THE NEW SPACE RACE: SpaceX rolls 7th Starship spacecraft out for testing ahead of next launch. Cool photos at the link. Some parts of the 21st Century are turning out as I’d hoped.
Archive for 2024
December 14, 2024
TERRIFYING QUESTION ABOUT THOSE DRONES: How many of the 36K+ young Chinese men who have entered the U.S. illegally under President Joe Biden are drone operators? Check out my latest PJMedia column.
UPDATE: Everything you ever wanted to know about drones, quad-copters and other UAVs.
PROFESSOR CARRINGTON, CALL YOUR OFFICE: Our Sun Could Be Overdue For a Violent Superflare, Study Warns.
HAHA, CRY MORE. LA Times Owner Killed Another Editorial and Progressives are Worked Up. “Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the LA Times, continues to shock the progressives who work at and buy his newspaper. He made news when he killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris prior to the election. This move was overshadowed when the Washington Post, owned by Jeff Bezos, did the same thing. Last month, Dr. Soon-Shiong killed another editorial, this one critical of Trump’s cabinet picks. . . . The editorial never ran. Instead, they went with another piece which was less critical of Trump’s cabinet picks. This is in keeping with a new push at the Times to expand the range of commentary. Last month Dr. Soon-Shiong said he wanted voices from ‘all sides.'”
Plus “He hasn’t done anything wrong here, he’s just telling the progressives who work for him that he wants a new tone at the paper he owns. He has every right to do this, whether they like it or not.” They don’t, and their outraged entitlement is beautiful.
MAKE THEM PAY: George Stephanopoulos and ABC apologize to Trump, are forced to pay $15 million to settle defamation suit. Plus attorney’s fees.
UPDATE (From Ed): Question asked and answered:
So the fact that ABC News and George Stephanopoulos have agreed to pay Donald Trump $15 million for defamation with a false claim of rape is going to be a front-page, lead of the evening news story for the next 3 days, right?
Stop laughing.
— John Podhoretz (@jpodhoretz) December 14, 2024
CHRISTIAN TOTO: NY Times Declares The Woke Movies Era Is Dead.
The New York Times uncorked a withering attack on woke Hollywood movies. The piece flexes its progressive bona fides, but large swathes of the article could have been written by The Critical Drinker or Film Threat’s Chris Gore.
The headline and subhead are stunning and brave in their bluntness.
Is the Awkward ‘Diversity Era’ of Hollywood Behind Us?
The past decade’s clumsiest attempts to cram new faces into old stories now feel like a moment, and a genre, of their own.
The same paper that erupted in fury over a Sen. Tom Cotton op-ed let this missive through?
The biggest takeaway? The woke movies era is over. Done. Kaput. And The New York Times appears happy to report it.
But how can Hollywood even put out product in 2025, what with all of the stars who promised to leave the country if Trump won in November…
UPDATE: So when does the woke era at the New York Times conclude? NYT Puts Menstrual Products in Men’s Bathrooms ‘To Support Transgender and Non-Binary Colleagues.’
The paper’s decision was announced by the vice president for global real estate and facilities, Victor Liu, in a company-wide Slack message. From July 26 to July 29, Liu said, the company would begin “adding menstrual products and sanitary baskets” to the office’s men’s restrooms “to support transgender and non-binary colleagues.” The company also announced that it was “removing gendered imagery and adding language that colleagues are welcome to use the restroom in which they feel most comfortable.”
The move highlights the growing cultural and political rift between legacy media companies and the general public. Polls show that Americans generally support policies that require individuals who identify as transgender to use bathrooms that match their biological sex. President-elect Donald Trump hammered the transgender issue in his successful campaign last fall, which surveys show was one of his most impactful talking points.
The Times declined to comment.
Just 1 percent of the Times’s workforce identifies as “nonbinary,” a category which includes transgender individuals but also those who simply choose not to identify with either gender, according to the paper’s 2023 “Diversity and Inclusion Report.” The number of “nonbinary” employees, the report stated, does appear to be climbing, although they are still a negligible portion of the paper’s workforce.
The Times’s efforts to appeal to a broader swath of Americans are often hamstrung by partisan reporters and junior employees who demand the paper move further left. Staff at the paper revolted in the summer of 2020 after the opinion section published a column by Sen. Tom Cotton (R., Ark.) that called for sending in the military to quell left-wing riots in the nation’s cities. That column prompted at least one writer, former tech reporter Charlie Warzel, to cry in an emergency staff meeting.
More recently, Times reporters are in the midst of a “rebellion” over the paper’s coverage of the war in Gaza, according to the Wall Street Journal. Senior editors, the Journal reported in April, are worried that some reporters “are compromising their neutrality and applying ideological purity tests.”
Because if there’s a safe place for nonbinary and LGBT people, it’s definitely the Gaza Strip.
FIGHT DRY SKIN: Kiehl’s Creme de Corps, Rich, Luscious Body Lotion. #CommissionEarned
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
LEFTIES CAN’T GIVE UP: Michigan’s Misguided Attempt to Bankrupt Gunmakers.
LIMITED TIME DEAL: Adjustable Dumbbells Sets. #CommissionEarned
‘WE’LL SEE YOU IN HELL!’ Exhausted Oakland tiki bar lashes out on Instagram.
When news broke Wednesday that the Kon-Tiki, a downtown Oakland cocktail spot, will close Dec. 22 after seven years of mai tais and shrimp tacos, it seemed like only the latest struggling operation to throw in the bar towel.
But the closure drew added attention Friday morning, when the bar’s Instagram account roared to life with a blistering message aimed at the Oakland Police Department, mean and incompetent city officials, “bonehead” employees, and “Karen M on Yelp” who “wishes you’d close because a server forgot her mayo.” The rant noted that business has been slow, but the combination of break-ins and burdensome regulatory requirements, like training mandates, is what ultimately did in the bar.
Comments on the post were turned off. The Standard reached out to the Kon-Tiki for details, and owner Christ (“crist”) Aivaliotis confirmed that he wrote the message. His heartbreaking tirade resembles an October rant from Michelin-starred chef Peter Hemsley of the recently closed South of Market restaurant Aphotic. Hemsley’s post decried the lack of business at the Moscone Center and Aphotic’s location near the “ugly butt end of a desolate convention center suck hole.”
Gooder and harder, California:
“Folx” is quite the leftist tell; no word yet if the owner is a Columbia graduate.
RSV VACCINES FOR KIDS HAVE A CHECKERED HISTORY: FDA Advisors Say More Data Needed for RSV Vaccines in Young Kids: A “very complicated situation” after mRNA vaccine trial was halted, expert says. “FDA advisors said that more data are needed to fully understand if there are broader safety concerns related to use of respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccines in young children after an mRNA vaccine trial was halted earlier this year. Moderna, which had been developing an mRNA vaccine candidate for RSV in infants and toddlers, notified the FDA in July that it had paused a phase I trial due to an imbalance of severe/hospitalized RSV cases in RSV-naive infants ages 5 to 7 months who had received the vaccine versus placebo, raising concern for possible vaccine-associated enhanced respiratory disease (VAERD), according to FDA briefing documents.”
An earlier effort at RSV vaccine had a similar problem.
BYRON YORK: Now we know how many secret sources the FBI had on Jan. 6, but what did they do?
There are other things we don’t know as well. The report covers the FBI, which is under the purview of the Justice Department inspector general. But it does not cover the activities of the Capitol Police or the Washington Metropolitan Police Department, which are not part of the Justice Department. Did they have confidential sources or undercover agents? We also don’t know, as law professor Jonathan Turley has pointed out, whether the presence of the secret FBI sources was “revealed to the defense in the hundreds of prosecutions.”
Friday morning, reporter and DOJ critic Julie Kelly posted, “It struck me that not a single text between an FBI handler and CHS is included in the Horowitz report. No comms whatsoever. How is that an investigative work product?” Kelly also pointed out that Inspector General Horowitz could only review what the FBI gave him. Whether you think that is acceptable or not depends on your degree of trust in the FBI, which is quite low among Republicans these days.
So, there is a lot more to know about the FBI and its secret sources on Jan. 6. Yes, it’s good to know a specific number. But that’s not the whole story.
Hopefully, more details will emerge next year:
Kash Patel: once they admit there was undercover informants at the capital, their own narrative is defeated because it takes six months to place an undercover informant in with the proud boys. pic.twitter.com/6uZMGLDV1r
— Insurrection Barbie (@DefiyantlyFree) December 13, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA updates ‘Moon to Mars’ roadmap for exploring Red Planet.
THE VEGAN MAFIA IS EVERYWHERE: Proposed USDA guidelines support beans, lentils for protein versus meat.
END OF THE LINE FOR NANCY PELOSI: Hip Fractures, Mortality Rates, and Father Time.
She’s not someone who’s spent the past 20 years in a rocking chair. She seems fit, thin, and very active.
All of this matters. The healthier you were before your hip injury, the more likely it is you’ll recover.
But it’s a deadly serious situation for Pelosi and her loved ones. Almost certainly, she’s facing a steep recovery process, and at her age, it’s foreseeable that there could be a series of struggles.
Nancy Pelosi has been such a fixture in American politics for so many decades, she seemed larger than life — a permanent, immovable presence. It seemed as if, in 50 million years, there would still be cockroaches, taxes, and Nancy Pelosi pulling strings in the House.
If anyone could outlast Father Time, it’s her.
But for both good and bad, our legislators are human. Ones on the right; ones on the left; those in the middle: we’re all flesh and blood.
And we all grow old. We all get sick. All of us will die.
Even Nancy Pelosi.
In all likelihood, her career is over.
Still though, never underestimate the power of the dark side of the Force: Pelosi files 2026 statement of candidacy with midterm elections on horizon.
McDonald’s is central to American life, both physically and culturally. The last few months have provided two massive news stories that have emphasized this. At the end of October, there was the viral, and controversial, Trump campaign stop, where he “worked” for 30 minutes at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania. Then, this week, there was the news that Luigi Mangione, the alleged assassin of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was caught in a McDonald’s—also, coincidentally, in Pennsylvania—because he was spotted by a group of morning regulars and employees.
The reaction to both stories in certain parts of the media has proved that a lot of commentators don’t understand what McDonald’s means to ordinary Americans—which basically means that they don’t understand ordinary Americans, period.
* * * * * * * * *
Trump’s superpower has long been signaling to working stiffs that he’s “just like you,” despite being on the surface nothing like them. His love of McDonald’s, which I believe is as genuine a feeling as any politician can ever have, is one of those signals. In fact, it may be his most effective, because it goads his critics into signaling that they are not “just like you.”
McDonald’s is wildly popular with every group of Americans—urban, rural, male, female, middle or working class; it unites every demographic in the U.S., with a single exception: the highly educated, especially academics. They alone, as a group, seem to have moral issues with McDonald’s, and while they might use it, they do so grudgingly, usually to appease crying kids or for a rest stop on a long trip.
So Trump’s embrace of McDonald’s becomes a political twofer. It shows he’s one of you: He is a back-row guy at heart. But it also shows that while he should be a member of the front-row, given his education and wealth, he’s not, because such people despise him for many of the same reasons they look down on you: for what he eats, how he talks, for what he believes in, and for how he arrives at those beliefs, which isn’t by spending years reading through approved syllabi, but having gone out into the world and learned from it, one mistake after the next.
The press, and his opponents, used the McDonald’s photo op to point out all the obvious absurdities. “The former president, before cosplaying as a successful businessman, was the quintessential elitist,” bleated MSNBC. “So what are MAGA die-hards and faux-centrist Trump apologists talking about when they praise his drive-through stint as ‘amazing and hilarious’?” Obviously, the article didn’t actually pose this question to any normal American, and instead just started quoting statistics.
Criticism like this fell flat because Trump also recognized the absurdities of his stunt, and didn’t care. And anyone who did could be seen, by him and his supporters, as the same old pedantic scolds—people who are so absorbed in their books that they can’t see the real and bigger truths of the world, including the idea that cosplaying as a McDonald’s employee for an hour, especially working the drive-through, is simply fun.
That’s all may be, but curiously enough, Ctrl-F “Kamala” on this Free Press article brings up zero results, when she was the whole reason Trump worked the French Fry machine and the drive-through at McDonald’s for one afternoon: ‘I Did Fries:’ Kamala Harris Claims She Worked at McDonald’s, but She Never Mentioned It Until She Ran for President. Did She Really Toil Beneath the Golden Arches?
As Trump said after his photo op, “I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala at McDonald’s.”
NEXT MONTH SHOULD BE FUN: Report reveals that FBI spied on its likely new director, Kash Patel.
It’s going to be awkward at FBI headquarters next month when President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the bureau likely takes over.
According to a new government watchdog report, the FBI spied on its prospective new boss, Kash Patel.
Patel has promised to “clean house” at the Hoover Building, and hold all those who “abused their power” during the Russiagate “witch hunt” accountable.
He might start with the officials and agents who secretly vacuumed up his phone records and emails starting in late 2017, when he led a House Intelligence Committee investigation into the FBI’s reliance on Hillary Clinton’s false opposition research to surveil a Trump campaign official as a supposed “Russian agent.”
According to a nearly 100-page report by the Justice Department’s inspector general, the FBI subpoenaed the records as part of an investigation it opened to find out whether congressional staffers leaked classified information about its Trump-Russia “collusion” case to the Washington Post and other media.
Working with career prosecutors at Justice, the FBI compelled Google and Apple to turn over the sensitive private information of subjects the FBI identified “between September 2017 and March 2018,” a period when Andrew McCabe was the acting FBI director. (Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions was out of the loop, the report said, having recused himself from the Russia probe.)
The court orders gagged the service providers from notifying Patel and other customers of the intrusion.
As chief counsel, Patel had no idea that the subject of his investigation — the FBI — was collecting his data and increasing the visibility of witnesses he was communicating with, including whistleblowers.
As Ward Clark adds at RedState, “The FBI, yes, needs major reform. Frankly, it would not be any over-reaction for Patel to simply dismiss anyone involved in this debacle. That would be what we might call ‘a good start.'”
JOLLY OLD ENGLAND IS NO MORE: Roger Kimball laments the passing of the England that gave the world the English Bill of Rights, Maggie Thatcher and C.S. Lewis.
GREAT GIFT: SwissGear Cecil 5505 Laptop Backpack, Black Hex, 18-Inch. #CommissionEarned
