YOU MUST WEAR THE RIBBON!! NHL Player’s Refusal to Wear Pride Jersey Sends Liberal Media Into Fits.
NHL defenceman Ivan Provorov refused to wear a rainbow flag gay pride jersey for the Flyers vs. Ducks game tonight (because he is a Russion Orthodox Christian) and what the media is doing to him is the Seinfeld Ribbon scene in real time👇👇👇 https://t.co/QQKdmituL3 pic.twitter.com/sfe0bph5qo
— Wokal Distance (@wokal_distance) January 18, 2023
ED POSTED THIS CRAZY ARTICLE A LITTLE WHILE AGO: Absolutely Insane: Connecticut Law Would Axe Fitness Requirements For Female Firefighters. For background on the disparate impact liability policy he alludes to, which started in the 1970s, try my article here.
Our anti-discrimination laws are soooo messed up, I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to fix them. But at least I’m trying ….
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China launches classified remote sensing and tech test satellites (video). “It’s unclear what the Yaogan 37 and Shiyan 22A and 22B satellites will be doing in orbit.”
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL: It’s Only Rock and Roll.
What at the time seemed like robust modern ideas about drugs and sex were in large part accidental prerogatives, conferred on the Baby Boom by its demographic might. In his autobiography, Wenner writes of managing his youthful “ambition and rebelliousness.” Youth brings those two things out in everybody. But they tend to be at odds. Elders capable of rewarding ambition do not look kindly on rebellion, and they outnumber the young. Today, for instance, only 31% of the population is under 24. Normally, adolescent rebellions end in a mix of emancipation and humiliation.
It was different for the Baby Boomers. Wenner, born at the very prow of the postwar Boom, turned 24 in 1970, when 46% of the country was his age or younger—an army of potential youth rebels large enough to tip the intergenerational balance. The more stridently youth put forward its demands, the more desperately grown-ups pled for “with-it” interlocutors. So for the early Baby Boomers, the ones born in the first decade after the war and today recently retired, adolescence had a different meaning than it has had for any American generation before or since. For them it was not a time of illusions, exclusions, and sputtering impotence. It was a time of camaraderie and effective conflict resolution that offered a set of best practices to last a lifetime. That is the story of Wenner, Rolling Stone, the 1970s, and the age of rock and roll more generally.
***
Wenner’s autobiography reads like a response to Joe Hagan’s Sticky Fingers, a better-written, more thorough, and more trustworthy life of Wenner published in 2017. Wenner grew up in California to parents who were striking it rich. They started a successful baby formula company before divorcing. His mother moved away to Hawaii when Wenner was in his early teens, telling him, “You’re on your own, Buster Brown.” It was a privileged kind of dysfunction. His father kept a ski house in the Rockies. His relatives lived on Park Avenue. Wenner was shipped to a Southern California prep school, carrying a terrible emotional imbalance: He was way oversupplied with self-importance and way undersupplied with love. He was sexually conflicted. He loved politics. He arrived at Berkeley in time for the Free Speech Movement—a brief outburst at which a bunch of earnest kids sang “We Shall Overcome” to protest the rules for the campus extracurricular-activities sign-up tables, implicitly comparing their provincial spat to what turned out to be the climactic struggles of the civil rights movement. Its standing as a significant historical event is unlikely to outlive the Baby Boom radicals who carried it out.
Here’s my review of Hagan’s Sticky Fingers from 2017, which, as the title implies, dishes up much dirt on Citizen Wenner.
DER APFEL FÄLLT NICHT WEIT VOM STAMM: Klaus Schwab’s Father Ran ‘National Socialist Model Company,’ Exploited Nazi Slave Labor.
Davos frontman Klaus Schwab’s daddy, Eugen Schwab, while the Third Reich was ravaging Europe in the 1930s and 40s, served as managing director of Escher Wyss Ravensburg, an engineering firm that constructed turbines and fighter plane parts for the regime.
While the elder Schwab worked in this capacity, the Nazis awarded Escher Wyss Ravensburg the prestigious title of “National Socialist Model Company” for all of its hard work in the service of the Führer.To achieve this recognition, Escher-Wyss Ravensburg, under Eugen Schwab’s leadership, utilized Nazi slave labor and prisoners of war in its facilities.
Ravensburg itself, aside from the slave factory, was the site of numerous Nazi crimes against humanity, such as forced sterilization for the purpose of “racial improvement.” But to Eugen Schwab, that was just the cost of doing business with the Third Reich.
You want to make an omelet, you gotta break some eggs, right?
Flashback: Environmentalists are watermelons: Green on the Outside, Red on the Inside. “I call the book Watermelons because they’re green on the outside but red on the inside. After the Berlin Wall came down, the communist movement, the global leftist movement, was left in a bit of a quandary. They pretty much lost the economic argument. They needed somewhere else to go, and global warming has become the great proxy issue. It enables them to achieve many of the same aims as before but under a cloak of green righteousness. This book, although it is about global warming, is about something in fact much, much bigger than that. It is about a global takeover by fascism, communism, call it what you will; their aims are much the same. It is about control.”
JACINDA ARDERN RESIGNS AS PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND.
Flashback: Why Jacinda Ardern’s COVID-19 elimination strategy was doomed to fail. “New Zealand stands as a cautionary tale about the nature of coronavirus: No matter how hard you try to fight the virus by smashing businesses, civil liberties, and lives, the thing always seems to find a way to come back.”
ANOTHER FACTOID DEMOLISHED: No, we don’t actually “know more about the Moon than about the deep sea.”
I CAN’T SAY I’M SMILING: Amazon is terminating its Amazon Smile program whereby customers can direct a tiny portion of the money they spend at Amazon to the charity of their choice. Amazon says it wants to concentrate its money on programs with greater impact. That’s its right, of course. But I fear the translation should go something like this: We’re not that keen on the charities that our customers choose.
Amazon’s policy of deferring to the execrable Southern Poverty Law Center on the question of which charities are really hate groups is well known. For example, the company excludes the Alliance Defending Freedom from the Amazon Smile program on that basis. Now it won’t have to try to justify that exclusion. It can direct its contributions to the groups it really likes and not worry about its customers’ preferences.
FROM WHAT WE’VE SEEN IN RECENT YEARS, THE STRIKE SHOULD BE PERMANENT: University of Illinois at Chicago faculty on strike. And whatever they’re making they’re overpaid. Now if only the administrators would walk out, too.
Connecticut Democrats are working to lower the physical fitness requirements for female firefighters, saying that less onerous standards will make fire departments “more diverse.”
A law introduced earlier this month in the Connecticut State Assembly would let women skip the Candidate Physical Ability Test, a timed gauntlet used by fire departments across the country. The test, which only 10 to 15 percent of women pass, requires candidates to complete intense physical tasks while wearing a 50 pound vest. It’s designed to simulate the experience of navigating a fire in heavy gear—and to weed out those unable to do so.
The law, introduced by five Democratic lawmakers, would offer women an alternative test based on “revised physical standards,” with the goal of ensuring that “additional female candidates” qualify for firefighter positions, text from the bill states.
But some firefighters, including women, who have climbed the ranks of their departments without workarounds, say the bill will set merit-based hiring ablaze and potentially endanger Connecticut residents. “If you can’t handle a 50 pound vest, you’re not going to be able to rescue a child from a burning building,” said Leah DiNapoli, a retired firefighter in New Haven, Conn.
“A citizen in need of rescue doesn’t care if a firefighter is white, black, Hispanic, male, or female,” said Frank Ricci, a retired firefighter who served as the president of the New Haven firefighters union. “They care that they can do the job. This attempt to socially engineer public safety positions will only serve to endanger the public.”
As David Frum wrote in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), about the changing face of police departments during that decade:
Americans over a certain age are often surprised to see diminutive women patrolling their city’s meanest streets. The policemen of their childhood were tall, commanding figures. Have the cops shrunk? Well, yes. In March 1973, the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration issued an order forbidding any local police department that received federal funds (that is, all of them) to maintain minimum height requirements—the rules disqualified too many women. In 1977, the Supreme Court seconded LEAA by striking down Alabama’s minimum height requirement as a violation of the 1964 act. The federal government lived up to its own principles. In 1971 it waived size and strength requirements for its own police forces. In 1977, New York City acceded to a judicial order and permitted women to apply for fire-fighting jobs. None of the applicants passed the department’s strength test so the judge ordered the strength test made easier until sufficient numbers of women could pass.
Well, better dead than rude, right?
IMPORTANT PENIS NEWS: Study indicates likely cause of common penis birth-defect. “An alarming increase in the occurrence of the most common genital malformation in male babies, hypospadias, is likely due to environmental factors, such as toxicant exposure, which alter epigenetic programming in a forming penis. . . . While the research is still in an early stage of development, it could ultimately lead to earlier detection and better clinical management of hypospadias, the prevalence of which has increased by 11.5% in recent decades, making it the most common genital malformation in newborn males.”
WARPLANES: F-15EX Breaks The Right Records At The Right Time
The F-15EX is cheaper to buy and operate than the F-35 and, for missions that do not depend a lot on stealth, the F-15EX is cheaper and more capable. New versions of the F-35 close that gap but for now the F-15EX is here and the new F-35A Block 4 models have been delayed because of problems with the new software. That has halted efforts to reduce the F-15EX orders from 140 to 80. The F-15EX has met or exceeded all its capabilities.
Lots of data in this How To Make War post.
MICROBIOME NEWS: Meditation may alter gut microbes, study of Tibetan monks suggests.
READER FAVORITE: Alimens Button Down Regular Fit Long Sleeve Plaid Flannel Shirts. #CommissionEarned
RECREATIONAL TANKS: WELL, THAT’S THE DREAM: Ukraine Reclassifies U.S. Tanks as “Recreational Vehicles” to Skirt Restrictions.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT [VIP]: Congress Has Become ‘Animal Farm,’ but I Know How to Fix It. “The creatures outside looked from Congressman to Senator, and from Senator to Congressman, and from Congressman to Senator again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
FASTER, PLEASE: Why the Navy is getting fast new medical ships. “Smaller than full-scale hospital ships, the ships in the Expeditionary Fast Transport class are already expanding how and where the Navy can operate, by providing supply and transport support for the fleet. The EPFs can sustain an average speed of 40 mph at sea, twice as fast as the hospital ships, and they can operate in shallower waters and less developed ports, with a draft of only 15 feet. The ship’s catamaran design offers great stability, especially important for the difficult tasks of surgery and sea.”
WHEN YOU’VE LOST THE VIEW…: Even ‘The View’ Thinks Biden Has Handled Garage-gate Poorly.
THE SURVEILLANCE STATE NEVER SHRINKS, IT ONLY GROWS: Little-Known Surveillance Program Captures Money Transfers Between U.S. and More Than 20 Countries. “The database, housed at a little-known nonprofit called the Transaction Record Analysis Center, or TRAC, was set up by the Arizona state attorney general’s office in 2014 as part of a settlement reached with Western Union to combat cross-border trafficking of drugs and people from Mexico. It has since expanded to allow officials of more than 600 law-enforcement entities—from federal agencies such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement to small-town police departments in nearly every state—to monitor the flow of funds through money services between the U.S. and countries around the world.”
LIGHTENING DEAL: Krosa -10℉ Winter Gloves for Men Women, 10 Touchscreen Fingers. #CommissionEarned (Bumped)
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