GARDEN OF GAINZZZ: Transforming Plants Into Workout Supplement Biofactories.
Archive for 2024
October 2, 2024
HE’S JUST TRYING TO DISTRACT FROM KAMALA’S HUSBAND’S DOMESTIC VIOLENCE RECORD: Tim Walz’s Self-Implosion Continues During Press Gaggle, and John Fetterman’s Reaction Is Priceless.
A QUESTION OF BALANCE: Idaho man walks over 1,100 feet with running lawn mower on his chin.
OLD AND BUSTED: The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books. To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
—The Atlantic, yesterday.
The New Awfulness? This Hartford Public High School Grad Can’t Read. Here’s How it Happened.
When 19-year-old Aleysha Ortiz told Hartford City Council members in May that the public school system stole her education, she had to memorize her speech.
Ortiz, who was a senior at Hartford Public High School at the time, wrote the speech using the talk-to-text function on her phone. She listened to it repeatedly to memorize it.
That’s because she was never taught to read or write — despite attending schools in Hartford since she was 6.
Ortiz, who came to Hartford from Puerto Rico with her family when she was young, struggled with language and other challenges along the way. But a confluence of circumstances, apparent apathy and institutional inertia pushed her haphazardly through the school system, according to Ortiz, her attorney and district officials.
Those officials, in statements that her attorney says display “shocking” educational neglect, have acknowledged that Ortiz never received instruction in reading.
Despite this, she received her diploma this spring after improving her grades in high school — with help from the speech-to-text function — and getting on the honor roll. She began her studies at the University of Connecticut this summer.
Ortiz can’t read even most one-syllable words. The words she can read were memorized during karaoke or from subtitles at the bottom of TV screens and associating the words she saw with what she heard, she said.
“I was pushed through. I was moved from class to class not being taught anything,” Ortiz told The Connecticut Mirror during a series of interviews. “They stole something from me … I wanted to do more, and I didn’t have the chance to do that.”
Ortiz was diagnosed with a speech impediment and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) in early childhood and has been classified as a student with a disability for “as long as I can remember,” she said.
I have to give whoever diagnosed Ortiz with ADHD for being an early adopter to what is an increasingly universal trend: Is ADHD overdiagnosed and overtreated?
Yes to both. Next questions?
‘AMAZING!’ Politico Explains Tim Walz’s Debate ‘Eye-Popping’ and It’s Something Else.
Quality control has slipped very badly when it comes to German-made propaganda in recent years.
THAT’S OBAMA-BIDEN-HARRIS:
Biden ships pallets of cash to Iran while it builds its nuclear program but opposes allies neutralizing the nuclear threat.
At what point is it just fair to say Biden-Harris support Iran having nukes? https://t.co/GlvK0eIqt9
— Sunny (@sunnyright) October 2, 2024
YES, THESE ARE CERTAINLY PRESIDENTIAL-QUALITY OPTICS IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH OF A DEVASTATING HURRICANE: Harris hails striking dockworkers, swipes at Trump’s record.
Vice President Kamala Harris on Wednesday embraced striking dockworkers and bashed former President Donald Trump’s labor policies in her first public comments since a work stoppage at ports across the East and Gulf Coasts began Tuesday.
She said in a statement that “foreign-owned shipping companies have made record profits” and the union workers “deserve a fair share” of that money. As tens of thousands of members of the International Longshoremen’s Association hit the picket line, Harris also sought to use the moment to draw a contrast with Trump on his labor record.
“As president, he blocked overtime benefits for millions of workers, he appointed union busters” to the National Labor Relations Board, she said, “and just recently, he said striking workers should be fired.”
Trump had previously tried to wield the strike against the Democrats. In a statement Tuesday, he said “American workers should be able to negotiate for better wages” and blamed the strike on “inflation brought on by Kamala Harris’ two votes for massive, out-of-control spending.”
Trump has long benefited from an image among some voters as a successful businessman who is well-equipped to manage the economy. Trump leaned into that impression when he was running this year against President Joe Biden, whom many Americans blame for inflation and high prices.
But after Biden dropped out of the presidential race, Harris managed to shake off some of that baggage, and opinion polls have shown her narrowing the gap with Trump about who can handle the economy better. If this strike drags on, though, the economic fallout from spiking prices and commodity shortages could imperil that progress.
As Ward Clark writes at sister site Red State: October Surprise! Kamala Harris Embraces Striking Port Workers, Owns Any Resulting Economic Damage.
Here’s the problem with her embracing the strikers: She now owns, whether fairly or unfairly, all of the economic fallout of this strike. All of the rising prices, all of the empty store shelves, all of the layoffs due to supply chain disruptions; she owns it all. She has chosen this, and in a month she may well learn that when you dine at the devil’s table, you don’t get to choose the menu. And it’s not just commodities that will be affected; if this strike drags on, there are indicators that it will affect the energy sector, too.
Then there’s the other endorsement Harris just tacitly made: Union boss who threatened to ‘cripple’ economy lives in luxe 7,000 square-foot mansion.
Harold Daggett — the union boss who has vowed to “cripple” the US economy if ports don’t ban automation and raise dockworkers’ wages sharply — had a Bentley convertible parked outside his sprawling mansion in New Jersey this week, exclusive photos obtained by The Post reveal.
Photos taken by drone on Tuesday show the British luxury car parked with its top up outside what appears to be a five-car garage that’s connected to his 7,136-square-foot, Tudor-style home by a covered skyway.
The hulking, two-story mansion — located on a 10-acre property in Sparta, a leafy enclave 50 miles west of New York City — encircles a spacious backyard patio with an amoeba-shaped pool. A covered outdoor bar is situated next to what appears to be a massive, brick pizza oven.
A gate on the far side of the patio opens toward what looks like a free-standing sauna surrounded by a spacious wooden deck. A expansive swathe of forest surrounds the property on all sides.
The posh compound is nestled in a picturesque section of the Garden State near the Delaware Water Gap, where five-bedroom homes list for as much as $6 million, according to Zillow.
One realtor who spoke to The Post said that Daggett put the four-bedroom, six-and-a-half bathroom property on the market in 2004 at a listing price of $3.1 million before reducing it to $2.9 million. He eventually took it off the market.
Daggett, who has been alleged to have ties with the mafia, is president of the International Longshoremen’s Association, a job that comes with a salary of $728,000 annually on top of an additional $173,000 from ILA-Local 1804-1.
Kamala-approved! Because it’s good to be in the nomenklatura. As Clark writes, “That’s not a good look, not when people are having trouble meeting their monthly grocery bills. It’s hard to feel much sympathy for a union boss bringing in damn near a million a year when you just had a mayonnaise sandwich for lunch.”
OOPS: Almost 200,000 Jeep 4xe Vehicles Recalled for Fire Risk. “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration hasn’t published the recall yet, but we know that Jeep has recorded 13 instances of fires in the 2020-2024 Wrangler 4xe and the 2022-2024 Grand Cherokee 4xe. The automaker estimates that around five percent of the almost 200,000 vehicles recalled have the problem. Jeep said the fire risk diminishes as the battery depletes and is advising owners to park away from structures while it develops a fix.”
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Kevin Sorbo Schools Whoopi: I’m Proof of New Hollywood Blacklist. “Every movie I have shot over the last 7 years I get at least one person, be it an actor or someone behind the camera, telling me they are thankful for me being a voice for them [as a conservative]. I tell them to be their own voice, but they fear what happened to me will happen to them.”
HMM: Bank of America is down: Users report their accounts showing empty balance during widespread outage. A friend says his account shows the correct balance, but he’s locked out of doing anything.
Related: Bank of America app glitch zeroes out people’s balances.
NO, JUST DO IT FOR REAL. NEXT QUESTION. A new book asks, “Do we need to abolish grading?“
HOW TIM WALZ GOT FREE SPEECH VERY WRONG AT THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE: There is no hate speech exception, government must not be the arbiter of truth, and you CAN shout fire in a crowded theater.
And to make that last point clear, here is a helpful video from FIRE:
MAKE BRITAIN FUN AGAIN:
The decimation of the UK's nightlife, and pub culture, is shocking. According to Bloomberg:
– Three-quarters of nightclubs shut since 2005
– Number of pubs down by a quarter since 2000
– 13,800 nighttime businesses shut in 2020-23
– 35% London's local music venues closed 2007-15— Wessie du Toit (@wessiedutoit) October 1, 2024
Sad.
MEANWHILE, OVER AT VODKAPUNDIT: Kamala Must Combat ‘Frightening!’ Commie Memes, but She Can’t Because She Is One.
X’s freewheeling Grok AI is responsible for letting users countless Commie Kamala memes, and they’re proving effective enough that MSNBC and Democrats (but I repeat myself) are having hissy fits trying to force Grok to stop them and Harris to fight them.
Is the urge to shut down and shut up all opposition just a sort of gag issue for the Left, or are they particularly hysterical this time around because the Commie Kamala memes are proving effective at defining the candidate who refuses to define herself?
Yes.
Let’s talk about the censorship reflex before we get to the part about why Commie Kamala has Democrats so worried.
Much more at the link.
LIGHTNING DEAL: Queen Size Hybrid Mattresses in a Box. #CommissionEarned
COOL. NOW DO SMALL, MASS-PRODUCED THORIUM REACTORS: The hottest trend in nuclear power: Reopening shuttered plants. “The Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan just closed a $1.5B federal loan to reopen, the latest in a push to restart retired nuclear plants amid rising power demand.”
Making nuclear power cool again might prove to be AI’s greatest achievement.
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
School Shooters Distance Themselves From Tim Walz https://t.co/nFHmdFVTJT pic.twitter.com/Z4yXHWweDn
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 2, 2024
The ghost of Michael O’Donoghue, the father of “cut and slash humor,” smiles.
MATT TAIBBI NAILS IT:
So let me pause to say something about America’s current intellectual class from which the anti-disinformation complex works. By the way, there are no working class censors. The dirty secret of content moderation all over the world is that it’s a tiny sliver of educated rich correcting everybody else. It’s telling people what fork to use, but you can get a degree in it, basically.
The problem is America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies who were marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Hadens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFalls, and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed speech police. In pre-revolutionary France, even the most drunken, depraved, debauched libertine had to be prepared to back up an insolent act with a sword fight to the death.
Our aristocrats pee themselves at a mean tweet.
These people have no honor, no belief, no poetry, no art, no humor, no patriotism, which is unique to them, no loyalty, no dreams, and no accomplishments. They are simultaneously illiterate and pretentious, which is very hard to pull off.
They may have one idea, and it’s not even an idea, but a sensation. Fear. Rightly so, because they snitch each other out at the drop of a hat. They’re afraid of each other. But they’re also terrified of everyone outside their social set, and they live in near-constant dread of being caught with even one original opinion.
You can watch the clip from his speech here.
NEWS YOU CAN USE: Stop iPhone apps from accessing all your contacts in iOS 18.
DISPATCHES FROM THE “VIBES ELECTION:” September consumer confidence falls the most in three years.
I REMEMBER WHEN THIS SORT OF THING WAS “CONSPIRACY THEORY:” Lab owner pleads guilty to faking COVID test results during pandemic.
LIKE DOUG EMHOFF, THAT’S GOING TO LEAVE A MARK:
DOJ Indicts JD Vance For Brutally Beating 3 Women https://t.co/WPgeUvqAzm pic.twitter.com/vCfgPiXu9x
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) October 2, 2024