FLASHBACK: CORBYNOMICS EXPLAINED.
Archive for 2023
July 14, 2023
I’M ON ONE OF THESE BRIEFS WITH DAVE KOPEL: Second Amendment Roundup: Delaware’s Gun Ban Heats Up: Third Circuit briefing is ongoing in challenge to rifle ban signed into law just a week after Bruen. “Delaware plagiarized California’s 1989 findings that it was imperative to ban any gun that is not a ‘sports or recreational firearm.’ The state ignored the Delaware Bill of Rights guarantee of the right to bear arms ‘for the defense of self, family, home and State,’ and disregarded Heller’s admonition that self-defense is ‘the central component of the right itself.’ Delaware copied a definition from Connecticut that criminalizes a rifle depending on where one’s fingers are placed when firing, and Maryland’s long list of banned rifles, such as the Colt AR-15. Curiously, that list excludes AR-15 HBAR (heavy barrel) rifles, unless made by Bushmaster – any semiauto rifle made by that firm is banned.”
HOW’S THAT GREEN ENERGY WORKING OUT FOR YOU? Britain to be left without emergency coal reserves this winter: National Grid deprived of support as Drax and EDF close remaining stations.
More: The Dimming of Coal: The UK’s Emergency Power Reserves in Peril.
THERE WILL BE A LOT MORE OF THIS: ‘World’s first mass-produced’ humanoid robot to tackle labour shortages amid ageing population.
THIS FEELS INEVITABLE [VIP]: California Officially Becomes ‘The Child-Trafficking State.’
MY BROTHER TRIED TO GET THE GR86 BUT WOUND UP GETTING THE GR COROLLA. HE LOVES IT. Rumor: Next Toyota GR86 Could Get GR Corolla’s Three-Cylinder Powertrain.
I had my doubts about the 3-cylinder thing, but it’s very powerful and sounds surprisingly muscular.
WHY, IT’S ALMOST AS THOUGH THE LEFT WANTS TO CREATE AN EDUCATIONAL UNDERCLASS THEY CAN MANIPULATE:
California will institute a math framework based on a failed experiment in SF. Math classes will emphasize social justice. The changes will harm the people the equity crew claims to care about, while the privileged will continue to have access to high-quality advanced math. pic.twitter.com/e9j1vTZgOu
— Laura Powell (@LauraPowellEsq) July 13, 2023
Or should I have said, “enlarge?”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Silver Lining: Hollywood Strikes Let Conservative Art Thrive.
That leaves two options for fresh programming down the not-so-short road, beyond projects already completed and ready to roll. Streamers are looking overseas to import foreign TV shows and movies to bulk up their content lineups.
…We’re also being threatened with a deluge of reality shows to tide viewers over until the dueling strikes are settled.
There’s another option, though, one that wouldn’t be possible just a few years ago.
Conservative platforms like The Daily Wire, Blaze TV, Fox News, Angel Studios and various YouTube-based channels are cranking up their original programming efforts. That was underway long before the twin strikes shuttered Hollywood.
Now, they may be one of the only games in town.
People are hungry for entertainment and, if the big-budget flops of the last few years are anything to judge by, tired of the thin gruel Hollywood keeps dishing out.
FLORIDA MAN FRIDAY [VIP]: He Hid WHAT, WHERE? “This week we have the curious case of the marmoset thief, the worst attempt at smuggling contraband into jail ever, and what happens when New York Man loses his shirt (and pants and underwear) in Vegas.”
DEAL OF THE DAY: KitchenAid 3.5 Cup Food Chopper. #CommissionEarned
ANTISOCIAL MEDIA: Meta Threads engagement has dropped off since red-hot debut, tracking firms say.
“The Threads launch really did ‘break the internet,’ or at least the Sensor Tower models,” Anthony Bartolacci, managing director at Sensor Tower, a marketing intelligence firm, told CNBC. “In the 10-plus years Sensor Tower has been estimating app installs, the first 72 hours of Threads was truly in a class by itself.”
But, he added, Sensor Tower data suggests a significant pullback in user engagement since Threads’ launch: On Tuesday and Wednesday, the platform’s number of daily active users were down about 20% from Saturday, and the time spent for user was down 50%, from 20 minutes to 10 minutes.
“These early returns signal that despite the hoopla during its launch, it will still be an uphill climb for Threads to carve out space in most users’ social network routine,” Bartolacci said. “The backing of Meta and the integration with Instagram likely gives Threads a much higher flood than other services, but it will need a more compelling value proposition than simply ‘Twitter, but without Elon Musk.'”
That’s a huge dropoff.
Meta made it easy, not just to sign up, but to bring all of your followers over from Instagram. That got a lot of people to take Threads out for a spin.
But what they found there was “vapid, boring and destined to fail.”
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Curtailing University Graft Can Prevent Student Debt Debacle.
In the last 35 years, Harvard’s tuition has seen a 90% increase in adjusted dollars. Has the school grown its faculty and course offerings to match that increase? No. It dramatically expanded its population of administrators. Harvard now employs over 7,000 full-time administrators. That’s more people than the school’s entire undergraduate population and three times the number of faculty members.
Most administrators take large salaries and benefits while contributing little, especially in the odious DEI realm.
Over at Yale in the last two decades, they went from five vice presidents to an astounding 31, while many administrative units during that same time saw a 150% increase in size, with surging salaries. . . .
These useless administrators are the actual beneficiaries of the student debt-forgiveness program. Have Biden, delusional Chuck Schumer, or any Democrat pointed this out when ranting gibberish about student loans?
It should be the goal of conservatives to institute rapid college-tuition deflation and remove useless administrators. This deflation would benefit everyone, perhaps even progressives.
No, those overpaid, underworked administrators are a major core of support, and source of shock troops, for the left. They won’t give that up without a fight.
AS LONG AS AI MAKES THINGS UP, IT’S NOT READY FOR DEPLOYMENT: New Lawsuit Against Bing Based on Allegedly AI-Hallucinated Libelous Statements.
HISTORY: Resting Place of Sunken World War II Carrier Identified 78 Years Later. “The USS Ommaney Bay was transiting the Sulu Sea near the Philippines on the evening of Jan. 4, 1945, when it came under attack by a twin-engine aircraft flown by a Japanese kamikaze pilot.”
HMM: In historic procedure, donor liver protects heart transplant. “Doctors in Seattle are reporting a history-making case in which a patient received two donor organs, a liver and a heart, to prevent the extreme likelihood that her body would reject a donor heart transplanted alone. In this innovative case, the organ recipient’s own healthy liver was transplanted, domino-like, into a second patient who had advanced liver disease. . . . Rodriguez’s case was unprecedented in two ways: Her own liver was healthy, and she received a donor liver only to mitigate the near-certainty, in her medical team’s opinion, that her body would immediately reject the donor heart she desperately needed.”
COOL, LET’S START WITH THE UAE: Hypocritical UN Climate Talks Chief (and UAE Oil Company Head) Calls for ‘Attacking All Emissions, Everywhere.’
OUR PRESIDENT IS A DEMENTED WEIRDO: WATCH: Joe Biden Terrorizes a Young Child at NATO Summit by Licking Her Repeatedly.
Flashback: It’s time to talk about former Vice President Joe Biden, the open sexual predator.
Biden Swims Naked, Upsetting Female Secret Service Agents:
“Agents say that, whether at the vice president’s residence or at his home in Delaware, Biden has a habit of swimming in his pool nude,” Kessler writes in the book – due for release Aug. 5.
“Female Secret Service agents find that offensive,” he writes.
“Biden likes to be revered as everyday Joe,” an unnamed agent told Kessler. “But the reality is no agents want to go on his detail because Biden makes agents’ lives so tough.”
Plus: Washington Post: What Are We Going To Do About Creepy Uncle Joe Biden?
Also: Joe Biden’s Woman-Touching Habit.
Related: Talking Points Memo: Why Does Creepy Uncle Joe Biden Get A Pass From Liberals?
Plus:
And the lefty press would even talk about this stuff, until all of a sudden it wouldn’t.
UPDATE: A “normal President?” Really? And if so, what does that say about our political class?
So normal that America’s newspaper of record has this amusing bit: D.C. Residents Concerned Crack House On Pennsylvania Avenue Will Drag Down Housing Market.
Call me crazy, but I don’t think licking and fondling children, or bags of cocaine in the White House, count as “normal.”
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Blue Origin engine explodes on test stand. “No big deal, ULA boss says … Tory Bruno, ULA’s CEO, said the BE-4 engine failed during an ‘acceptance test’ before Blue Origin was set to deliver it to ULA’s factory for integration with a Vulcan booster. The two BE-4 engines already integrated with ULA’s first Vulcan flight vehicle passed their acceptance testing, and engineers are confident in the engine’s design. Bruno said an explosion during an engine acceptance test is ‘relatively routine’ early in the engine’s production run. But this isn’t great news for ULA’s Vulcan rocket program, which is already dealing with an explosion that occurred during a ground test of the rocket’s Centaur V upper stage in March. That has pushed back the Vulcan rocket’s debut from mid-year to the end of 2023, at the earliest.”
WHY WAIT? Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) thinks it “may” be necessary for Congress to invoke the War Powers Act to stop President Joe Biden’s march to “locking us into supporting Ukraine,” according to The Blaze. Lee’s comment was prompted by Biden putting reservists on notice of potential deployment to Europe
READER FAVORITE: REOKA Cervical Pillow for Neck Pain Relief. #CommissionEarned
K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: There Is Nothing Worth Saving in America’s Public Schools.
For starters, schools have failed abysmally in their fundamental task — teaching basic academic skills — despite spending staggering sums. In 2019, annual expenditures for K–12 public schools totaled almost $800 billion, but, according to the Nation’s Report Card, barely one-third of public school students were “proficient” in math and reading pre-COVID, a dismal track record that worsened significantly post-COVID. Nationally, just 26 percent of eighth graders are proficient in math, with 31 percent proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 3 percent of fourth graders are mathematically proficient, while twenty-three Baltimore public schools reported exactly zero math-proficient students. Government schools, which enroll almost nine out of ten American children, repeatedly fail to deliver on their promises but are rewarded with big budgets and near-monopolistic power.
In government, failure is generally rewarded, which is why there’s so much of it.