VITAMIN D UPDATE: Vitamin D found to not reduce risk of asthma attacks.
Archive for 2023
February 6, 2023
OH, CANADA: Trudeau’s internet censorship bill passes Canadian senate. “The text of the bill describes the plan by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party to increase the government’s ability to censor controversial and unpopular speech on the internet, stating that the legislation would ‘specify that the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission… must regulate and supervise the Canadian broadcasting system.'”
MIDDLE EAST EARTHQUAKE: ‘An Emergency Within an Emergency.’ “The massive earthquakes that hit Syria and Turkey over the weekend have killed at least 2,400 people but the death toll is sure to drastically rise with “tens of thousands of citizens… waiting under the rubble” in Hatay alone.”
Lots of video at link.
AFTER A WHILE NOT CLEANING HOUSE CAN COST YOU YOUR LIFE: The Termites Are In The Woodwork.
And your liberty, and your pursuit of happiness too, if anyone still cares.
THE WSJ, UNPAYWALLED: Biden and the Chinese Spy Balloon: Why did he wait so long to order the airspace intruder shot down?
Start with the chronology of when the balloon crossed into U.S. airspace and the long delay in shooting it down. Mr. Biden said Saturday that on Wednesday he had ordered the Pentagon to take down the balloon. But that was already half a week after the balloon had entered the U.S. over Alaska, crossed into Canada and then into Montana.
Mr. Biden said his military advisers wanted to wait to shoot down the spy balloon until it reached U.S. territorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean. The justification for delay was the risk of falling debris, but that is hard to credit.
The Washington Post’s David Ignatius reports an unintentionally amusing Pentagon claim that shooting down the balloon at 60,000 feet would have endangered 2,000 people in Montana. Not 2,500? How could anyone know such a specific number? In any case, the balloon entered Alaskan airspace days earlier. Was there no safe place to down the balloon in that vast and sparsely populated state? Let’s hope Navy divers can recover the balloon’s intelligence-gathering equipment intact. . . .
Other questions for the White House include whether and when it raised the balloon issue with Beijing, and how the Chinese responded. Did they lie to U.S. officials the way their foreign ministry lied to the world on Friday in calling the balloon merely a “civilian airship” doing mainly “meteorological” data collection? Media reports say the White House kept its knowledge of the balloon under wraps until it was spotted by civilians on the ground, which made disclosure unavoidable.
It’s fair to wonder if the Administration hoped the balloon would cross the U.S. into the Atlantic without public notice. Secretary of State Antony Blinken was scheduled to visit Beijing this week in a high-stakes attempt to put U.S.-China relations on a less contentious footing. So much for that. On Friday Mr. Blinken postponed the trip, and the balloon fallout will make its resumption harder.
The Chinese response to the shootdown was relatively mild by its standards, albeit reserving “the right to make further responses if necessary.” But sending a balloon to spy on the U.S. on the eve of the talks was a reckless, if all too typical, Communist Party provocation.
It’s bad enough if the People’s Liberation Army launched it to scuttle the Blinken visit. It’s worse if the spy flight was sanctioned by the Politburo and President Xi Jinping. In that case the conclusion has to be that they wanted to test Mr. Biden. Is the U.S. President so eager to court better relations that he’d overlook the spy balloon if it wasn’t detected? This is familiar Chinese diplomatic behavior to probe for weakness in an adversary.
They found that weakness. They now will expect us to dither for days in the face of provocation. That will embolden them, even if they turn out to be wrong.
In addition, though the Biden people say this happened under Trump. The Trump people — even those who have written hostile tell-all memoirs since — say it didn’t. Maybe it did, but the Pentagon bureaucracy never told the political appointees of the Trump Administration. Given the way the bureaucracy behaved under Trump, that’s not at all implausible.
For the Chinese, this is proof that we are operating under an inept administration. It’s that for the rest of us, too.
EMBARRASSMENT: The short life of the new USS Little Rock: Design flaws, setbacks lead to decommissioning.
Some 8,500 people turned out on Dec. 16, 2017, to watch the commissioning of the new $440 million USS Little Rock — draped in red, white and blue bunting — at Buffalo and Erie County Naval and Military Park.
That now appears to have been the ship’s only bright moment.
Not even six years later, the USS Little Rock will be decommissioned on March 31 at Mayport Naval Station in Florida, where it is stationed.
The 387-foot-long vessel was imperiled from the start with significant design flaws that the Navy has concluded cannot be overcome.
U.S. Navy officials first announced at a media briefing almost a year ago that nine Freedom-class littoral combat ships would be decommissioned as part of the 2023 fiscal year budget.
“It’s somewhat of an embarrassment,” said Paul Marzello, the Naval Park’s executive director.
“Embarrassment” is a pretty good word for the Navy’s surface ship procurement this century.
LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE: DeSantis Goes After Foundation for Lewd Drag Show Event With Children Present.
IT SHOULD HAVE ENDED ALREADY: Here’s what will happen when the COVID-19 public health emergency ends. “Some telehealth flexibilities that were granted under the public health emergency will draw to a close. It will end a practice that allowed people to be prescribed a controlled substance through telehealth without an in-person doctor’s visit unless the federal government takes steps to make the changes permanent. Congress has already approved a two-year extension to enable Medicare to continue to reimburse for telehealth services, which was put in place through the emergency declaration and had grown popular throughout the pandemic.”
They should make the telehealth exceptions permanent.
THE SOTU SPIN: State of the Union: Biden sees economic glow, GOP sees gloom.
Notice the anti-GOP bias built into the headline. But…
The Reality: Record numbers of people are worse off, a recipe for political discontent. “Four in 10 Americans say they’ve gotten worse off financially since Joe Biden became president, the most in ABC News/Washington Post polls dating back 37 years. Political fallout includes poor performance ratings for Biden and a tight hypothetical Biden/Trump rematch next year.”
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: Cold War 2 in Paradise. “Everything is negotiated. Russia has manifestly set restrictions on itself by not attacking NATO sovereign territory, just as NATO has implicitly discouraged Kyiv from striking targets on Russian territory, except when they are directly linked to attacks on Ukraine. Both sides are fighting under implicitly negotiated rules of engagement, which to the extent they are understood and mutually accepted, have limited escalation so far.”
READER FAVORITE: Legendary Whitetails Men’s Buck Camp Flannel Shirt. #CommissionEarned
LAUGHING WOLF: The Termites Are In The Woodwork.
As it is, the government and corporate media are dropping like a hot potato any mention that the balloon we did finally shoot down may have spent three days loitering over Malmstrom AFB, which happens to house the majority of our Minuteman missiles. Among other things. Look at all the bases and such along the flight path of the balloon. Want to place a bet that if the data is not already being shared with Moscow, it soon will be?
And let’s not forget that the balloon(s) were allegedly not picked up before they were over the Aleutian Islands. If that is true, that would indicate that multiple systems failed in their job. No one, not two, but multiple systems. Also, note that neither was shot down right then either over ocean or in a remote area, despite the violation of American airspace and international law. Instead, they were allowed to continue on and complete their mission.
Dereliction of Duty is the politest term I can use for what has happened.
Read the whole thing.
HOW MUCH MUST COURTS BLIND THEMSELVES TO ANTI-MALE DISCRIMINATION IN TITLE IX HEARINGS? In a Seventh Circuit amicus brief, FIRE and I argue that it’s way less than the district court judge in Doe v. Loyola University Chicago thought.
COMPARED TO CHEAP GAS, WORLD PEACE, AND LOW INFLATION, THE LACK OF MEAN TWEETS PALES: ABC/WaPo: Trump beats Biden in a hypothetical matchup.
AND FOUR TIMES AS CORRUPT: Planned New FBI HQ Is Twice the Size of the Pentagon.
Riveted into the colossal new project are woke regulations to ensure that the FBI center will comply with diversity, equity, LGBTQ+, and climate change political goals.
The plan, unveiled last September, has received little attention. For years the FBI has sought to vacate its present headquarters, a brutalist concrete bunker on stilts and occupying two city blocks between the White House and the Capitol.
Plans for the new FBI headquarters specify that it will be built on one of three sites in suburban Virginia and Maryland. Those sites are large parcels of 58, 61, and 80 acres.
That means, at minimum, the new FBI headquarters complex would be twice the size of the Pentagon building. Covering about 29 acres plus a five-acre courtyard, the Pentagon, until recently, was the largest office building on earth.
Speaker McCarthy, will you continue funding this monstrosity?
APP STATE’S MAGICAL VANISHING DEI COMMITTEE. Nothing to hide here, no sir. It’s all on the up-and-up.
KRUISER’S MORNING BRIEFING: That Noise You Hear Is the ChiComs Laughing at Pudding Brain Biden. “If the Chinese balloon thing was a mini dress rehearsal for World War III, we may want to form some Mandarin study groups.”
MORE REPARATIONS: Wealthy British family to pay reparations.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX Starship’s first launch is for real.
SpaceX is indeed close to launching Starship, despite the fact that the company has not formally announced a date.
Shortly into January, the company stacked the jumbo rocket at its launch pad on Texas’ Gulf Coast, then loaded it with fuel for a so-called “wet dress rehearsal.” SpaceX said the test, a key practice run for any new rocket, was successful.
Next the team said it would disassemble Starship for a test fire of the rocket booster’s 33 Raptor engines, according to recent updates from SpaceX on Twitter.
But in order for Starship to actually reach ignition, the Federal Aviation Administration must license the launch, which won’t be done until “SpaceX meets all licensing, safety and other regulatory requirements,” according to an agency statement given to Mashable in January when asked for the status. The review is ongoing, a spokesman said.
Get the hell out of Musk’s way.