Archive for 2023
January 3, 2023
RIP: Ken Block, Rally Car Racer and Hoonigan Founder, Killed Snowboarding in Utah.
Block featured in one of Top Gear’s most iconic clips, as he jumped between dunes in a rally car with an astonished James May in the passenger seat, while a C-130 Hercules and a motocross driver fly by:
YEAH, FOR YEARS THE SPY SATELLITE FOLKS SNICKERED AT NASA/JPL’S EFFORTS TO IMPROVE THEIR OPTICS: The spy agency origins of NASA’s next powerful planet-hunting observatory. “To give you a sense of just how surreal this is, imagine all of the time, money, and engineering that went into designing and launching the JWST. Now imagine that a spy agency not only had two more JWST-class instruments, but didn’t even need them anymore.”
A spy satellite is mostly just a space telescope pointed in the opposite direction, and vice versa.
HAPPY NEW YEAR FROM 60 MINUTES! Paul Ehrlich Is Always Wrong. “0% of the time, he’s right every time,” Jim Treacher writes:
When a 90-year-old man says there are too many people on the planet, you’re allowed to ask why he’s still sticking around.
* * * * * * * *
I’d ask why CBS News is still giving this crank a platform after he’s been wrong about literally everything for over half a century. I’d wonder why sonorous dimwit Scott Pelley is still spreading Ehrlich’s nonsense. But it’s not as if the field of journalism is capable of disappointing me anymore.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s okay to hate humanity. Some of my best friends are misanthropists. But creeps like Ehrlich try to cloak their malevolence in altruism, and it’s just phony. The climate cultists don’t care about mankind. They see us as vermin and want us out of the way so they can bring about a utopia they can rule. They’re fascists.
Should Pelley offer a second opinion to counterbalance Ehrlich’s eco-doomsaying? Let’s ask him! In January 2007, Pelley “was asked why he refused to include global warming skeptics in his reporting. He responded, ‘If I do an interview with [Holocaust survivor] Elie Wiesel, am I required as a journalist to find a Holocaust denier?’”
READING IS WAS FUNDAMENTAL: Can You Check Out a Pipe, Too? Boulder’s Main Library Closes Due to Meth.
HMM: Scientists explore using psychedelics to treat alcohol, drug disorders. My observation, going back to people my parents’ age who used psychedelics when I was a kid, is that there are long-lasting negative effects. I remember my dad, who had Alzheimer’s, reflecting that everyone he knew who did DMT in the sixties had gotten Alzheimer’s. Of course the dosage and purity are different now, but still.
KIRA DAVIS: Some of the Craziest California Laws Going Into Effect for 2023. “Welcome to California, where the only thing more hated than plastic, single-use products, is the taxpayer.”
HEADLINE OF THE YEAR: New Year’s Eve fireworks cancelled because of masturbating walrus.
Thor the walrus put on an X-rated show of his own — after his arrival put an end to a town’s New Year’s Eve fireworks display.
As huge crowds gathered to see the Arctic mammal lounging at a harbour, council officials axed the light show so he was not disturbed.
But parents had to cover their children’s eyes when the two-ton beast appeared to perform a solo sex act on the slipway on Saturday.
Footage of Thor’s un-family friendly performance in Scarborough, North Yorks, went viral on social media.
One wag joked: “Walrus misunderstood ‘Are you coming to Scarborough fair’?”
Another posted: “David Attenborough missed that in Blue Planet.
Experts reckon Thor is the same walrus spotted on a beach in Calshot, Hampshire, in December and is stopping to rest on a journey back to colder waters.
It seems like a cold shower would do him a lot of good.
Just catching up on the ‘masturbating walrus cancels NYE fireworks’ story. pic.twitter.com/u1LxFWhYcp
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) January 2, 2023
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: “Wait I don’t think that’s a beach ball!” Is This the Best Car Decal Ever?
COLOR ME UNSURPRISED: Ketamine found to increase brain noise.
JIM GERAGHTY: NFL Shaken by Damar Hamlin Collapse.
A few folks have wondered if, once Hamlin’s condition has stabilized and we know he’ll be okay, the game can be continued or replayed, and if so, how. There is just one more week in the regular season, and both the Bills and Bengals have already qualified for the playoffs. In the early morning hours, the Bills players and staff returned to Buffalo; they’re going to need, at minimum, a couple of days before they can refocus on football. The playoffs are scheduled to start on Saturday, January 14. Right now, it seems likely that 30 of the NFL’s 32 teams will play a 17-game schedule, and the Bills and Bengals will play only 16 games, and that awkward imbalance will have to do. Put an asterisk in the record books, and chalk it up to extraordinary and unavoidable circumstances.
Last night also brought a lot of the idiotic usual suspects out of the woodwork to contend that Hamlin’s collapse had nothing to do with the impact to the chest he had suffered moments earlier and was some sort of delayed — I guess really delayed — serious reaction to the Covid-19 vaccine.
At some point, those who speculate that every health problem of every celebrity or public figure is a reaction to a Covid vaccine whose supposed dangers the whole wide world is covering up will become akin to those who attribute all world events to aliens or lizard people. As the saying goes, you can’t reason a man out of a position he didn’t reason himself into. These people will use words such as “medical evidence,” but they’re clearly not interested in that. They choose to live in an alternate world of dark conspiracies, shadowy secrets, brainwashed “sheeple,” and themselves: the bold, rebellious heroes of their own narrative. It is a faith-based argument meant for a faith-based audience.
Speaking of faith-based, I can’t help but notice that modern America is a secular society, with more than a little sneering and eye-rolling at organized religion.
And then something like this happens, and the word “pray” comes out of so many mouths.
ESPN hosts as they tap danced and improvised before the game was officially cancelled by the ozone layer of NFL management were a grim spectacle. The same leftists who get the vapors over the phrase “thoughts and prayers” after a violent act in America were certainly offering a lot of them last night.
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY, CHAIRMAN XI: Hospitals in China are telling families to ‘bring your own beds.’
MICHAEL WALSH: To Thee I Can’t Sing.
DOUBLING DOWN ON FAILURE: Mask mandate returns Tuesday for students in Paterson, New Jersey. “For many, the fashion is of face coverings so three years ago.”
Careful wearing of fresh masks that are routinely replaced after a few hours can do some good. “Compliance masking” in which people pull an old dirty mask out of their pocket to satisfy a mandate is worse than useless. Guess which one this is.
HUMAN AREN’T OBSOLETE YET: Students earn As on tests, essays with ChatGPT artificial intelligence. “Davinci doesn’t advance any arguments of its own – it merely recounts claims that it encountered in its research. What Davinci has really produced is a book report – not an essay that shows some evidence of critical thinking.”
MARK JUDGE: Reediting Babylon and sanctifying Hollywood.
THOUGHTS ON THE GENDER SPECTRUM from a specialist in spectrums.
GOODER AND HARDER, AMERICA: These three Biden tax hikes just took effect with the new year.
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Eugenics Experts Advise Having Sex with Short People.
Plus:
- Grandpa is in the garden, growing flowers, literally.
- A LibsOfTikTok video you can’t watch all the way through.
- “Woke AI is coming.”
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
EVERYTHING IS RACIST: NFL Accused of Racism for Not Postponing Bills-Bengals Game Sooner.
BE PREPARED: Adjustable RV 12V Reading Lamp. #CommissionEarned