Archive for 2023
February 14, 2023
VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: Barney the Dinosaur Is Getting Rebooted… With an Excruciating Twist. “Barney the Dinosaur is coming back but, like a zombie, worse than before and with a hunger for brains.”
Plus:
- Another dude in a dress explaining periods.
- There’s nothing worse than those evil SOBs who cure blindness.
- You’ll never believe what costs more than gas in some places.
So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Lasko U12104 High Velocity Pro Pivoting Utility Fan. #CommissionEarned
CDR SALAMANDER: We Have a Lot of Things to Relearn.
Thinking of the American military’s readiness for the next large war, there is rightfully a lot of concern that after a couple of decades of imperial policing wars in Central and Southwest Asia, that not only are we ill-equipped for a major peer conflict ashore, but that we’ve forgotten much of what is considered fundamental aspects of significant force-on-force combat.
The Russo-Ukrainian War has offered some good reminders, from the utility of armor, artillery, and logistics that clever peace time theorists were wishing away, but on the land side of the equation, what are some other critical capabilities that we have had the luxury of generations to forget about?
Over at the Modern War Institute, they have a reminder of something I think most of us have not given much thought to recently; the operational level fighting retreat.
Read the whole thing.
GRIFTOCRACY: RealClearInvestigations: The Sudden Dominance of the Diversity Industrial Complex. “Seemingly in unison, and with almost no debate, nearly every major American institution – including federal, state, and local governments, universities and public schools, hospitals, insurance, media and technology companies and major retail brands – has agreed that the DEI infrastructure is essential to the nation’s proper functioning.”
THE ATLANTIC: The Inconvenient Truth About Electric Vehicles. “In an electrified America, charging access may become a status symbol. Because the first wave of new EVs have been so expensive, America’s affluent tax brackets made up the bulk of early adopters. The same people are also those most likely to be able to afford their own homes and install a charger that can power up their car overnight. As EV adoption reaches mainstream levels—which is happening at rates outpacing even rosy expert predictions—lots of new electric drivers will be the same urban dwellers that have been priced out of their local housing market, creating two classes of EV owners.”
Plus: “The experience of owning, charging, and driving an electric vehicle makes the rising inequality of America more visible in new and subtle ways.”
The mandated electrification of cars and trucks is a cause of rising inequality — by design.
THE WAY THEY WEREN’T, AND HOW IT SAVED A MEMORABLE FILM FROM DISASTER:
Though the actor’s playing hardball frustrated producer Ray Stark (Funny Girl), who wanted to immediately hire Ryan O’Neill rather than negotiate, director Sidney Pollack knew how indispensable Redford would be. And how good he was, having just directed him in the eventual western classic, Jeremiah Johnson. O’Neill, Pollack realized, would have played the part as originally written, tilting the film toward Streisand and Laurents’ vision and to ultimate failure. It was the accommodations he made to secure Redford that salvaged the picture. Pollack brought in two new writers (David Rayfiel, Alvin Sargent) to elevate both Redford’s Hubbell over Streisand’s communist Katie Morosky and the love story above a political one.
Unlike any male character on film today, Hubbell constantly stands up to Katie’s ideological extremism, despite the filmmakers’ sympathy to it, making the film watchable. In their best exchange, Hubbell takes Katie to task for her piqued dismissal of his friends — all the men of whom just fought in World War II, including Hubbell. “You do it, you know. You make yourself feel out of place.… Why don’t you try talking to them?… You don’t talk, you lecture. I mean, what was that speech in there about Yalta? Katie, there isn’t anyone in that room who needs you to explain Yalta.” The Yalta Conference, of course, was the summit meeting between the three main Allied leaders — Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin — at which Katie’s idol, FDR, fundamentally sold out Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union.
What truly saved the picture was the jettisoning of the heavy Blacklist emphasis in its third act. Hubbell forsakes future novel writing to adapt his last book into a Hollywood movie, much to Katie’s disappointment. This throws the couple into the center of the McCarthyite purges. Fifty years later, Hollywood players would initiate a modern blacklist against conservatives, but in the early ’70s, they settled for condemning the original.
Read the whole thing.
“SCHOLAR:” Music scholar calls black Communist dad racist for liking white composers.
Eh, calling someone a Communist is worse than calling them a racist anyway. Or should be. Communists killed 100 million people. A racist, nowadays, is absolutely anyone who’s pissed off a lefty.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: The New York Times would like you to have more sex, please.
Of course, it wouldn’t be a true NYT op-ed without a deeply right-on argument: “Having more sex is both personal guidance — your doctor might well agree — and a political statement. American society is less connected, made up of individuals who seem increasingly willing to isolate themselves. Having more sex can be an act of social solidarity.” To the barricades, fornicators!
Taylor concludes by saying, “So, anyone capable should have sex — as much as they can, as pleasurably as they can, as often as they can.” Cockburn would like to give praise to the Times where it’s due for offering sage wisdom during America’s bonking blight. A true act of public service journalism.
In the lead-up to Valentine’s Day, and in the spirit of the pursuit of happiness our Founders promised us, Cockburn implores you to share this article with your spouse, hook-up, crush or polycule (probably not coworkers, it’s 2023 after all). “Honey look, it’s science, the New York Times says so.” Could there be a more compelling case?
To be honest, I’m not sure I want to be on that intimate a basis with my daily newspaper. It’s not you, it’s me, Gray Lady.
SOFT TARGET: The New York Times Has an Embarrassing Epiphany About ‘Gun-free Zones.’
UPDATE (FROM GLENN): They should have followed the science.
UH-HUH: All those spy balloons have had only a ‘limited’ benefit for China, White House claims,
“We assess at this time these balloons have provided limited additive capabilities to the PRC’s other intelligence platforms used over the United States,” Kirby said Monday at a White House briefing.
The US has so far downed four flying objects in just over a week, starting with an alleged Chinese spy balloon whose journey across the country raised national security questions. China contends the balloon had no espionage purpose and was just collecting weather data.
Three more objects have since been brought down — one over Alaska on Friday, in northern Canada on Saturday and in Michigan on Sunday. Officials have stopped short of saying what the three much smaller objects are or whether they think there’s a link between them and the Chinese balloon.
Kirby said Monday that recovery efforts were still continuing and noted the objects shot down over Alaska and Canada were in remote areas and that the object downed over Lake Huron “now lies in what is probably very deep water.”
He said officials still “have not yet been able to definitively assess what these most recent objects are.”
If the benefit Beijing was looking for was to gauge the mettle of our commander-in-chief, those balloons have been immeasurably valuable.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: The Physician of the Future—Dumber, Woker, and More Likely to Kill You. “I’m just saying that an across-the-board lowering of entrance standards for medical school MIGHT be fraught with unpleasant consequences. Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I think it should be more difficult to become a physician, not easier.”
ACCOUNTABILITY TIME IS COMING: Some of the 51 signers of that October 2020 “statement” by 51 intelligence agency veterans that the Hunter Biden laptop was “Russian disinformation” have been interviewed on the record by House Judiciary and Intelligence committee investigators.
Most of them, however, have blatantly ignored the “nice” requests from Chairman Jim Jordan of Judiciary and Mike Turner of Intel, both Ohio Republicans, such as the letter to 10 of them I reported for Epoch Times. Odds seem good the next requests won’t be nearly so nice.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: John Fetterman really wasn’t fit for the Senate — but the press still pretends.
MEDIA FREAKS, WE ALL FREAK: Michael Snyder at The Lid thinks the main reason the country is freaking out over the four recent shoot-downs in U.S. airspace — the Chinese spy balloon and three UFOs — is due mainly to the fact the Mainstream Media is doing so.
“But the truth is that hordes of highly sophisticated unidentified aircraft have been flying over U.S. territory for years,” writes Synder. “Let me give you some examples. In December 2019, large groups of “unidentified drones” were repeatedly spotted flying over northeastern Colorado and western Nebraska …”
There are more. You want to read this one.
‘HASN’T SAID A WORD:’ Republicans Slam Pete Buttigieg For Silence After Ohio Train Derailment.
To be fair, Buttigieg has far more pressing issues to worry about: Pete Buttigieg Frets That Too Many Construction Crews ‘Don’t Look Like’ The Neighborhoods They Work In.
HMM: SpaceX rolls naked Starship prototype to test site.
Aside from a range of smaller design changes, Ship 26 has three main differences relative to most prior Starships. First, it has zero heat shield tiles. Since the 2020-2021 period of suborbital Starship flight testing, all finished ships (S20, S21, S22, S24, S25) have been fitted with ~10,000 black, ceramic heat shield tiles. Eventually, those tiles will (theoretically) protect Starships from the intense heat created by reentering Earth’s atmosphere at orbital velocity.
Ship 26 also has no flaps. Since SpaceX first fully assembled a Starship in October 2020, every ship the company has completed (SN8, SN9, SN10, SN11, SN15, SN16, S20, S21, S22, S24, S25) has had four large flaps and form-fitting ‘aerocovers’ installed. Starships need flaps to steer and orient themselves during orbital reentries. They also need flaps to control themselves during exotic landing maneuvers, which require ships to free-fall belly-down (like a human skydiver) and aggressively flip into a vertical orientation for propulsive landings.
Finally, and most confusingly, Ship 26 has no payload bay of any kind. The end result is a smooth, featureless Starship that looks like a steel bullet, can’t return to Earth, and can’t deploy satellites. Combined, the fact it exists at all almost seems like an elaborate, multi-month mistake. But SpaceX clearly intended to build Ship 26 and is now preparing to qualify it for flight.
Nobody outside of SpaceX knows what Ship 26 is and they aren’t talking.
THE GOVERNMENT IS DOING ITS BEST. Sen. J.D. Vance Calls For Answers After Ohio Train Derailment, Notes ‘Alarming’ Reports He Received.
FOLLOW THE SCIENCE, NOT “THE SCIENCE:” I’m pro-science. That’s why I’m anti-mask: The landmark Cochrane study shows that the mask skeptics were right.
Publicly, the government has said it mitigated the spy balloon’s intelligence gathering capabilities. But [House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Michael McCaul (R-TX) said he is not convinced.
“My assessment — and I can’t get into the detail of the intelligence document — is that if it was still transmitting going over these three very sensitive nuclear sites, I think if you look at the flight pattern of the balloon, it tells a story as to what the Chinese were up to as they controlled this aircraft throughout the United States,” he said.
“Going over those sites, in my judgment, would cause great damage. Remember, a balloon could see a lot more on the ground than a satellite,” he added.
Later in the interview, McCall hypothesized that China sent the spy balloon to assess U.S. military capabilities in the event that China and Taiwan end their cold war.
WE ARE RULED BY CROOKS AND MORONS. AND BIGOTS. After Train Crash ‘Nuked’ Ohio Town With Toxic Chemicals, Buttigieg Focuses on Bigger Threat: White Construction Workers.
OLD AND BUSTED: The Turing Test.
The New Hotness? The Voight-Kampff Test: ChatGPT is exposed as it squirms over porn.