“THEY WEREN’T COUNTING ON THE INDIAN NAVY, AND WHAT A HOOT!” Indian Commandos Give Somali Pirates a Bit of FO When They Decide to FA. “Who’s the captain now, eh? Message received. What a great story and a happy ending.”
Archive for 2024
January 5, 2024
OUR RULING CLASS IN A NUTSHELL:
Joe Biden is calling Trump a “dictator” while simultaneously supporting his chief political opponent getting kicked off the ballot pic.twitter.com/dER9htucqu
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) January 5, 2024
WELL, GOOD: China Had a Bad Year.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG:
NEW: According to just-filed Judicial Watch suit, the officer who killed Ashli Babbitt had his police powers revoked for a prior off-duty shooting in which "stray bullets from Lt. Byrd’s firearm struck the sides of homes nearby. Investigation found use of force was not justified"
— Paul Sperry (@paulsperry_) January 5, 2024
OPEN THREAD: Rest assured, you’ll get your money’s worth.
WHEN PROSECUTORS RABBLE ROUSE ABOUT THE THREAT OF RABBLE-ROUSING:
BREAKING: Jack Smith warns if Trump is re-elected he could use the State of the Union address to incite his supporters to kill opposing politicians pic.twitter.com/q0nrGYlbnw
— Jack Poso 🇺🇸 (@JackPosobiec) January 4, 2024
People in authority used to think it was important to maintain some degree of dignity.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: China completes new commercial launch pad to boost access to space.
WHY IS THE TV INDUSTRY SUCH A CESSPIT OF SEXUAL ABUSE? Nigel Lythgoe stepping aside as ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ judge after sexual assault allegations.
FLASHBACK: Draft Women? Why Not?
A disqualification would poison American politics for a generation. Which might be one of the left’s goals.
If the Democrats were confident they’d win on the merits, they wouldn’t be trying to disqualify Trump now.
OH NO! ANYWAY . . . Submerging Skylines: Major East Coast Cities Including NYC and DC Rapidly Sinking.
Another reason to dust off my proposal to Tax The Blue Zones!
LOST HIS MIND OR CYA? Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine Has Lost His Mind on Transing Children.
GIVEN HOW MOST COLLEGE STUDENTS LIVE, THIS IS BAD NEWS: Disrupted sleep in early adulthood linked to memory problems later.
GREGOR SAMSA SMILES: How Severed Cockroach Legs Could Help Us ‘Fully Rebuild’ Human Bodies.
Hugh Herr, Ph.D., co-founder of MIT’s Center for Bionics, is one of them. The first prostheses he designed were his own, after doctors told him he’d never rock climb again following a double amputation below the knees. Today, he researches ways to make replacement limbs more cyborg-like and integrated with their human hosts. His ultimate goal is what he calls embodiment, where “the electromechanics are so married to human physiology you can’t remove them.” This means a prosthetic limb would no longer be a tool you can take off, like a pair of glasses, but another part of your body that responds without you having to even think about it, more like a pacemaker. “In the future,” Herr tells Popular Mechanics, “when a person has cancer, we will be able to fully rebuild their body.”
That may sound like a lofty goal, but we’re rapidly getting closer to realizing it. When it comes to getting human physiology and mechanical parts to play nicely together, there are three main interfaces, Herr says:
- The mechanical, or how seamlessly the external limb attaches to biological components while remaining effective;
- The neural, or how to connect the prosthetic part to the brain and both give and receive feedback from it; and
- Cutaneous feedback, which largely focuses on proprioception, or the sense of knowing where in space a limb is.
Right now, most commercial prosthetics are controlled by electric signals transmitted via sensors to the muscles and nerves adjacent to the amputation site. While capable of somewhat sophisticated movements, these devices often lack a lot in terms of control and natural sensation, e.g., being able to feel that your foot is on level ground.
Reading between the lines, Kremlinology style, this sort of article, appearing at the beginning of an election year, can only mean one thing: leftist scientists are once again hoping to advance exoskeleton technology sufficiently quickly, to allow Hillary Clinton yet another shot at campaigning this year, if Biden’s adrenochrome dosages aren’t sufficiently powerful enough to get him through the campaign season. Wake up, sheeple!
WELL THAT DOESN’T MAKE A STRONG CASE, GUYS: Striking doctors in England say hospitals haven’t shown an urgent need for them to return to work.
MIKE’S MIDWEST MULLIGAN: Ohio Gov. DeWine Signs ‘Emergency’ Executive Order Banning Transgender Surgeries for Minors After Vetoing Similar Bill.
UPDATE: “The bill DeWine vetoed would prohibit gender-affirming care, such as hormone blockers, hormone replacement therapy and surgery for transgender youth. It would also require K-12 schools, state colleges and universities and private colleges and universities to have separate single-sex teams for each sex. It also creates legal remedies for violations. Republicans in the House and Senate have enough control in each chamber to override DeWine’s veto. They have until the session ends at the end of this year to do it.”
WHICH IS GOOD, AS OTHERWISE THERE’D BE NO REASON TO BUY MORE THAN ONE: The Perfect Pistol Doesn’t Exist.
Related:
START THE NEW YEAR RIGHT: COSORI Air Fryer TurboBlaze 6.0-Quart Compact Airfryer. #CommissionEarned
RACE CARD DECLINED: Claudine Gay Made a Career of Attacking Black Scholars. Don’t Defend Her for Being Black.
The demand that Gay resign stems from the utter lack of moral competency she displayed in her testimony before Congress, in which she said that calling for the genocide of Jews is only against Harvard rules in certain contexts. She also failed to condemn the Hamas atrocities against Israel in real time on October 7, another reason she should resign. There is also now evidence of serial plagiarism. And did I mention Gay has published no books—an unprecedented feat for a Harvard President, unless one travels back in time to the year 1773? . . .
Did you know that Claudine Gay during her Harvard career has repeatedly targeted and disrupted the careers of prominent Black male professors?
As Dean of the College, Gay terminated Ronald S. Sullivan, Jr. as Faculty Dean of the Winthrop House. Professor Sullivan, Jr., a graduate of Morehouse College and Harvard Law School, was the first Black faculty dean of a house in the history of Harvard College.
What was Professor Sullivan’s offense? Sullivan deigned to represent the disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein—an act of moral conscience, since all are entitled to legal representation in our legal system. Yet legal conscience mattered not to Claudine Gay, who terminated a race pioneer for doing his civic duty.
You may excuse this heartless termination as a one-off. You would be wrong. Economics Professor Roland G. Fryer, Jr. was next in the sights of Dean Gay. Fryer was a top Black professor at Harvard. After having overcome all sorts of hardship and childhood deprivation, Professor Fryer joined the faculty at Harvard to become the second-youngest professor ever to be awarded tenure at Harvard, and went on to blaze a trail of distinction, including winning the MacArthur Fellowship and the John Bates Clark Medal.
Yet when Fryer undertook research into the killings of unarmed Black men in Houston, Fryer’s research found no racial disparities. He made the mistake of undercutting the racial narrative that the Left has adopted, and as a result, Gay did her best to remove all of his academic privileges, coordinating a witch hunt against him. Fryer survived Gay’s crusade of discharge but Fryer’s lab was shut down, his reputation tarnished.
No one in good faith should defend President Gay because she is the first Black president of Harvard. Even if you don’t agree with me that our racial struggle is in our past, someone who has targeted Black male professors has waived any benefit of the “first Black” defense.
To be fair, no one in good faith is defending her.
END OF AN ERA: Wayne LaPierre announces resignation as NRA chief. Lots of people dislike him, and not without reason, but his era at NRA was also marked by the biggest victories of its history. The challenge for his successors will be to revitalize the organization, which is currently being upstaged by other oufits like the GOA or the SAF.
HEALTH: You’ll Never Believe How Bad This Is for Your Heart. “I have noticed though that if there’s one thing that sends my blood pressure higher than a lunch of ramen noodles and Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, it’s getting stuck in traffic. As it turns out, I’m not alone.”
IF I’M GOING TO HAVE MALARIA, I’LL TAKE MINE ASYMPTOMATIC! Classifying the natural history of asymptomatic malaria.
STILL A FEW BUGS IN THE SYSTEM: ChatGPT found to have very low success rate in diagnosing pediatric case studies.
GOOD LORD: Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton Swatted. “In any case, I’ve got to believe that SWATing the Attorney General is a pretty risky gambit. I mean, I’m pretty sure any AG is going to have the resources to pursue the perps. Likewise, I’m pretty sure he can get a warrant for the device data, and even an unregistered burner phone can be tracked.”
MR. PRESIDENT, WE MUST NOT ALLOW A COLLEGE PLAGIARISM GAP!
To be fair, Rufo is in excellent company here. As Tom Wolfe told Rolling Stone’s Chet Flippo in 1980:
I believe it was in the New Republic that Mitch Tuchman wrote that the reason you turned against liberals is that you were rejected by the white-shoe crowd at Yale.
Wait a minute! Is that one by Tuchman? Yeah, oh, that was great.
He talked about your doctoral dissertation.
Yeah, he wrote that after The Painted Word. It went further than that. It was called “The Manchurian Candidate,” and it said in all seriousness that I had some-how been prepared by the establishment, which he obviously thought existed at Yale, to be this kind of kamikaze like Laurence Harvey – I think that’s who was in The Manchurian Candidate, wasn’t it? – to go out and assassinate liberal culture. I loved that. And he’s talking about Yale. When I was at Yale, William Buckley was writing God and Man at Yale, saying that it had been taken over by the Left and that the Left was pouring all this poison into the innocent vessels of the young. Tuchman’s saying I turned on liberalism is amusing in itself, because it would indicate that I had either been or pretended to be a liberal and then had turned on my comrades for some devious reason. All I ever did was write about the world we inhabit, the world of culture, with a capital C, and journalism and the arts and so on, with exactly the same tone that I wrote about everything else. With exactly the same reverence that the people who screamed the most would have written about life in a small American town or in the business world or in professional sports, which is to say with no reverence at all, which is as it should be. And these days, if you mock the prevailing fashion in the world of the arts or journalism, you’re called a conservative. Which is just another term for a heretic. I would much rather be called a conservative in that case than its opposite, I assure you.
I’m so old, I can remember when The Manchurian Candidate was meant to be a satire of those who imagined Russians under every floorboard; I’m pretty sure that John Frankenheimer didn’t intend his film to be a how-to guide for routing them out.
(Classical allusion in headline.)