OPEN THREAD: How was your weekend?
Archive for 2023
January 8, 2023
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Space mining startups see a rich future on asteroids and the moon: “Nobody wants to think about a future in which humans don’t thrive. So it’s time for us to go into space.”
Actually, I think plenty of Greens and leftists want a future in which humans don’t thrive.
WHAT JANUARY 6 2021 WASN’T, JANUARY 8 2023 ACTUALLY KINDA IS: Pro-Bolsonaro protesters storm Brazil’s Congress, Supreme Court, presidential palace.
But there are some similarities: “Many in Brazil were questioning how the police had ignored abundant warnings, were unprepared or were somehow complicit. . . . Earlier videos on social media showed a limited presence of the capital’s military police; one showed officers standing by as people flooded into Congress, with one using his phone to record images. The capital’s security secretariat didn’t respond to a request from The Associated Press for comment about the relative absence of the police.”
MOST OF ITS PROBLEMS ARE SELF-INFLICTED: Japan Times: The global economy braces for a difficult year.
A slowdown is certain and the only question is how deep and widespread the slump will be. Downward pressures are severe: the ongoing war in Ukraine, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on China — as well as the possibility of another global wave of infections — and continuing efforts by central banks to squeeze inflation out of their economies. Japanese policymakers must prepare for these diverse challenges, ones that will be compounded by a change of leadership at the Bank of Japan and the prospect of instability in the Cabinet.
Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund, has warned that 2023 will be a “tougher” year than 2022, with “one-third of the world economy to be in recession” as the United States, China and the European Union all slow simultaneously. Last October, the IMF projected global growth of 3.2% in 2022 and 2.7% in 2023; in April, the estimate was 3.6% for both years.
Those are the worst numbers for the global economy in this century, with the exceptions of the 2007-2009 Global Financial Crisis and the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic. Expect a further downgrading from the IMF when it publishes its next update, which usually occurs later this month at the World Economic Forum’s Davos meeting.
It’s unfortunate that the global ruling class is so exceptionally awful.
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SORRY, CHINA: Chinese Military Officials Reportedly Concerned Over US Air Force’s Rapid Dragon Palletized Weapon System. “The Chinese military is reportedly alarmed by a new tactic being employed by the US Air Force. During a live-fire exercise over Norway, the service showcased the ability to deploy Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missiles (JASSM) from cargo aircraft, such as the Lockheed Martin C-130J Super Hercules, via the Rapid Dragon Palletized Weapon System. . . . Along with allowing the US Air Force to initiate attacks from outside of dangerous areas, it means cargo aircraft can be temporarily repurposed as standoff bombers, a cost-effective measure.”
THE WAR ON CIVIL RIGHTS, 21ST CENTURY “MASSIVE RESISTANCE” EDITION: New Year, Old Story: Anti-Gun Blue States Renew Attacks on Firearm Makers, Gun-Owning Americans.
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JONATHAN TURLEY: “We Don’t Do This:” Adam Schiff and the Underbelly of American Censorship.
In the latest tranche of “Twitter Files,” journalist Matt Taibbi revealed that Twitter balked at Schiff’s demand that Twitter suspend an array of posters or label their content as “misinformation” and “reduce the visibility” of them. Among those who Schiff secretly tried to censor was New York Post columnist Paul Sperry.
Sperry drew Schiff’s ire by writing about a conversation allegedly overheard by one of his sources. Sperry’s article, which appeared in RealClearInvestigations, cited two sources as overhearing two White House staffers discussing how to remove newly-elected President Trump from office. The article raised the possibility of bias on the part of an alleged key player in launching the first Trump impeachment, CIA analyst Eric Ciaramella. The sources reportedly said that Ciaramella was in a conversation with Sean Misko, a holdover from the Obama administration who later joined Schiff’s staff. The conversation — in Sperry’s words — showed that “just days after [Trump] was sworn in they were already trying to get rid of him.”
Rather than simply refute the allegation, Schiff wanted Sperry and other critics silenced. His office reportedly laid out steps to cleanse Twitter of their criticism, including an instruction to “remove any and all content about Mr. Misko and other Committee staff from its service — to include quotes, retweets, and reactions to that content.”
The date of Schiff’s non-public letter in November 2020 is notable: Earlier that year, I wrote a column for The Hill criticizing Schiff for pushing for censorship of misinformation in a letter that he sent to social media companies. His office promptly objected to the very suggestion that Schiff supported censorship.
We now know Schiff was actively seeking to censor specific critics on social media. These likely were viewed as more than “requests” since Schiff was sending public letters threatening possible legislative action against these same companies. He wanted his critics silenced on social media. After all, criticizing his investigations or staff must, by definition, be misinformation — right?
Over to you, Kevin McCarthy: McCarthy: ‘Adam Schiff will no longer be on the Intel Committee when I become Speaker.’
Anything beyond that?
OLDER MEN, YOUNGER WOMEN: IT’S NATURE’S WAY. Study reveals average age at conception for men versus women over past 250,000 years. “According to the study, published today in Science Advances and co-authored by IU post-doctoral researcher Richard Wang, the average age that humans had children throughout the past 250,000 years is 26.9. Furthermore, fathers were consistently older, at 30.7 years on average, than mothers, at 23.2 years on average, but the age gap has shrunk in the past 5,000 years.”
SHOCKING NEWS FROM 1898: Exercise, sports: A natural antidepressant for teens.
BIPARTISAN SUPPORT! The Illegal Migrant Busing Program Wins in the End.
Four months ago, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis committed a prosecutable offense. At least, that’s what his more hysterical critics snarled as they processed their inchoate frustration with the governor’s shuttling of displaced migrants to the rarified atmosphere of Martha’s Vineyard. His alleged crime pales in comparison to Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s, who sent thousands of migrants north from the border towns where they congregate to cities in the Northeast and Midwest. The humanitarian crisis these governors disaggregated exposed them to ill-defined legal consequences, their critics insisted. Well, these Republicans are in good company. Colorado’s Democratic Gov. Jarred Polis may soon join them both in the dock.
“We were notified yesterday that the governor of Colorado is now stating that they are going to be sending migrants to places like New York and Chicago,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams told reporters on Tuesday, making a splash Polis might have hoped to avoid. “This is just unfair for local governments to have to take on this national obligation,” Adams complained, adding that he was only informed of that this effort was underway the night before.
When contacted by Politico, Polis’s administration defended itself. Denver is only assisting asylum seekers in their efforts to reach their final destinations inside the United States, and they’ve been doing so for weeks. It’s a logical and justified response to an influx of migrants, which has overwhelmed public services and forced Colorado’s capital city to declare a state of emergency. Moreover, the program is fully financed by legitimately allocated funds, and professionals are overseeing the needs of the migrants themselves. Polis insisted that it’s “terrible” that “people are being used as political props” by some unnamed scoundrels. By contrast, he insisted, “what we are doing here is just honoring our values by treating people with dignity and respect.”
How Polis’s migrant distribution program differs appreciably from those authored by Abbott and DeSantis is, however, a mystery.
Earlier: Sanctuary Cities Seethe as Illegal Immigrants Actually Arrive.
The surest sign that public policies are simply virtue signals is when the messages don’t cost anything. The easiest way to tell when that signal starts to fail is to watch politicians flounder as the costs start to rise and voters demand relief.
It was free—and meaningless—for progressive churches to post banners calling themselves “nuclear free zones” during the Reagan era. Their dwindling congregations loved it. It was free, after George Floyd‘s murder, to post woke catechism signs on your front lawn, proclaiming “In this house, we believe: Black Lives Matter, women’s rights are human rights, no human is illegal” and so on. Maybe the neighbors gave you high-fives. And for years it has been free for deep-blue cities to proclaim themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants. That’s changing now that voters want some sanctuary for themselves.
Changes like this happen when voters realize the old virtue signals actually entail serious costs—and that they will have to pay them. That is exactly what’s happening in New York City and Washington D.C. now that Texas governor Greg Abbott is sending those cities a few busloads of illegal immigrants from his state.
These progressive bastions were silent when the Biden administration flew planeloads of illegal immigrants to suburban airports in the middle of the night. TV coverage was prohibited, and the arrivals were secretly dispersed. Abbott’s buses, by contrast, arrive downtown greeted by local TV crews. Now you can hear the politicians screech.
To paraphrase Sarah Hoyt in October, Adams’ mouth wrote the checks; he should pay for them.
CHRISTOPHER RUFO: The Quiet Right.
Though few have noticed, this is already happening. A “Quiet Right” is patiently, and nearly invisibly, building a viable counterculture.
The main locus of this movement is in education, where conservative families have created robust alternatives to the secular and predominantly left-wing public education system. Many have turned to homeschooling, which has seen double-digit growth in recent years. Others have enrolled their children in a fast-growing network of “classical schools,” which have returned to the traditional liberal arts curriculum of logic, rhetoric, grammar, mathematics, Latin, and music. And the small but influential network of traditional, faith-based colleges, such as Hillsdale, Benedictine, Thomas Aquinas, and University of Dallas, have seen record-breaking enrollment.
In the cultural domain, the Quiet Right has broken significant new ground. In the arts, right-wing pseudonymous authors have created new magazines, publishing houses, and literary prizes. More mainstream companies, such as the Daily Wire, have sought to create conservative media institutions at industrial scale. Figurative painting and neo-classical architecture have gained appreciation. At the grassroots level, faith-based and family-oriented social media content have seen rapid growth, with “mom bloggers” revalorizing family and motherhood and a “back-to-the-land” movement appealing to classic Americana imagery and offering an alternative to millennial aesthetics.
The Quiet Right is also reshaping America’s social geography. The past decade has seen a movement to repopulate small towns and create culturally moderate communities that offer an alternative to misgoverned coastal enclaves. Covid-19 accelerated this shift, with many families packing their bags and seeking more ideologically compatible communities. They fled California, Illinois, and New York for Florida and Texas. Even within states, the flight to the suburbs is, in large part, a flight from left-wing culture and policy.
But haven’t we been here before, many times? At the end of 1969, Time magazine named “The American Middle Class” its collective “Man of the Year,” and with Henry Luce having left the building a few years prior, the magazine was left wondering just who are these strange conservative people in flyover country — the people his magazine was originally created to serve.
BUT WHY DID THE PYTHON CROSS THE ROAD? 15-foot Burmese python spotted crossing Florida road.
BUT IS THAT GOOD, OR IS IT JUST FEARMONGERING DEPRIVING PATIENTS OF NEEDED PAIN RELIEF? Study: Informing doctors of fatal ODs linked to fewer opioid prescriptions. The study doesn’t appear to address that, but it’s at least possible that the optimum level of prescribing for, say, 97% of patients increases the risk of overdose for, say, 1%.
HERE COMES THE NEW COVID SCARE: The Hill, one of the most reliable weathervanes of the Establishment Media’s evolving narratives, looks to be taking up the latest COVID fear-mongering.
They’ve got a scary new name for the alleged latest variant, the XBB.1.5 and the panicky headline: “What We Know About the XBB.1.5 COVID Variant Sweeping the Northeast.” Reports The Hill’s Joseph Choi:
“The XBB.1.5 omicron subvariant is raising concerns of a potential surge in COVID-19 cases as it sweeps across the Northeast. Officials have warned in recent weeks that the strain is highly transmissible, can more easily evade the immunity offered by vaccines or prior infections than past variants — and is likely to drive cases up around the country.”
One thing you might note in the story – the absence of actual case data. Nowhere does Choi quote the latest CDC case data, perhaps because as of December 31, 2022, there were only 5,522 new cases and the seven-day weekly average was 52,879, down from the 87,414 on September 1, 2022, and way down from the 700,000+ average in January 2022.
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: New York City schools ban AI chatbot that writes essays and answers prompts.
New York City schools have banned ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence chatbot that generates human-like writing including essays, amid fears that students could use it to cheat.
According to the city’s education department, the tool will be forbidden across all devices and networks in New York’s public schools. Jenna Lyle, a department spokesperson, said the decision stems from “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of contents”.
ChatGPT was created by OpenAI, an independent artificial intelligence research foundation co-founded by Elon Musk in 2015. Released last November, OpenAI’s chatbot is able to create stunningly human-like responses to a wide range of questions and various writing prompts. ChatGPT is trained on a large sample of text taken from the internet and interacts with users in a dialogue format.
According to OpenAI, the conversation format allows ChatGPT “to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests”. Users can request rephrasings, summaries and expansions on the texts that it churns out.
The decision to ban the chatbot in New York schools comes amid widespread fears that it could encourage students to plagiarize.
ChatGPT seems very limited right now, but it’s only going to get smarter:
The bot doesn’t work perfectly. It has a tendency to “hallucinate” facts that aren’t strictly true, which technology analyst Benedict Evans described as “like an undergraduate confidently answering a question for which it didn’t attend any lectures. It looks like a confident bullshitter that can write very convincing nonsense.”
It’s the early days — Skynet isn’t smiling just yet, but it will eventually.
JOYCE CAROL OATES PERPLEXED BY OLD PHOTO OF WINSOME SEARS HOLDING A RIFLE; ‘SHE IS IN NO DANGER.’ “Sears is a badass who served in the Marines and supports Second Amendment rights. That’s why she’s posing with the rifle. It’s not a candid action shot from the battlefield. But Oates is (playing?) dumb by thinking Sears is preparing to shoot something.”
C’mon Joyce, you can figure this one out, if you wanted to.
ITS ORIGIN AND PURPOSE, STILL A TOTAL MYSTERY: Media Blackout Over Terror Incident At Vegas Power Plant.
The US power grid is under attack as extremists shoot, sabotage, and vandalize electrical equipment at power stations. One of the highest-profile attacks was when two men used guns to paralyze a substation in Washington state on Christmas Day, leaving thousands without electricity. The incident made national news, but strangely enough, another attack last week on the Las Vegas power grid went unnoticed by the national press.
Mohammad Mesmarian, 34, rammed his car through the gate of a solar power generation plant outside Las Vegas on Wednesday and set his car on fire, intending to damage a massive transformer, 8 News Now reported.
“Employees at the plant said they found a car smoldering in a generator pit,” 8 News Now said, adding the Mega Solar Array facility provides power to 13 properties on the Las Vegas Strip, all belonging to MGM Resorts.
Investigators believe Mesmarian “siphoned gasoline from his car to put on wires at the transformer,” 8 News Now said, citing documents from investigators.
“Mesmarian clarified he burned the Toyota Camry,” police said. “Mesmarian said he burned the vehicle at a Tesla solar plant and did it ‘for the future.'”
Move along, nothing to see here.
ROGER KIMBALL: The New McCarthyism.
The bottom line is that McCarthy’s prerogatives as speaker have been curtailed, which is a good thing. Also, he has made public promises on important matters that it will be difficult to walk away from without cost. At the same time, I get the distinct feeling that not a lot is going to change. Will there be a meaningful investigation of the January 6 protest at the Capitol? (Where was Nancy Pelosi? Why was the offer of deploying the National Guard not accepted? Who, finally, is Ray Epps and was he correct in saying he “orchestrated” the protest and entry into the Capitol?) Will the partisan and grotesquely un-democratic actions of the January 6 committee presided over by anti-Trump fanatics receive the scrutiny they deserve? I doubt it.
I expect the changes to the people’s business-as-usual to be mostly cosmetic under the reign of this new McCarthyism. I might, of course, be proved wrong. I hope I will be.
Read the whole thing.
COMBAT BAD POSTURE: Trigger Point Grid Patented Multi-Density Foam Massage Roller. #CommissionEarned
GET A JOB, KIDS: Dining hall staff prevents theft as protesters demand free food, tuition.
Student protests are problematic, as they constitute the flaunting of class privilege.
FREE SPEECH: FIGHT THE POWER. Appeals court rules in favor of teacher who wore MAGA hat to racial bias trainings.
In pursuing diversity and equity, it’s important to teach colleagues how to tolerate people and ideas they dislike.