Archive for 2024
January 9, 2024
I IMAGINE THE TERMINAL VELOCITY IS PRETTY HIGH: Ultimate Drop Test: iPhone survives 16,000-foot fall after door plug blows off Alaska Air flight 1282.
LONGEVITY: Lifespan of mice extended by stimulating specific brain cells.
UPDATE: Link/caption glitch. Sorry. Fixed now.
OUT TODAY: From Roger Simon, American Refugees: The Untold Story of the Mass Migration from Blue to Red States. #CommissionEarned
JIM TREACHER: Protesters Are Dumb.
So a bunch of protesters blocked a bunch of stuff yesterday. They’re outraged that the Jews are allowed to exist, and they want to ruin your day over it.
In New York City, they blocked bridges and tunnels. This guy wasn’t having it.
Look at those woke white women trying to tell a black man his business.
What in the world does this guy have to do with Israel? How does it help “Palestine,” a country that doesn’t even exist, to keep him from his family?
And why would you imagine that buying a reflective vest makes you a cop?
Because that’s all these people are: wannabe cops. They think they should be in charge of everything. They should be telling the rest of us what to do and say. They’re nothing but half-assed fascists.
Related: And they’re Biden approved, not surprisingly! Talk About Passion:
President Biden paid tribute to “the passion” of pro-Hamas protesters in his campaign event at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston yesterday. The White House denominated the speech a “political event” in the transcript of Biden’s remarks. C-SPAN has posted video of the event here. Biden is introduced by his political savior, Rep. James Clyburn, and begins speaking at about 8:00.
I didn’t think the IRS blessed political events in churches. See the IRS note here. Perhaps I misunderstand, or perhaps the church is availing itself of the Hunter Biden exception to enforcement of the Internal Revenue Code.
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Around the same time yesterday a passionate dad fought through pro-Hamas protesters blocking the Williamsburg Bridge. The Daily Mail has a good account here. The New York Post covers it here. The Post editors dub him “Angry Mr. Brooklyn” and toast him as “the new hero of New York.” You won’t be hearing much about the dad’s passion from Biden, but this dad won the day.
More: US police arrest 325 anti-Israel protesters blocking New York City tunnel, bridges.
The ubiquity of social media should make it quite easy for the NYPD to arrest plenty more, if they want to.
I’VE MOVED UP TO THE 4-GALLON CLUB AND HEADING TOWARD FIVE: The Red Cross — the biggest U.S. blood supplier — said in a release Sunday that the number of U.S. blood donors has hit a 20-year all-time low.
DUANE PATTERSON: ESPN’s Scott Van Pelt to Houston Texans’ QB C.J. Stroud: Let’s Talk About Something Besides Your Faith, M’kay?
When I saw this, I had two immediate reactions. First, what a humble, decent young man Coleridge Bernard Stroud, IV seems to be. He is fearless about his Christian faith, and it genuinely seems to animate him in a way sufficient to provide calm in the middle of the chaos of a professional football team needing a win to make it into the playoffs. That was very refreshing to see. My other thought was that ESPN must have hated this with the heat of a thousand suns. He’s one of the brightest young quarterbacks on the horizon – tons of talent, lots of poise, but…that constant Jesus talk. I’m sure suits at the sports network are trying to figure out how to get him to tone that down a bit, or even better, a lot. Then, he’d be the perfect Cinderella story.
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Niko Collins is one of the Texans’ new wide receivers, and he had himself a phenomenal game as well, literally from the first play to the final winning drive. He also happens to have graduated from the University of Michigan, who will be vying for the national championship this week. Stroud is an alum of The Ohio State University, two opposing teams of perhaps the fiercest rivalry in college football. Van Pelt tried to exploit that rivalry and how it affects their working relationship. Stroud answered it about perfect, but being a young player, gave Van Pelt what he was looking for. “Yeah, it sucks that he went there.”
Van Pelt laughed out loud. He got his payoff. He replied with, “You finally answered a question honestly.” [Emphasis mine — Ed.] Excuse me, what was that? All of his previous answers about his faith were dishonest? C.J. Stroud is a liar when he professes his faith? No one honestly believes in Jesus? Those that tell you publicly they do are scam artists? Is that what I’m sensing from the anchor of ESPN? I know he was trying to do jock talk, but the kid is who he is, not who Scott Van Pelt or some sports network would like him to be. It makes you wonder if there’s any record of hostility towards Christianity from Van Pelt.
Van Pelt is used to being the interviewer, not the interviewee, but in the heat of live TV, it was quite a Kinsley gaffe from the veteran sports anchor. I had flashbacks to listening to California Bay Area sports radio’s KNBR 680 in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, where the anchors would invariably get the vapors after they played audio clips of an athletic superstar thanked God for his talents and career success. (And openly loathe on the air about having to follow the simulcast of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show in the morning.)
(Duane Patterson’s article is just for Salem’s VIP members; please use the discount code LOYALTY if you’ve been thinking of becoming a supporter.)
WHEN THE WOKE JARGON CONFLICTS: Was just filling out a medical form and saw the now-customary “Sex at Birth” (sigh) field, in which the options given were male, female, and “unidentified.” I’m pretty sure the “at birth” was added in order to avoid the problems of trying to insure (say) a hysterectomy for the “unidentified,” but you can hardly blame them for being confused at this point.
Bonus round: someone should do an analysis of how many people actually use such “other” categories on official forms. I’ll bet it’s way fewer than you’d think – which is why the analysis will never be allowed to occur.
THEY ALWAYS PRETEND IT’S ABOUT NAZIS: Substack Versus the Slippery Slope: The real reason to keep even Nazis on the platform. The people pushing this line don’t care about Nazis, they just want to use the “threat” of Nazis to acquire the power to shut down their political rivals. It’s this way every time. They’re not well-meaning anti-Nazis, they’re vile censors with bad intent.
Related: “Go to Hell. Your self-righteous whingeing might have been tolerable four years ago. It no longer is. And it is becoming increasingly difficult to see it as the product of an innocent concern for respectful and civilized online communities. . . . What number is zero? The number of people who have died as a result of the offensive words of white nationalists on Substack.”
IT’S AN ELECTION YEAR: Brace for Impact: Are You Ready for WAR in ‘24?
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD: DOJ Sues Texas Saying It’s Against The Law To Pass A Law To Enforce The Law.
WATCH: Race-baiting Joe Biden claims housing prices are based on race.
Joe Biden is race-baiting again in order to try and help uplift his abysmal poll numbers. Today he claimed that housing prices are based on race, suggesting identical homes with blacks living in them are valued less than ones with whites. Seriously.
“Today, a home owned by a black family on one side of a highway, built by the same builder on the other side of the highway, and a white guy living in it, the white guy’s home is valued more than the black guy’s! …That’s how you build generational wealth!”
And don’t get his transportation secretary started on how racist those roads are, to boot.
AN ENTIRELY PREDICTABLE SUDDEN DISASTER 30 YEARS IN THE MAKING: Yep, Groupthink Has Doomed California, Just Like I Said It Would.
DON SURBER: Harvardicide: Come for the destruction of DEI, stay for academia’s collapse. “I come to praise Claudine Gay, not condemn her. The now ex-president of Harvard did our nation a great service by being smug and arrogant at a congressional hearing. Her hubris revealed what a farce DEI is as Harvard overlooked qualified candidates and chose her simply because she is a black lady. . . . Her ability to become the top scholar in America — and presiding over Harvard is the cherry atop the Ivy League whipped cream that covers the higher education dessert — raises the question of whether this treat is worth having. Maybe America needs more meat and potatoes.”
WALL STREET JOURNAL: Elon Musk vs. the Administrative State: SpaceX fights an NLRB attack on the company’s employment practices.
SpaceX wants to colonize Mars, but first it’s taking on a more difficult mission: Rolling back the administrative state. CEO Elon Musk’s firm is challenging the structure and powers of the National Labor Relations Board.
A regional director at the NLRB last week charged SpaceX with retaliating against employees who wrote an open letter criticizing Mr. Musk. The complaint alleged that the company unfairly barred workers from discussing the letter and “created an impression of surveillance” by “showing employees screen shots of communications between employees.”
SpaceX responded with a lawsuit in federal court arguing that the board’s structure and administrative trials are unconstitutional. The suit leans in part on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals’s SEC v. Jarkesy precedent. The Supreme Court heard the Securities and Exchange Commission’s appeal in the case in November, and a decision is expected by June.
Jarkesy held that the SEC administrative law judges’ dual layers of protection from presidential removal violate the Constitution’s command that the President must “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’” The Fifth Circuit also held that the SEC’s administrative process for adjudicating fraud claims violates the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial.
Like SEC administrative law judges, the NLRB’s judges can only be removed for good cause as found by a Merit Systems Protection Board whose members can only be removed for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Similar to the SEC, the NLRB asserts the power to extract monetary damages from defendants. SpaceX argues that such claims belong in federal court where defendants enjoy a right to a jury trial.
The SpaceX lawsuit also seeks to break new legal ground by taking aim at the NLRB’s combination of adjudicative, legislative and executive power, which it argues violates the constitutional separation of powers and due process. NLRB members rule on charges brought in its administrative courts and decide whether to seek injunctive relief in federal court.
Members of other independent agencies do the same, but SpaceX argues that the NLRB’s procedural unfairness is magnified because the board “has chosen to promulgate virtually all the legal rules in its field through adjudication rather than rulemaking.” . . .
The “accumulation of all powers legislative, executive and judiciary, in the same hands” is “the very definition of tyranny,” SpaceX writes, citing James Madison’s Federalist No. 47. Congress has granted the NLRB and other independent agencies sweeping powers that would have made the founders blanch. But the agencies have also expanded their purview.
The Biden NLRB is a case in point. The board’s statutory mission is to protect workers’ right to organize, but it is rewriting labor law to limit employer rights to manage their workforces. Credit to SpaceX for firing a rocket at the administrative state.
SpaceX has a good chance of winning here. It’s also a brushback at other bureaucracies.
SURPRISE! LEFTIST FUNDING HOLOCAUST MUSEUM PROTESTS: Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Ryan Mauro did some research on the funding behind those Pro-Palestinian protests at the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. and discovered the originator of Dark Money, the Tides Foundation. And there’s more!
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: 56 million Americans have been in credit card debt for at least a year. ‘We are seeing pockets of trouble,’ expert says.A
ltogether, card balances now total $1.08 trillion, according to the latest quarterly report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, a new record.
“Over the past two years, Americans’ credit card balances have skyrocketed 40%,” said Ted Rossman, senior industry analyst at Bankrate.
“While Americans are managing their credit card debt pretty well, all things considered, we are seeing pockets of trouble at the household level,” Rossman said.
More cardholders are carrying debt from month to month and fewer are able to pay off their balances in full, according to a separate report by Bankrate.com.
They keep telling me the economy is booming but all I see is mountains of debt.
NIBBLING AWAY AT THE LEGAL MONOPOLY: North Carolina Nonprofit and Paralegals Sue State Over First Amendment Right to Give Legal Advice on Court-Created Forms.
Somewhat related: America’s unregulated shampooer menace.
MILT HARRIS: Tearing Down Hatred Where Hatred Doesn’t Exist.
MARKET SHARE: U.S. crude oil falls 4% as Saudi price cut heightens global demand worries.
The sell-off comes after Saudi Aramco on Sunday sharply lowered the price of Arab Light Crude to Asian customers by $2 per barrel.
The Saudi price cut comes amid persistent market weakness due in large part to record U.S. crude production and softening demand in China. OPEC and its allies are cutting their production by 2.2 million barrels per day this quarter in an effort to balance the market.
“While it is possible that the price reduction was to maintain market share in the face of production cuts, the market is taking it as a clear sign that the economy is slowing. Maybe the landing might not be so soft,” Phil Flynn of The Price Futures Group wrote on Monday.
U.S. crude and Brent, the global benchmark, both ended the first week of 2024 more than 2% higher on mounting tensions in the Middle East, but supply and demand concerns have persistently overshadowed geopolitical risks in the market.
“The market seems to feel that geopolitical risk will not impact supply and if it does, demand is weak so it will not matter,” Flynn wrote.
The Saudis are trying to keep market share with lower prices which, in the short run, can hurt American producers with higher production costs. Longer run, the Permian Basin will still be there.
NEW ENERGY SURVEY, SAME RESULTS: Most Americans want cheap energy and a mere 3 percent think climate change is the nation’s most pressing issue. That’s according to a new survey of likely voters in eight battleground states conducted for the American Energy Alliance (AEA) and the Committee to Unleash Prosperity (CTUP).
WHY IS HIGHER EDUCATION SUCH A CESSPIT OF RACIST BIGOTRY? DEI staffer alleges U. Wisconsin discriminated against her for being white: lawsuit.
POT, MEET KETTLE: Kamala Harris Accuses Republicans of ‘Trying to Silence’ Voters
EVERYTHING IS GOING SWIMMINGLY: Stanford professor steps down from anti-Semitism committee following allegations of anti-Israel views. “Kelman, criticized for downplaying campus anti-Semitism in a 2017 paper, faced opposition from Stanford students and alum, prompting his resignation from the committee.”