international attention and became a flashpoint in the national furor over the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.”
Reporters Bethany Bruner, Monroe Trombly, and Tony Cook added “Gerson Fuentes, 27, whose last address was an apartment in Columbus,” was arrested “after police said he confessed to raping the child on at least two occasions.” But nowhere in this article was there any focus on his immigration status.
A source at Immigration and Customs Enforcement told Fox News that “Fuentes is a Guatemalan national in the country illegally and that ICE has placed a detainer” on him. In the Columbus Dispatch, these same three reporters noted Fuentes “is believed to be undocumented,” but McPaper left that snippet on the proverbial cutting-room floor.
That doesn’t need “international attention.”
Read the whole thing.
Perhaps too many in the public now think of the media as as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, to coin an Insta-phrase.
Evergreen:
(Updated and bumped.)
FREDDIE DE BOER: Education Doesn’t Work 2.0: a comprehensive argument that education cannot close academic gaps. “The brute reality is that most kids slot themselves into academic ability bands early in life and stay there throughout schooling. We have a certain natural level of performance, gravitate towards it early on, and are likely to remain in that band relative to peers until our education ends. There is some room for wiggle, and in large populations there are always outliers. But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.”
It’s like human abilities are distributed according to some sort of . . . bell curve, or something.
Plus: “If you’re really dead set on education as the key to improving the economic fortunes of the disadvantaged, and you don’t think we can or should redistribute our way to a more just and equal society, and you’re fixated on moving kids from the bottom of the academic performance spectrum to the top, what can we do? What works? Nothing.”
Related, Paul Krugman even noticed this some years ago: “Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).”
QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Despite the odds and the obstacles, we push to move forward, that we are guided by what we see, that can be, unburdened by what has been.”
—Kamala Harris Quotes As Motivational Posters, Part 2, The Federalist, Wednesday.
THANK GOODNESS FOR JOE MANCHIN: Sanders Accuses Manchin of ‘Sabotage’ Against Biden Agenda.
DEAL OF THE DAY: MOSFiATA Fruit Peeling Knife. #CommissionEarned
JIM TREACHER: Libs Seethe After Good Guy with Gun Stops Bad Guy with Gun. It never happens, and also it’s bad that it happened. “It would be better if nobody committed murder at all, of course. But when someone stops a murderer before he can kill again, here’s the proper response: Thank you.”
IF HE DOESN’T LIKE THE LAW, HE SHOULD HAVE TO LIVE WITHOUT ITS PROTECTIONS: Not Content With Violating the 2nd Amendment, Gavin Newsom is Now Attacking 1st Amendment Rights.
But he’s not just a wannabe tyrant, he’s also a moron who knows nothing of gun safety: “Gov. Newsom held a .22-caliber youth model rifle and called it a ‘weapon of war’ while pointing it directly at the cameraman”
These people deserve neither respect nor obedience.
UKRAINE WAR: Will U.S. Rockets Turn the Tide? “What happens when Ukraine suddenly has the ability to reach out and touch Russian supplies and transportation networks far behind Russia’s artillery?”
DEAL OF THE DAY: NIUTA Intelligent Fast Instant Read Meat Thermometer. #CommissionEarned