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Archive for 2024
November 8, 2024
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Russia launches Soyuz in service of Iran.
Russia launched a Soyuz rocket Monday carrying two satellites designed to monitor the space weather around Earth and 53 small satellites, including two Iranian ones, Reuters reports. The primary payloads aboard the Soyuz-2.1b rocket were two Ionosfera-M satellites to probe the ionosphere, an outer layer of the atmosphere near the edge of space. Solar activity can alter conditions in the ionosphere, impacting communications and navigation. The two Iranian satellites on this mission were named Kowsar and Hodhod. They will collect high-resolution reconnaissance imagery and support communications for Iran.
A distant third … This was only the 13th orbital launch by Russia this year, trailing far behind the United States and China. We know of two more Soyuz flights planned for later this month, but no more, barring a surprise military launch (which is possible). The projected launch rate puts Russia on pace for its quietest year of launch activity since 1961, the year Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly in space.
That’s quite the decline.
JUSTINE BATEMAN OFFERS HILARIOUS FILM TIPS TO MELTING DOWN TIKTOKERS: #SocialMediaVideoCritique. “We can’t say she is a Trump supporter for certain, she probably isn’t, but her eyes seem to have been opened about how bad leftist politicians are. A Los Angeles resident, Bateman is hyper-critical of Governor Gavin Newsom, Mayor Karen Bass, and recently ousted District Attorney George Gascón.”
#SocialMediaVideoCritique
– This one has a number of issues.
– Primarily, the main objective of the piece is to “shave the head.” However, this never plays out properly, and we are instead distracted by the actresses inability to perform the direction.
– The actions that 1/ https://t.co/SVr0FQzecS— Justine Bateman (@JustineBateman) November 7, 2024
Bateman offers her some thoughts on her worldview in a Twitter thread today that begins, “Decompressing from walking on eggshells for the past four years:”
I am neither one extreme or the other, but am one of the millions of people who believe in common sense, and that everyone should be free to live their lives however they want, unless that freedom interferes with someone else’s freedom to live their own life.
That’s it.
That was fascist hate speech, particularly in Los Angeles, right up until Tuesday night.
SPRINGTIME FOR KAMALA: Kamala Harris Quoted One Of Hitler’s Favorite Writers In Her Concession Speech.
Carlyle’s original quote was less exact: “The eternal stars shine out again, as soon as it is dark enough.” Regardless, according to the website Quote Investigator, in a published paper Beard himself attributed his own take on the aphorism directly to Carlyle: “In conclusion we may say, with Carlyle, when it grows dark enough we can see stars.”
Why does this matter? Well, if you poke around you’ll see that Carlyle was reviled for much of the 20th century as the illiberal “prophet of fascism.” Oh and then there’s this:
In his waning days, defeated and surrounded only by loyalists in his bunker, Hitler sought consolation from the literature he admired the most. According to many biographers, the following scene took place. Hitler turned to Goebbels, his trusted assistant, and asked for a final reading. The words he chose to hear before his death were from Thomas Carlyle’s biography of Frederick the Great.
Now to be fair to Carlyle, like a lot of influential intellectuals, he was a lot more complex and nuanced than his critics make him out to be. He’s probably better known as the originator of the “great man of history” theory than for his supposed fascism, though a lot of people contentiously argue that the former leads to the latter. His reputation has been rehabbed somewhat since the mid-20th century when he was more reviled, but he’s exactly the kind of figure that woke academics extend almost no grace toward. (And that’s without even getting into his 19th century views on race.)
Anyway, the long and short of it is that, while Kamala Harris was graciously conceding her electoral loss to a man she had insincerely warned was dangerous fascist, she tried to soothe her supporter’s souls by, however inadvertently, quoting one of Hitler’s favorite historians. Absolute perfection.
It’s great to see the final episode of HBO’s Veep go out on such a brilliantly satiric note.
GET IN WHILE THE GETTING IS GOOD: The Biden Administration and ‘Coyotes’ Expect Huge Surge in Illegals at the Border.
WAIT, I THOUGHT IT WAS ONLY WOMEN WHO FACED PRESSURE TO HAVE PERFECT BODIES: Social media likes and comments linked to young men’s obsession with perfect pecs and a six-pack.
Is this really new?
ELECTION INTEGRITY: Colorado—unlike any other state in the union—saw an unmistakable leftward shift in voting patterns in the most recent elections.
The timing, juxtaposed against a broader national trend of rightward-leaning shifts, raises some pertinent questions. Why did Colorado buck the trend so decisively, and at such an unusual time?
This is the same Colorado that, under Secretary of State Jena Griswold, experienced a catastrophic breach of election security. Colorado’s voting machine BIOS passwords were posted online for anyone to access months before the election.
The breach under Griswold’s watch was unprecedented, and yet it seemingly had no repercussions or impact, at least not officially. But with Colorado being the only state to record a notable shift to the left, can one truly ignore the possible connection? Four full months of exposed BIOS passwords in an environment of deeply polarized and contested elections is not a mere technical error—it is an open door, a flashing invitation for interference, be it from internal actors or foreign opportunists.
What are we to conclude when the only state with such an electoral shift is also the state that allowed its voting systems to be compromised with such brazen carelessness?
Read the whole thing.
THE PLUCKY SOCIALIST BRITS AT THE GRAUNIAD ARE TAKING THE NEWS OF TRUMP’S VICTORY REMARKABLY WELL. And when I say “well,” what I really mean is this: Guardian staff offered Trump therapy over ‘upsetting’ result.
While Republicans across the US celebrate Donald Trump’s victory and eagerly await his return to the White House, those that backed the wrong horse appear to be struggling to come to terms with it. Mr S is still waiting to hear whether certain lefty celebrities are going to follow through with their plans to leave the country over the result, and a number of pundits are still recovering from their fantastically inaccurate predictions about the race. But we should also spare a thought for some of those hit hardest by the announcement: Guardian journalists.
It now transpires that the newspaper has reached out to its employees to offer, er, Trump therapy. In a company-wide email, editor Katharine Viner sympathised with staffers saddened by the outcome of the ‘dramatic night’. Assuring journalists she knows ‘the result has been very upsetting for many colleagues’, Viner has encouraged UK workers to contact their American counterparts – as ‘they will be most directly affected by the result’. Going on the Grauniad editor gushed:
“If you’re not in the US, do contact your American colleagues to offer your support… It’s upsetting for many other
I want to say that George Orwell would be shocked by how far his fellow British socialists have fallen — but to be honest, based upon his low opinion of the typical socialist Brit in 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier, he wouldn’t be at all. And today on both sides of the pond, the cognitive dissonance of leftists imagining themselves as being the second coming of the French Resistance intersecting with the level of safetyism they’ve had drilled into them is astonishing to watch.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: Artificial sensory cilia can monitor internal biomarkers to detect and assess airway diseases.
KNOCK OUT THE DEEP STATE: Elon Musk’s Fist Is Wrapped Inside a Velvet Glove.
GREAT MOMENTS IN COGNITIVE DISSONANCE:
MILTON FRIEDMAN’S REVENGE: Biden and Harris Got the Economic Policy They Wanted, and Voters Hated It.
“Milton Friedman isn’t running the show anymore,” said then-candidate Joe Biden in early 2020, and he got elected and proved it. Never mind that Milton Friedman was never running the show — the federal government has by and large ignored his policy advice for decades. The Biden years generated takes like “The End of Friedmanomics” at the New Republic in 2021, or the retrospective “When Milton Friedman Ran the Show” from the Atlantic in 2023.
Democrats’ economic agenda the past four years was about as anti-Friedman as possible, and they implemented it successfully. This is a key point — Democrats can’t accurately say that their agenda was not tried.
The key tenets were government spending and regulation. The spending was to boost demand. Sometimes it was to boost demand for specific goods, such as electric vehicles or higher education. Overall economy-wide demand was boosted by massive budget deficits. Even with a growing economy, soaring stock market, and low unemployment, Biden wanted — and got — budget deficits as a share of GDP greater than those during the Great Depression.
The Biden administration’s regulatory burden far exceeded even the Obama administration’s. According to Dan Goldbeck of the American Action Forum, at this point in Obama’s first term, final rules imposed by his administration had cost $490 billion. Final rules imposed under Biden so far have cost $1.7 trillion.
Joe Biden’s “Investing in America” agenda was epitomized by major legislation that has passed into law: the American Rescue Plan Act, the infrastructure law, the CHIPS Act, and the so-called Inflation Reduction Act. These included major industrial-policy components, giving government more power to direct investment in specific sectors deemed vital to the national interest.
These laws were self-consciously and proudly advertised as big-government efforts to counteract the alleged failures of the free market. They were branded “pro-worker” by politicians and the press and included a bevy of benefits for labor unions and the strengthening of “buy American” rules.
Democrats aimed to and were praised for wanting to “run the economy hot,” meaning maintaining tight labor markets through continuous expansionary monetary and fiscal policy. This was supposed to be “inclusive” economic policy that would benefit low-income and racial-minority workers and reduce inequality.
Democrats invented the word “Bidenomics” to describe this supposedly new economic paradigm, which was really reheated Keynesianism with some “diversity” sprinkled in for extra flavor. Then, they stopped using the term, and it was adopted by conservative-activist groups such as Americans for Prosperity to denigrate the administration’s agenda.
When Democrats replaced Biden with Harris, they had an opportunity to also replace their unpopular economic agenda. They did not take it. Harris essentially ran a controlled experiment to test the hypothesis that the only problem with Biden’s economic agenda was that Biden was too old.
As with recent pro-Jimmy Carter revisionists (inspired perhaps by Ezra Klein’s 2009 defense of Jimmy Carter’s “Malaise Speech”), I eagerly await the thinkpieces built around the premise that True Bidenomics has never been tried!
HE’S RIGHT. SEND THIS TO YOUR GOP SENATORS AND REPRESENTATIVE:
Dear GOP,
You asked for a mandate.
We delivered.
Now it’s your turn.
NO MORE EXCUSES.
Batter up!— Dan Bongino (@dbongino) November 8, 2024
EVERYONE WHO’S USED IT HAS KNOWN THIS FOR YEARS: FDA says commonly used decongestant ‘not effective,’ proposes removal. “The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has determined commonly used oral phenylephrine is ‘not effective’ and has proposed its removal from over-the-counter nasal decongestants.”
It was only brought out because the effective stuff, pseudoephedrine (Sudafed), was put behind the counter, in an apparently useless effort to reduce meth availability.
THERE’S A NEW SHERIFF IN TOWN AND HE COMMANDS RESPECT:
Qatar has notified Hamas Officials staying in the Country, that they are no longer welcome and must immediately make preparations to depart.
— OSINTdefender (@sentdefender) November 8, 2024
This isn’t quite the same as Iran releasing the hostages while Ronald Reagan was being sworn in — mostly because Qatar isn’t even waiting for the inuagural.