SO I’M READING TOM BURKHALTER’S WWII AVIATION NOVELS, starting with Everything We Had, and they’re quite good — page turners with lots of aviation detail and good characters. I just finished the second book, A Snowball’s Chance. Well worth your time. (Bumped).
Archive for 2023
December 14, 2023
ALL THE BEST PEOPLE TOLD ME THAT STATUES WERE JUST PROPERTY IN 2020: Christian Veteran Knocks Down, BEHEADS Statue to Satan in Iowa.
I hope he used methods that were approved by pro-statue toppling Popular Mechanics(!) in 2020: How to Topple a Statue Using Science.
And by pro-statue toppling historians back then as well: Professor of ‘art crime’ instructs protesters on better way to topple statues that offend them.
In 2021, the Washington Post assured its readers: Why knocking down statues is a tradition around the world. “Statues are hulking barometers of the values of society around them. In authoritarian countries those values are imposed from above. But in a democracy, von Tunzelmann makes clear, the public has the right to continually reassess and judge them, and perhaps find them wanting.”
Kurt Schlichter tried to warn the left in 2015: Liberals May Regret Their New Rules.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Revolutionizing Amputee Care: Spinal Cord Stimulation Alleviates Pain and Enhances Balance.
BEEGE WELBORN: Snortin’ Fire at Some GOP Names Who Voted ‘Yea’ on FISA Reauthorization and Wouldn’t Kill It in the House. “I eagerly await an explanation because, as of this moment, I’m not seeing one. I cannot conceive of one the trio might present as plausible, and I’m really kind of torqued.”
WELL, GOOD: Did Google Just Defeat Every Geofence Warrant? “Google will no longer keep location history even for the users who opted in to have it turned on. Instead, the location history will only be kept on the user’s phone. . . . Unless I’m missing something, this will entirely defeat geofence warrants— which, I would speculate, was probably the point of Google’s policy change. If Google doesn’t keep the records, Google will have no records to turn over. If the government comes to Google with a court order for geofence data, Google will just say, sorry, we don’t keep that stuff anymore.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: More cardiac specialists use smartwatches to spot heart problems in kids. “A review of medical records at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health found that 41 young patients had arrhythmias detected by a smartwatch, a new study published Wednesday in the journal Communications Medicine found.”
DISPARATE IMPACT LIABILITY’S BEGINNINGS: On this day in 1970, the parties argued Griggs v. Duke Power Co. before the Supreme Court. Was there ever a more messed up, incoherent, anti-Congressional intent legal doctrine to come forth from the Supreme Court? I doubt it. Notably, the author of the Court’s opinion was the Court’s light-weight Chief, Warren Burger.
More stuff to file under “The 21st Century isn’t working out the way I thought it would.” According to Ars Technica:
“A lawyer representing Donald Trump’s former attorney Michael Cohen filed a court brief that cited three cases that do not exist, according to a federal judge. The incident is similar to a recent one in which lawyers submitted fake citations originally provided by ChatGPT, but it hasn’t yet been confirmed whether Cohen’s lawyer also used an AI tool.”
Ars Technica added this little gem: “Schwartz advertises his criminal defense services on a personal website with a tagline that says, “The power of the lawyer is in the uncertainty of the law.”
HIGHER EDUCATION’S DOUBLE STANDARD: “It surely feels like being on the right side of social justice these days means shielding Black students even from all but nonexistent harms while essentially telling Jewish students, who are being actually assailed verbally, to just grow up.” Not just assailed verbally, either.
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Largest solar flare of this cycle (so far). “Sunspot 3514 erupted on Dec. 14th (1702 UT), producing a strong X2.8-class solar flare. This is the strongest flare of Solar Cycle 25 (so far) and the most powerful eruption the sun has produced since the great storms of Sept. 2017. NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory recorded the extreme ultraviolet flash. . . . It’s too soon to know for sure, but this explosion probably launched a fast coronal mass ejection (CME) with an Earth-directed component. The US Air Force is reporting a Type II solar radio burst, which typically comes from the leading edge of a CME. Based on the drift rate of the radio burst, the emerging CME’s velocity could exceed 2100 km/s (4.7 million mph). Stay tuned for confirmation.”
THEY WERE GOING AFTER TRUMP, WHEN ALL ALONG THE RUSSIAN COLLUSION WAS COMING FROM INSIDE THE FBI: Tough Sentence Punctuates Downfall of Former FBI Counterintelligence Chief: Judge sentences Charles McGonigal to more than four years in prison for accepting secret payments from sanctioned Russian oligarch.
Charles McGonigal spent more than two decades as an FBI agent working on some of the country’s most important national-security and terrorism cases, including the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and ended up as the bureau’s chief spy hunter in New York.
He has since taken a humiliating fall, pleading guilty earlier this year to felonies in two separate cases, including violating U.S. sanctions by accepting secret payments from a Russian oligarch, a crime for which he was sentenced on Thursday to more than four years in prison. . . .
The sentencing underscored the precipitous fall from grace for the former counterintelligence chief, who once had access to sensitive information and oversaw investigations into spies and U.S. citizens suspected of working on behalf of foreign governments. In the fallout, McGonigal has lost lucrative private-sector gigs and the respect of many former agents.
He told the judge at the sentencing that he regretted his actions and that he had betrayed his family, friends and former colleagues.
“As a former FBI special agent, it causes me extreme mental, emotional and physical pain,” he said.
Well, good. It should. I suspect that there are quite a few other people in that corrupt organization who need to face similar treatment.
PERFECT GIFT: The Perfect Pizza Pack™. #CommissionEarned
HOLSTER EVOLUTION: Being quick on the draw is a relative thing.
AND THE MAIL-FRAUD VOTING BEAT GOES ON: A new survey from Rasmussen and Heartland Institute claims one in five mail-in voters admit to committing fraud in the 2020 election, reports The Washington Stand’s Dan Hart.
WINDOW TO THE WOMB: Live Action, one of the most visible and active pro-life advocacy groups, released today what it describes as “a state-of-the-art, medically accurate web app with a time-lapse of every single day of a baby’s development before birth!”
I’LL PASS BUT I’M ALSO ODDLY INTRIGUED: Doritos launches nacho cheese flavored alcohol. “Smells and tastes just like the real thing.”
I’M GOING TO WRITE A CHILDREN’S BOOK CALLED “THE LITTLEST BROWN DWARF.” NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope identifies ‘tiniest free-floating brown dwarf.’
YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A MUCH BIGGER BLOG: Former NYT editor James Bennet: When the New York Times lost its way.
It became one of Dean Baquet’s frequent mordant jokes that he missed the old advertising-based business model, because, compared with subscribers, advertisers felt so much less sense of ownership over the journalism. I recall his astonishment, fairly early in the Trump administration, after Times reporters conducted an interview with Trump. Subscribers were angry about the questions the Times had asked. It was as if they’d only be satisfied, Baquet said, if the reporters leaped across the desk and tried to wring the president’s neck. The Times was slow to break it to its readers that there was less to Trump’s ties to Russia than they were hoping, and more to Hunter Biden’s laptop, that Trump might be right that covid came from a Chinese lab, that masks were not always effective against the virus, that shutting down schools for many months was a bad idea.
Of course, it’s not like there weren’t previous signs of the Gray Lady’s increasingly unconstrained relationship with the truth: NY Times editor after blaming Sarah Palin for incitement in the Tucson shooting: ‘The right is coming after us.’
Then, sometime shortly before midnight, Bennet sent an email to [Elizabeth] Williamson: “Are you up? The right is coming after us…” He must not have slept much that night because the following morning he had sent an email to his team at 5:08 am: “Hey guys — We’re taking a lot of criticism for saying that the attack on Giffords was in any way connected to incitement.… I don’t know what the truth is here, but we may have relied too heavily on our early editorials and other early coverage of that attack. If so, I’m very sorry for my own failure on this yesterday. … I’d like to get to the bottom of this as quickly as possible this morning and correct the piece if needed.”
So if you’re following this closely, Bennet went from not knowing what was true in the early afternoon, to knowing in the evening that Palin was responsible as he rewrote the editorial, and then back to not knowing the following morning. The Times’ lawyers want to say that this proves it was all a mistake, i.e. he didn’t know he was wrong. But how can that be so if he stated he didn’t know the truth before the rewrite? Once he’d admitted that, wasn’t it his responsibility to research the connection before stating categorically that it existed? But Bennet claimed in his deposition that he never looked at any of the links provided to him, including the one Williamson had buried in her draft.
And note this quote from Bennet himself at the beginning of his essay:
“Are we truly so precious?” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of the New York Times, asked me one Wednesday evening in June 2020. I was the editorial-page editor of the Times, and we had just published an op-ed by Tom Cotton, a senator from Arkansas, that was outraging many members of the Times staff. America’s conscience had been shocked days before by images of a white police officer kneeling on the neck of a black man, George Floyd, until he died. It was a frenzied time in America, assaulted by covid-19, scalded by police barbarism. Throughout the country protesters were on the march. Substantive reform of the police, so long delayed, suddenly seemed like a real possibility, but so did violence and political backlash. In some cities rioting and looting had broken out.
It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions of helping readers understand the world, in order to fix it, and in the Times’s Opinion section, which I oversaw, we were pursuing our role of presenting debate from all sides.
“It was the kind of crisis in which journalism could fulfil its highest ambitions.” If only the staffers manning the Times’ newsroom weren’t so woefully unprepared for fulfilling that mission brief by the spring of 2020.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Watch Jill Biden Magically Transform From Cringe to Cringier.
WELL, SURE, THEY’RE FRIGHTENED OF BEING “MISGENDERED.” Gen Z perceives more dangers than previous generations, study shows.
CHANGE: Elon U. “It seems like Austin is becoming something of a center for anti-woke universities. First the University of Austin anounced it was starting a campus here, and now Elon Musk has filed paperwork to start a new university.”
SPRING FASCISM PREVIEW, PART DEUX: Oakland menorah destroyed, thrown into Lake Merritt.
Why are cities that are monopolized by the party of tolerance for diversity such cesspits of bigotry?
GOOD ADVICE FOR MANY PRODUCTS: “Experts recommend carefully selecting tilapia based on where it is sourced and avoiding it from China.”