LIFE AMONG THE NOBLE SAVAGES: Mystery Human Relative Appears to Have Been Butchered And Eaten 1.45 Million Years Ago . . . But By Whom?
Archive for 2023
June 26, 2023
THIS IS A MEAN THING TO DO TO JESSE: FOX News Channel announces who will replace Tucker Carlson in primetime shake-up.
People like him, but a lot of people won’t tune in to watch him in that time slot.
I KNEW HE’D NEVER LET US DOWN: Rick Astley performs a full set of The Smiths’ greatest hits at Glastonbury — setlist + video.
GOOD: A cholesterol-lowering alternative to statins reduces deaths from heart disease, new study finds. “Bempedoic acid, which was approved in 2020 by the Food and Drug Administration, is not as effective as statins, which are considered the gold standard in treating high cholesterol. However, many people stop or refuse to take statins because of possible side effects such as muscle pain, headaches, sleep problems and digestive problems.”
GEORGE MF WASHINGTON: (Movie) Romance is Dead.
It’s difficult sometimes to remember that there was a time, not even that long ago, when movies were made for one reason… to make the largest possible audience happy on a Friday night… to give them a fun way to spend two hours and to send them home with a smile on their faces to enjoy the rest of their weekend.
A happy customer, Hollywood used to understand, is a repeat customer.
Nowadays it seems like the prevailing wisdom in Hollywood is that if an audience walks out of the theater smiling, then it means they didn’t learn their lesson.
Which brings me to THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS, which I re-watched last week, thanks to the almighty Algorithm.
This one’s a treat; read the whole thing.
THOUGHTS ON HEIGHTENED SECURITY IN HOUSES OF WORSHIP.
Harden the targets by hardening the people. An ex-college-girlfriend is a “guardian” at the hospital where she’s an administrator, which means she’s trained on shooter responses and carries a gun (her lifelong choice, an S&W .357 revolver) at all times. She carried that gun when we were in college, too. She knows how to use it.
HMM: Spam Denial of Service Attack Against James O’Keefe? “First James O’Keefe dropped a video in which a Black Rock recruiter says they buy and sell politicians…”
GET IN SHAPE: AIXPI Grip Strength Trainer. #CommissionEarned
THE SECOND ARRANGEMENT: Tale of the tape.
In the days before a hapless studio technician erased Steely Dan’s “The Second Arrangement” in 1979, Roger Nichols, the band’s late, great longtime engineer, made a rough mix of the track on a cassette tape. The song was nearly complete. Horns and a fade would soon be added. Producer Gary Katz already was imagining it as the band’s next single. When Nichols returned to his apartment at 30 Lincoln Plaza in New York, he set the tape aside and forgot about it.
“Roger would bring home work tapes from the studio almost every night,” says Conrad Reeder, Nichols’s widow. (He died from pancreatic cancer at the age of 66 in April 2011.) “He wasn’t much into cassettes, though, because he didn’t want to hear a track at anything but the highest fidelity. So the tapes would just be lying around the house.”
The day of the “Second Arrangement” fiasco, Reeder recalls Nichols coming back from the studio hours earlier than usual. “He walked in the door and looked ashen, as if somebody had died. I was like, ‘What happened?’ He told me an assistant engineer had erased the song—everything up to the fade.”
For a time there was hope that the song could be salvaged from one of the rough mixdowns. Engineer Elliot Scheiner came forward with a mix that had been made at a lower speed setting—15 inches per second (IPS) as opposed to 30 IPS. “‘Do we want to try and overdub on that?’” he asked. “I gave them the tape, and Roger put it up and listened to it,” but the quality wasn’t quite up to the Dan’s lofty standards.
“We tried cutting the song again,” Nichols wrote in a post on an EQ magazine audio forum in 1999, “and finished it. Horns, backgrounds, lead vocal. We listened to it and Donald said, ‘NAW…scrap it!’”
At some point Nichols put the “Second Arrangement” tape into a drawer of a roll-top desk. And there it remained, undisturbed, until after his death.
You can hear it at the link.
(Hat tip, fellow Dan fan Will Collier.)
WITH REASON: 2 in 3 concerned about Biden’s mental, physical health: survey.
He’s not fit to be president. He wasn’t fit when he ran for election. The press and the Democratic Party — but I repeat myself — colluded to conceal that fact.
Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.
WE’D BETTER: Keeping The U.S. Undersea Advantage. “For generations, a great comparative advantage the United States has enjoyed at sea is the superiority of its submarine force. It has become simply an assumption in our war planning to the point it is treated as almost a natural part of the environment. Of course, nothing stands still in war.”
We’ve been sleeping on a lot of our advantages.
WHAT A DRAG: Lia Thomas ineligible for Olympics after new FINA ruling on transgender athletes. “Athletes who transitioned after the age of 12, or achieved Tanner Stage 2 in puberty, will be barred from competing as a female.”
Thomas doesn’t seem to have transitioned in any noticeable way except for his wardrobe.
JEFFREY CARTER ON Labor in Restaurants.
SOUNDS LIKE A LUCRATIVE MARKET: 1.3B people worldwide could have diabetes by 2050. “Diabetes is skyrocketing, with more than 500 million people of all ages living with the disease and the number of cases worldwide projected to hit 1.3 billion in the next 30 years. ‘The rapid rate at which diabetes is growing is not only alarming but also challenging for every health system in the world, especially given how the disease also increases the risk for ischemic heart disease and stroke,’ said lead researcher Kanyin Liane Ong, of the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington School of Medicine, in Seattle.”
A ROSE BY ANY OTHER NAME…: The Army’s M10 Booker is a tank. Prove us wrong.
In order to determine once and forever more whether the Booker is a tank, we at the Military Times Observation Post developed a legal test* based on Supreme Court Associate Justice Potter Stewart’s 1964 concurring opinion in Jacobellis v. Ohio.
“I know it when I see it,” Potter famously argued. He may or may not have been describing his method of determining whether a video was “hardcore pornography” and thus in violation of Ohio’s obscenity law, but it’s a convenient way to make up an official-sounding intellectual framework that just happens to support our (correct and esteemed) opinion.
So let’s evaluate the Booker according to the Potter Tank Test: Do we know it to be a tank when we see it?
Yes.
Previously: Meet the Not-Tank Named After Two Army Heroes.
ANALYSIS: TRUE. Gingrich Warns That Biden’s Campaign Is Stronger Than We Think.
Please note that it’s Biden’s campaign that’s strong, not Biden.
DEAL OF THE DAY: Mofri Men’s Dress Shoes. #CommissionEarned
CRISIS BY DESIGN: Biden’s Border Crisis Is As Bad As Ever, His Admin Is Just Better At Hiding It.
First, the Biden administration is ushering in would-be border jumpers through what it calls a “historic expansion” of granting humanitarian fast-pass entrance slips to intending border jumpers via a cell-phone app called “CBP-One.” This historically expanded program allows those who intended to cross illegally between land ports of entry to now be funneled through them and thus not be counted in the politically problematic monthly “illegal crossings” category.
The “70 percent” decline in “illegal crossings” does not mean 70 percent fewer foreign nationals entered America over the border as implied.
Under the CBP-One rubric, most (if not all) of the administration’s claimed “decline” in “non-citizen” migrants are still pouring into American towns and cities that are, in growing numbers, declaring emergencies and demanding state and federal bailouts. Here’s what a typical CBP-One line into America looks like on the bridge from Matamoros to Brownsville.
The administration so far has maintained the fiction of steep declines in foreign national border entries through secrecy. It will not release the granular-level CBP-One entry data that would tell Americans how many foreign nationals are crossing on bridges and through airports.
As one measure reflecting the administration’s desire to keep CBP-One entries a state secret, the administration ignored my February 2023 Freedom of Information Act request for granular breakdowns of the entries.
Read the whole thing.
ASKING THE UNANSWERABLE QUESTIONS: What the Hell Just Happened in Russia? “At this point, we barely know what we don’t know. But maybe the biggest mystery of all is why Prigozhin stood down just when it looked like he was on the verge of success. We can only conjecture but, out of all the wild-a**-guesses I’ve seen on the news and online, this one is certainly the most interesting…”