LIFE IS EVERYWHERE (AT LEAST ON EARTH): Scientists Find A Whole New Ecosystem Hiding Beneath Earth’s Seafloor. “Underneath the seafloor of this well-studied site, the international team of researchers found veins of subsurface fluids swimming with life that has never been seen before. It’s a whole new world we didn’t know existed.”
Archive for 2023
August 9, 2023
WELL, THAT’S A GOOD WIFE: Indiana woman fatally shoots man after he holds gun to her husband’s head.
After last summer’s ruling on abortion, attacks on the Supreme Court were inevitable. The majority decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health––that there is no constitutional right to abortion––broke with a long-standing precedent that a majority of the public supported while taking away a right that tens of millions valued, factors that stoked a backlash as significant as any the Court had seen in decades.
What’s striking and harder to understand is the similarly furious backlash to the Supreme Court’s most recent term, which began in October 2022 and culminated in rulings announced this summer. That term encompasses 60 cases in total. The nonpartisan National Constitution Center flagged 13 of those cases as significant. Taken together, they show a Court that is broadly in step with public opinion and whose justices form shifting coalitions across ideological lines.
Maybe both backlashes stemmed from the same cause.
UPDATE: From the comments: “Glenn, the histrionic attacks on the US Supreme Court are coming from the Democrat senators on Senate Judiciary Committee and their looney-tune staff. The histrionics are coming from those who complained about the lack of decorum exhibited by Donald Trump.”
WHEN WOMEN GET ALTERNATIVES IT MEANS MEN NEED TO RAISE THEIR GAME. WHEN MEN GET ALTERNATIVES IT’S AWFUL AND MUST BE STOPPED. AI “girlfriends” called a threat to women’s rights.
Related: AI and the Screwfly Succession.
MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Texas Outlaws Men In Women’s College Sports.
PAULA BOLYARD: This Is Getting So Ridiculous. Check Out What the Big Tech Goons Are up to Now. “The Powers That Be don’t want us writing about climate change or COVID-19 — unless we agree that climate change is an immediate existential threat to the world and that the CDC and Anthony Fauci got everything right in their response to COVID. Telling the truth about transgenderism is another topic that gets us slapped with flags.”
TO BE REPLACED BY EVS: Nissan Titan Pickup Killed, Ends Production Next Year.
JUST ANOTHER BROKEN EGG: Why Kamala Harris Won’t Be Asked About the Suicide of a Newspaperman She Persecuted.
REMEMBER THE SBARRO BOMBING: It happened before 9/11 and so tends not to be recalled among the Islamic terrorist onslaughts that characterized the period. The Lid’s Jeff Dunetz offers this sobering observation on the 22nd anniversary of mass murder in a pizzaria:
“It is important to remember this attack, not merely to memorialize the innocent victims whose only crime was to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, but as a reminder of how much of the world appeases terrorists claiming that there is a ‘military wing’ of a terrorist organization operating separately from its terrorist partners.
“Remember the members of the U.S. Congress who support the BDS movement, not realizing that an attack on the Jewish State is an attack on the entire Jewish nation, no matter where those Jewish people live.
“Remember how the terrorist attacks on Israel made since 2001 are blamed on Israel, or how. The American news media takes the terrorists’ words as truth without doing their jobs and discover that their versions of truth are lies.”
MATT MARGOLIS: The Latest Trump Indictment Looks Like It’s Backfiring.
TRANSPARENCY IS A B—H IF YOUR NAME IS FAUCI: He told Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) during Senate testimony under oath that he didn’t know “as a fact” if he’d been paid royalties by drug and medical research firms while at NIH. Now the truth is known, thanks to OpenTheBooks.com.
And as a result, the former White House Chief Medical Adviser/Director of the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) and highest-paid federal employee can expect to be summoned back to the Senate for a chat with the Kentucky senator.
READER FAVORITE: Amazon Fire HD 10 tablet. #CommissionEarned
SPACE: Looking back toward cosmic dawn − astronomers confirm the faintest galaxy ever seen.
The intense ultraviolet light from the first generations of stars and galaxies is thought to have burned through the hydrogen fog, transforming the universe into what we see today. While previous generations of telescopes lacked the ability to study those early cosmic objects, astronomers are now using the James Webb Space Telescope’s superior technology to study the stars and galaxies that formed in the immediate aftermath of the Big Bang.
I’m an astronomer who studies the farthest galaxies in the universe using the world’s foremost ground- and space-based telescopes. Using new observations from the Webb telescope and a phenomenon called gravitational lensing, my team confirmed the existence of the faintest galaxy currently known in the early universe. The galaxy, called JD1, is seen as it was when the universe was only 480 million years old, or 4% of its present age.
And scientists are really just getting started with JWST.
SPYING: Research shows snoops can decipher keystrokes during Zoom calls.
Insert Jeffrey Toobin joke here.
COWABUNGA, HUNGA-TONGA: “The Hunga-Tonga eruption is rapidly becoming the lab leak of climate science.”
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP [VIP]: Well Done, Everybody — Anheuser-Busch Is in Real Trouble Now.
Plus:
- Indiana Mike and the Facepalm of Doom.
- It’s vital that California stop the shoplifter-stoppers.
- How not to go to a concert.
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
TOO MANY: How many paid FBI operatives are “villains?”
In 2011, a group of Muslim men who became known as the “Newburgh Four” were convicted of plotting to blow up some Synagogues in New York and shoot down National Guard planes. It was a shocking plan, but sadly not all that surprising in the post-9/11 world. Last month, however, a federal judge in New York ordered them to be granted a compassionate early release after reviewing the FBI’s case that led to the men’s arrests. She described the men as “hapless, easily manipulated and penurious petty criminals,” saying that the real “villain” in the case was the paid FBI informant who lured them into the plot. She also described the FBI and the United States government as “the real coconspirator” in the case.
Well, that’s a federal judge talking, not some conspiracy theorist. Plus: “Now another convicted Muslim terrorist named Yassin Aref is seeking the same form of relief. The former Imam has spent 14 years behind bars after being convicted in an FBI sting of an alleged plot involving a stinger missile. According to his attorney, he too was the victim of a paid FBI informant with a long record of shady activities himself. And considering how the FBI has been behaving over the past few years, we should probably give some consideration to these claims. . . . If this is how the FBI recruits paid informants, it’s difficult to argue that the Bureau should be given the benefit of the doubt by default. . . . There is clearly something very wrong at the FBI and these problems have been present since well before Christopher Wray took over and apparently turned the corruption dial up to eleven. For a judge to refer to FBI informants as ‘villains’ doesn’t sound like hyperbole given everything else we’ve learned. That tag could probably be applied to some of their agents and most of the top leadership at the Bureau these days.”
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Biden Has Handed Taliban Over $2 BILLION In 2 Years.
The SIGAR report found that approximately $1.7 billion “remained available for possible disbursement” at the time writing. The Beacon notes that “it is more than likely that a sizable portion of these funds will end up in the terror group’s coffers.”
The Taliban are viewing international aide as a “revenue stream,” according to the report, which further states that the group is “comfortable accepting foreign support insofar as they can closely monitor the organizations, including restricting and controlling them, and claim some credit for the provision of the benefits.”
The findings come after John Sopko, head of SIGAR, told the House Foreign Affairs Committee in April that he “cannot assure this committee or the American taxpayer we are not currently funding the Taliban,” and accused the Biden administration of blocking his efforts to find out.
Is the big guy getting his cut?
GREAT MOMENTS IN FAILURE THEATER: Rand Paul just escalated the fight to hold Dr. Fauci criminally accountable.
IF IT WERE FREEZING IT WOULD JUST BE WEATHER: EU climate report: July was hottest month in recorded history.
AND THEN THERE WERE EIGHT: These Republicans Have Met the Criteria for the First GOP Debate.