STOCKPILE ALL YOU WANT. IF IT BECOMES ILLEGAL, IT’S ILLEGAL: Hochul: NY building five-year stockpile of abortion drug after ruling.
Also, given the state of NY, I keep thinking of Hitler trying to speed up the Final Solution, while it became obvious he was losing the war. I’m sorry to bring up comparison ad Hitlorum, but it’s becoming more obvious by the day how apt it is.
MATT TAIBBI: The Crackdown Cometh: Leaks for me, not for thee.
On a flight, reading about the FBI’s arrest of Jack Texiera, already dubbed the “Pentagon Leaker.” A quick review reveals multiple media portraits already out depicting him as a dangerous incel who shared his wares on Discord, a social media app where “racist memes” and “offensive jokes” flourish. Writes the New York Times:
Dark humor about race or ideology can eventually shape the beliefs of impressionable young people, and innocuous memes can be co-opted into symbols of hatred, researchers say.
Well, clearly we can’t have dark humor or innocuous memes! Gitmo cages for all!
The New York Times summarized key points in the secret defense documents, which among other things suggested “Ukrainian forces are in more dire straits than their government has acknowledged publicly.” Reading what’s out there, it’s not easy to parse what’s a legitimate intelligence concern in reaction to these leaks and what’s mere embarrassment at having been caught lying, to the public, to would-be U.S. allies the documents show we’ve been spying on, etc.
You’ll read a lot in the coming days about the dangers of apps like Discord, or of online gaming groups, which counterintelligence officials told the Washington Post today are a “magnet for spies.” The Leaker tale will also surely be framed as reason to pass the RESTRICT Act, the wet dream of creepazoid Virginia Senator Mark Warner, which would give government wide latitude to crack down on “communication technology” creating “undue or unacceptable risk” to national security.
The intelligence community has itself been massively interfering in domestic news using illegal leaks for years. Remember the “Why Did Obama Dawdle on Russia’s Hacking?” story by David Ignatius of the Washington Post in January of 2017, outing would-be Trump National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had been captured in intercepts speaking with a Russian ambassador? That was just the first in a string of leak- or intercept-based news stories that dominated news cycles in the Trump years, involving everything from conclusions of the FISA court to supposedly secret meetings in the Seychelles.
When civilians or whistleblowers like Edward Snowden, Julian Assange (in jail for an incredible four years now), Reality Winner and now the “Discord Leaker” bring leaked information to the public, the immediate threat is Espionage Act charges and decades of jail time. When a CIA head or a top FBI official does it, it’s just news. In fact, officials talk openly about using “strategic leaks” as a P.R. staple. In a world where media currency is becoming the ultimate power, these people want a monopoly. It’s infuriating.
It’s especially infuriating because they are, by and large, garbage people.
Related: Don’t Fear the Leaker: Thoughts on Bureaucracy and Ethical Whistleblowing.
EDUCATION, THEN AND NOW:
How a book written in 1910 could teach you calculus better than several books of today
[Calculus Made Easy, by Silvanus P. Thompson, 1910 – full text pdf: https://t.co/W4gspJGhHK or with the table of contents: https://t.co/55dkZzX4XV] pic.twitter.com/Tg65f7eayT
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) November 26, 2022
OPEN THREAD: Roll with it.
ROGER SIMON: Digital Money Plus Electric Cars Equals Fascist America.
The administrative state is moving faster to cement its totalitarian rule over the United States of America than we can to keep pace.
They are doing this because they realize the majority of our people oppose their wishes, but if they are able to impose them by fiat before that opposition forms and reacts, most people will eventually go along. Unfortunately, it’s human nature for many.
This Passover, I had a telling reminder when I learned for the first time that only an estimated 20 percent of the Jews left Egypt during the Exodus. The other 80 percent chose to remain in the comfort of what they knew—slavery. (These figures come from the medieval French rabbi Rashi, one of the most revered Talmudic scholars.)
Our slavery comes in an electric form. Only a few days ago, the following was announced in The New York Times (which we today learned has become a reality):
“The Biden administration is planning some of the most stringent auto pollution limits in the world, designed to ensure that all-electric cars make up as much 67 percent of new passenger vehicles sold in the country by 2032, according to two people familiar with the matter.”
Currently, the same article reports, they are around 5.8 percent.
Joe Lancaster of Reason adds: The EPA’s Ban of Gasoline-Powered Cars Will Actually Slow Development of Electric Cars. “The Biden administration should let the market decide. Clearly, there is a demand for electric vehicles. But by insisting on the rate at which the industry needs to make the transition, the administration’s incentives could be undermining progress. Axios noted this week that ‘battery technology is still evolving…meaning the U.S. may be at risk of building mines and factories to produce batteries that wind up being obsolete in a decade.’ As Reason‘s Ronald Bailey wrote in the March 2023 issue, electrochemists are already devising new methods of powering electric cars that don’t use scarce materials. By imposing such a breakneck timeline, the EPA is forcing automakers to choose production over innovation.”
SPACE: How to watch the launch of Europe’s JUICE mission to Jupiter on April 14: Europe’s Ariane 5 rocket will have only one second to lift off at 8:14 EDT on Friday, April 14. “Due to the intricacies of the trajectory that will take JUICE to the gas giant planet, the rocket has to lift off during a one-second window, but Arianespace representatives said in a pre-launch news conference that the team has built margins into the pre-launch procedure to absorb any delays and deviations. Fortunately, additional one-second launch windows will be available every day until the end of April.”
That’s an awfully narrow launch window.
THE BBC’S LIBERAL BUBBLE HAS FINALLY BURST:
Challenged by Clayton over Twitter no longer flagging up so-called Covid “misinformation” (aka, things posted by lockdown sceptics like me which usually turned out to be true), Elon inquired mischievously: “Does the BBC hold itself at all responsible for misinformation regarding masking and side-effects of vaccinations and not reporting on that at all?” You could cut the silence with a knife.
“And what about the fact that the BBC was put under pressure by the British government to change the editorial policy, are you aware of that?” Musk taunted.
“This is not an interview about the BBC,” spluttered Clayton.Oh, dear deluded reporter, it was about the BBC, and how. Huge thanks to Musk for exposing the corporation’s groupthink with such forensic, dancing wit. Elon, I could not love you more.
Should Clayton ever secure another encounter with the Twitter titan, may I suggest he ditches the affronted liberal assumptions and tries arming himself with some facts. It’s called journalism.
Flashback: ‘A Powerfully Corrosive Internal Culture.’
LAUGHABLE: Equality Florida warns that Florida is “unsafe.”
This is how the Left works. Everything is a campaign, and while I haven’t looked into the funding sources for these groups I would be willing to be quite a lot that if you followed the money it would all lead to the same group of Leftist Democrat donors who have decided that destroying Ron DeSantis is job #1.
They are terrified of him, and they have reason to be. Because, despite what the “Florida Immigrant Coalition” claims, people of color in Florida like Governor DeSantis just fine. It turns out that being an excellent governor pays political dividends.
The coordinated campaign goes far beyond these “grasstops” groups that exist to do the bidding of the Left. Expect news stories to be generated by these fake warnings, and think pieces to follow about how DeSantis is scaring gays and Hispanics by sending brownshirts after them. This is just the Leftist propaganda network doing its job.
It’s all lies.
No it’s not — heed their advice!
The man who recently leaked world-shaking classified government documents is reportedly a gun-happy bigot who was trying to impress his teenage gaming buddies in a Discord clubhouse. The Washington Post broke the news in a terrific story incorporating conversations with one of the man’s pre-adult acolytes. It seems the leaker, known by fans as “OG,” pilfered the documents from the military base where he worked. And you can bet he’s a nobody. As the Post notes: “Thousands of military personnel and government employees around OG’s age, working entry-to-low-level positions, could plausibly have access to classified documents like the ones he allegedly shared.” But that didn’t stop him from becoming, first, king of the digital Lilliputians and, then, a threat to national security. OG “appears to have persuaded some highly impressionable teenagers that he’s a modern-day gamer meets Jason Bourne.”
And that’s how we arrived at our latest geopolitical crisis: cosplay gone wrong. A nonentity in the real world pulls a bunch of gamer kids into his fantasy life and rocks diplomatic relationships around the globe.
Read the whole thing.
FLASHBACK: The Lieutenant Wouldn’t Like That.
HOWARD WOLOWITZ, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Watch a robot hand only use its ‘skin’ to feel and grab objects.
AT A GUESS, BECAUSE THE REGIME NEEDED HIM TO: Why did Peter Daszak change his mind? New documents reveal he warned against risky research.
Peter Daszak spent many years hunting down bat viruses with Chinese scientists, helped fund their cutting-edge research in Wuhan, and then vociferously led opposition to any suggestions that the pandemic might have been linked to a laboratory in the city. A pugnacious character, the British zoologist would pop up regularly in the media to fiercely dismiss “conspiracy theories”, playing a key role in efforts to stifle debate over the origins of Covid-19.
So how strange to discover that this same man had previously warned that risky research was “intensifying” threats from “lab-enhanced viruses”. In fact, two years before the pandemic erupted, Daszak was involved in drafting a presentation about the dangers of engineered viruses being accidentally or even deliberately released into the world.
In this newly uncovered presentation, the scientist warned that “gain-of-function” research — which boosts the transmissibility of viruses — was “elevating the risk” that “deadly novel biological agents” could be released through accident or design. The document, demanding the urgent development of counter-measures, put such risk at the same level as natural spillover from the wild. It even focused on the specific threat from coronaviruses.
Yet after the pandemic erupted in Wuhan, Daszak headed the charge against those claiming the mysterious new disease might be potentially linked to research in the city, with even the British Medical Journal branding him the leader of the campaign to label such critics as conspiracy theorists.
Little wonder the disclosure of this document has provoked angry claims of hypocrisy.
Indeed. Plus: “Today, Daszak is the $460,368-a-year president of EcoHealth Alliance, a New York-based group that channelled US research funding to Wuhan Institute of Virology until the payments were exposed and terminated by President Trump in April 2020.” Well, there’s a clue.
As somebody said, they told me to follow the science, but instead I followed the money and it led me straight to the science.
UH, HE’S A DEMOCRAT? Why Kentucky’s Governor Andy Beshear Won’t Be Savaged By the Gun Control Industry.
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Megyn Kelly on MeToo’s Collapse: ‘We’re Back to Where We Started.’ “The MeToo movement has been exploded and women really have nowhere to turn. You can leave the set in tears after being screamed at by [Lemon], who I bet has a long HR personnel file, and they just say, ‘re-educating training, bye.’ Not good enough.”
#MeToo was a political convenience that got dropped as soon as it was no longer convenient.
DEAL OF THE DAY: BULLIANT Men’s Belt. #CommissionEarned
BUT THERE WAS TIME FOR MUCH MORE: We Charged Our Electric Truck at 7-Eleven and All We Got Was This Stupid Hat.
Our F-150 Lightning was on the EV equivalent of fumes, sitting at 13 percent charge and 30 miles of range, when we plugged in. You activate the station through the clunky but functional 7Charge app. The Lightning said the stop would take a little over an hour to hit 80 percent, so we looked for ways to entertain ourselves. Thankfully a store full of distractions was mere feet away. Having spent five minutes and $3.58 on a coffee and a hot chocolate (our photographers have the palates of children), we returned to the Lightning to nurse our drinks, chit-chat, and kill time.
About a half hour later, we went back into 7-Eleven to hit the restroom and grab some food. The location didn’t have a public restroom, but the sympathetic clerk made an exception after we explained we were using the 7Charge station. We then went shopping and came out with two taquitos, some Goldfish crackers, a bag of chips, some water, two Starbucks Double Shots, an extra-large Coke Slurpee, and a sweet 7-Eleven trucker hat. We spent an additional $29.83 on boredom retail. Just half a bag of chips and a single Double Shot remained by the time our Lightning notified us its pack was sitting at 80 percent charge and 227 miles of range. The 87.619 kW our Ford consumed cost $51.70 at an expensive $0.59 per kW, as well as an hour and 11 minutes of our time, the price of the snacks, and possibly some heart health.
Time required to fill up with gas? Probably under five minutes. “We love that Ford has been aggressive in adding features like YouTube to our Lightning via over-the-air software updates, but what we’d really love is for it to improve the Lightning’s peak charge rate.”
THIS IS HOW SCIENTISTS GET A REPUTATION AS SPOILSPORTS: Studies show a mysterious health benefit to ice cream. Scientists don’t want to talk about it.
Back in 2018, a Harvard doctoral student named Andres Ardisson Korat was presenting his research on the relationship between dairy foods and chronic disease to his thesis committee. One of his studies had led him to an unusual conclusion: Among diabetics, eating half a cup of ice cream a day was associated with a lower risk of heart problems. Needless to say, the idea that a dessert loaded with saturated fat and sugar might actually be good for you raised some eyebrows at the nation’s most influential department of nutrition.
Earlier, the department chair, Frank Hu, had instructed Ardisson Korat to do some further digging: Could his research have been led astray by an artifact of chance, or a hidden source of bias, or a computational error? As Ardisson Korat spelled out on the day of his defense, his debunking efforts had been largely futile. The ice-cream signal was robust.
I say, why take chances and also pass the chocolate-chocolate chip.
NOT A HAPPY STORY: “The New Elite: The Rise of the Progressive Aristocracy.”
“URBAN STRUGGLES”: Walmart Closing Half its Chicago Locations. “I’m more interested in WaPo reporter Jaclyn Peiser’s skewed take than I am in any problems Walmart has in one of the nation’s most violent cities.”
READER FAVORITE: Glocusent LED Neck Reading Light. #CommissionEarned
LAUGHING WOLF: Yet Another Intelligence Disaster.
Okay, to be fair, U.S. intelligence operations have been a disaster for a while now. Frankly, we never have been that good at it. Yes, we’ve had a few individuals over the years who were outstanding at the job, going back to the Civil War. Organized and large scale intelligence operations not so much. I don’t know if it’s the ghost of Stimson and the curse of the Black Chamber or something else. The OSS was a good wartime operation, but when it came time to start the metamorphasis to what eventually became the CIA, well, let’s say there have been ups and downs.
Personally, I view the current FUBAR as starting under Carter, who should have been awarded the Order of Stimson for his incompetence with intelligence, intelligence operations, and (much needed) intelligence reforms. His cavalier revelation of our ability to monitor car phones in Moscow blew that source and the much needed intelligence it provided right out the airlock.
Which brings us to the current fuckup. While I wonder if it was more than one person, someone rather clearly went shopping in a SCIF and despite all preventative measures walked out with documents that were never intended to leave the SCIF. Unlike television, getting into and out of a SCIF can be and should be a major PITA. Because if not you get the current situation. Like David, I suspect they know or have a good idea of the person or persons involved as the access list for documents like this is rather small.
Read the whole, damning thing.
21ST CENTURY HEADLINES: UMG tells Apple and Spotify to block AI lyric, melody scraping.
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