OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
Archive for 2024
March 17, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Peregrine payloads returned useful data despite no lunar landing.
MATT TAIBBI: On Today’s Absurd New York Times Hit Piece: Correcting the record after a desperate slam job on the Twitter Files, published just before oral arguments in a historic First Amendment case in the Supreme Court. “Michael, Bari, Lee, David Zweig and others involved with the Twitter Files project have been subject to a lot of silly smear jobs in the last year-plus, but this piece of deep state fan fiction in the Times is low even by their standards. It’s clearly intended to re-cast the outing of federal censorship initiatives as Trumpian conspiracy theory before oral arguments begin in Murthy v. Missouri tomorrow.”
WEREN’T THEY SAYING THIS 20 YEARS AGO? Startling Findings – The Arctic Could Become “Ice-Free” in Less Than 10 Years.
In the Holocene era, hardwood forests grew to the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and Norwegian women wore basically grass skirts. That era was known as the “climatic optimum” when I was in school, so I’ll need an explanation as to why a repeat would be awful.
FLASHBACK: The First Two Hours of MTV.
COOK YOUR MORELS: Experts warn of dangers of undercooked morel mushrooms after two deaths.
IT’S A BLOODBATH!
SUPERCUT!
Trump critics would never use a term like “bloodbath” pic.twitter.com/6dSTMwsfJa
— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) March 17, 2024
CIVILIZATION’S THIN VENEER: Haiti Has Fallen, Cannibal ‘Barbeque’ Now in Charge.
15 DAYS TO SLOW THE SPREAD: Four years ago, Las Vegas’ casinos shut down for 78 days. The fallout was brutal.
Four years ago few believed that Las Vegas’ casinos would be forced to close to minimize the impact of the COVID-19 virus that was rampaging worldwide.
But they did. And the fallout was brutal.
About a month after casinos in Macao were closed for 15 days to slow COVID’s spread, then-Gov. Steve Sisolak on March 17, 2020 ordered all casinos as well as restaurants, bars and other nonessential businesses in the state to close for 30 days.
The key phrase above is “then-Gov. Steve Sisolak:” COVID Lockdown Helps Bounce Democratic Governor in Nevada.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: Media Reports Trump Threatened Nuclear War After He Says, ‘This Guacamole Is The Bomb!’
A FEW GUYS, A FEW BASEBALL BATS, AND WE HAVE THE TRADITIONAL REMEDY FOR THIS: Toronto Police Recommend Letting Thieves Steal Your Car.
READER FAVORITE: Survival Gear and Equipment 12 in 1. #CommissionEarned
I HATE TICKS, AND I LIKE IT WHEN THEY DIE: Tick-killing pill shows promising results in human trial.
TRUMP PLATFORMED FAUCI AND SHUT AMERICA DOWN FOUR YEARS AGO THIS WEEK:
Though Donald Trump and his supporters do not want to admit it, this week, [four] years ago, American kids were forced out of schools and into their homes. The President of the United States had chosen to give Tony Fauci a big platform and advocated shutting everything down.
On Donald Trump’s last day in office, instead of pardoning the people who’d stormed into the Capitol on January 6th, he was giving a presidential commendation to Fauci.
That’s the actual history. Here’s the video of Trump, Fauci, and Deborah Birx laughing it up as they shut down America.
Flashback: Dr. Birx Praises Herself While Revealing Ignorance, Treachery, and Deceit.
I HAD NOT NOTICED THIS: Beverly Hills Cop is a Fourth Amendment Movie.
How did this nation ever get to the point where a man once considered nothing more than a tacky, loud, nouveau-riche liberal NYC real estate mogul/celebrity, with an orange complexion and a crazy pompadour/combover, would be transmogrified into the ultimate scapegoat for the failings, crimes, and corruption that have plagued our government and society since at least the end of the Second World War; the locus and symbol of the most unbridled hatred by the very same global elite that, in point of fact, are guilty of those sins and that he once perhaps was a part of? If I had to venture a guess, I’d say in nearly the same manner as “just some guy in golf pants” (as he once described how the elites tagged him) who at one time happened to have the largest sustained radio audience in history.
Last week marked the third anniversary of Rush Limbaugh passing away after a yearlong battle with terminal lung cancer. In a career that spanned nearly a third of a century, Limbaugh become far and away the most listened-to talk radio host in broadcast history. The conventional wisdom, which is something that Limbaugh defied on a daily basis, was that he had some sort of Svengali-like appeal over masses of mostly white, male, Bible-thumping bumpkins from flyover country by telling them what to think. In point of fact, it was just the opposite. Limbaugh’s success was being able to articulate what a vast swathe of the nation felt—a well-founded angst about the direction of the country especially since the beginning of the Clinton years and for sure with everything in the wake of the 9/11/01 attacks.
“There couldn’t have been a Donald Trump without a Rush Limbaugh to pave the way.”
He, more than any other political and cultural leader, held both a moral high ground and most crucially a bully pulpit that gave voice to a true silent majority. In examining the life and times of Limbaugh, as well as the gigantic sword of Damocles above Donald Trump’s head, and collectively whatever is left of the United States as we knew or imagined it, a bit of reflection on how we got here, or to coin a phrase, how we—or at least I—got “woke” to the world as it is, is in order.
Read the whole thing.
D.E.I. MUST D.I.E.: DEI Got Me Sacked From My Nursing Job: It didn’t matter that my critical Facebook posts made no reference to the hospital where I worked.
I took the first session of the course in July 2023. I was bombarded with evidence-free claims that implicit bias has caused a crisis of maternal mortality in black women. The course ignored the complex factors that contribute to higher black maternal mortality, including comorbidities, while defining any death from any cause after a year of giving birth as maternal mortality—a logical stretch.
Overall, the course implied that white nurses like me are killing black mothers. I was supposed to internalize this message and somehow apply it to the management of my team. . . .
The mounting politicization of the workplace frustrated me, so on Feb. 7 I posted what I thought was an innocuous message to my Facebook.
page: “No employer has the right to invade the unconscious spaces of it’s [sic] employees minds in an attempt to reprogram them into thinking certain ways. If your employer signs you up for an ‘Unconscious Bias’ aka ‘Implicit Bias’ training, then they are doing exactly that.”
My Facebook page doesn’t link me to Meritus, nor did I mention the hospital by name. I didn’t mention the courses, either. All I did was criticize the idea that people should be forced to accept a hateful worldview.
That was my mistake—speaking out publicly. The next day I received a call from my manager, who informed me that Meritus had placed me on administrative leave. . . .In the meeting where I was fired, a Meritus representative repeatedly said I had waded into “a touchy subject.” That’s exactly my point. DEI is inherently divisive and discriminatory to boot. No hospital or medical provider should touch something so touchy, much less fire someone for daring to question it.
I love “Meritus” as the name for a company promoting anti-merit ideology.
MATTHEW CONTINETTI: America’s Political Realignment Is Real.
The latest example: AEI researcher Nate Moore investigated Trump’s growing favorability rating and found that the former president is more popular now than at any point since he left office. The source of this newfound popularity is minority voters. “While his support has ticked up among white and black Americans,” Moore wrote this week in The Liberal Patriot, “the share of Hispanic Americans who have a favorable view of Trump has doubled over the last year from around 20 percent to 40 percent.”
John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times, analyzed election surveys going back to the 1950s. He found that the Democrats’ advantage among nonwhite voters is at its lowest point since JFK was president. Black and Hispanic voters are matching their party preferences with their ideological preferences. Fewer self-identified conservative nonwhites vote Democratic for communal reasons.
“The migration we’re seeing today is not so much natural Democrats becoming disillusioned,” writes Burn-Murdoch, “but natural Republicans realising they’ve been voting for the wrong party.” That has made Trump’s GOP more diverse, more non-college, and more conservative.
Realignment proceeds in stages. Non-college-educated white voters were the first to abandon the Democrats, beginning in the late 1960s. Nixon’s “hardhats” and the Reagan Democrats disliked their former party’s positions on crime, busing, inflation, Vietnam, and the counterculture.
In the second stage, college-educated white voters in the suburbs began drifting away from the GOP in the 1990s. President Bill Clinton’s soccer moms couldn’t vote for Republican candidates affiliated with the Religious Right and the NRA. By 1998, journalist David Brooks was visiting well-heeled suburbs such as Winnetka, Ill., and finding that the rich Republicans were turning into Democrats.
Trump’s election in 2016 marked the onset of the third stage. College-educated white voters left the GOP in droves, but the Republican Party remained competitive because Trump drew in large numbers of non-college-educated white voters spread throughout the country. The white working class felt a gut connection to Trump, who also began picking up support among Hispanic voters and black men—despite the media narrative that he and MAGA are racist.
Biden’s presidency has catalyzed the educational realignment. Though “Joe from Scranton” presents himself as a champion of the working class, his spending, energy, and environmental policies have worsened living standards by contributing to rising prices and interest rates. The crisis on the southern border alarms voters concerned about security, civic disorder, and the rule of law. The world has become more dangerous, with Russia invading Ukraine, Iranian proxies wreaking havoc in the Middle East, and China and North Korea testing American willpower. State collapse in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Venezuela, and Haiti fuels migration and unrest. Biden will turn 82 in November. He doesn’t look up to the job.
As Glenn wrote in the New York Post in September: Here’s how Republicans can get minority voters to abandon the Democrats.
I propose that Republicans, or GOP-aligned groups, start an education and outreach program aimed at those immigrants, explaining to them what Democrats actually support.
It should include pictures of teenage girls whose breasts have been removed as they transition to being male, with their mothers standing proudly by them (these pictures are already out there on social media, circulated by the pro-transition crowd).
It should include Democratic officials’ own words about removing police from urban neighborhoods and letting social workers deal with violent crime.
And it should include environmentalists’ vows to get rid of air conditioning, automobiles, cheap electricity and inexpensive housing — you know, the kinds of things immigrants come to America to get.
Automobiles, you say? Biden Campaign, Establishment Media Attack Trump with Fake Interpretation of ‘Bloodbath’ Comments in Ohio Rally.
MAYBE THEY SHOULD TRY JUST WRITING ABOUT, YOU KNOW, ACTUAL SCIENCE? Scientific American’s Latest Foray into Gender-Based Science Analysis.
IT’S SATIRE — OR IS IT? Screwdrivers Now Permitted On Boeing Flights, To Allow Passengers To Help With Maintenance.
WATCHING THE SAUSAGE BEING MADE: ‘Hoax-Making in Progress:’ You Know Biden/Media Are Panicking With Latest Fake Story Pushed About Trump. “Other useful idiots, like Bill Kristol, jumped aboard, spreading this absurd lie, saying that you had a “moral and civic obligation to vote against him (he later edited his tweet to remove the video). ABC, CBS, Yahoo, and NBC then all jumped aboard the propaganda train. Here’s a sample — the only one in there that was honest in the title was The Daily Beast.”
— Dr. Nickarama (@nickaramaOG) March 17, 2024
READER FAVORITE: Van Heusen Men’s Dress Shirt. #CommissionEarned
STEVE LINKED TO THIS FOUR YEAR AGO TODAY: Nevada Brothel Demands Masked Sex During Coronavirus Scare.
I don’t think the Zucker Brothers intended The Naked Gun to be a how-to guide for safe sex back in 2020: