Archive for 2024

SURE LOOKS LIKE AN INVASION TO ME:

 

“The data shows that ideology, race and gender are all statistically significant predictors of self-reported mental health, with liberals having the worst self-reported mental health compared to moderates and conservatives, and women having worse self-reported mental health than men. What’s more, the interaction between race, ideology, and gender is statistically significant — with liberal white and non-white women having the worst self-reported mental health. This trend has also been reported by Zach Goldberg and Haidt using Pew Research’s data, as well as findings from Gimbrone et al.”

SPACE: A Soyuz crew launch suffers a rare abort seconds before liftoff.

On Thursday a crew of three people was due to launch on a Soyuz rocket, bound for the International Space Station.

However, the launch scrubbed at about 20 seconds before the planned liftoff time, just before the sequence to ignite the rocket’s engines was initiated, due to unspecified issues. Shortly after the abort, there were unconfirmed reports of an issue with the ground systems supporting the Soyuz rocket.

The three people inside the Soyuz spacecraft, on top of the rocket, were NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson, Roscosmos cosmonaut Oleg Novitskiy, and spaceflight participant Marina Vasilevskaya of Belarus. This Soyuz MS-25 mission had been planned for liftoff from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan at 13:21 UTC (6:21 pm local time in Baikonur).

Such scrubs are rare. The Soyuz booster and its launch systems are typically robust, launching regardless of weather conditions—watching an orbital, liquid-fueled rocket launch during a snowstorm is quite a trip. And the Russians have plenty of experience with the booster. Since its debut in 1966, across a number of variants, the Soviet Union and Russia have launched more than 2,000 Soyuz rockets.

I’m curious to know what caused the scrub but don’t expect an honest answer out of Moscow.

DON’T GET COCKY:

LEFTISM AS A MENTAL DISORDER, EXHIBIT #1,000,006:

As one game designer put it, “These are likely the type of devs holding all other devs hostage for their agenda. Tyranny of the woke in gaming.”

WE WILL BE GREETED AS LIBERATORS: Biden declares London, Rome, Toronto are ‘in America’ in latest flub.

President Biden on Tuesday again flubbed what was supposed to be an applause line in a speech about his efforts to lower prescription drug costs.

It was the second time this month Mr. Biden botched the same line while decrying the cost of drug prices for Americans. The president attempted to argue that if Americans traveled to international cities, they would be able to buy the same drugs cheaper.

“If we drove out to the airport and put you on Air Force One and you had a prescription you needed to fill, and it was an American company that made it, I’d say, ‘Ok. Let’s fly to Toronto or Berlin or to London or to Rome or any other major city in America.’” Mr. Biden said in a speech from Las Vegas.

As they’ve been doing since his 2020 campaign began, the palace guard at the Washington Post are busing doing damage control, spotting Republicans pouncing and seizing on Biden’s “stutter:”

Evergreen:

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: California teen dies from brain injuries from high school fight, mom claims. “Juarez, a single mom of two, claimed Mejia often returned home covered in bruises after she enrolled at the public school in south LA eight months ago. The distraught mother allegedly took pictures and documented her daughter’s injuries to report them to school officials and campus police, but her pleas for help reportedly went unheard, according to KTLA. . . . The grieving mother blamed the tragedy on the school after she reported the videos to the officials and claimed nothing was done with the bullies.”

Well, it’s not as if they’d misgendered her.

ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO MEMORY HOLE: Drama at The New York Times.

If you’ve read anything about the tumult at The New York Times in recent years—here’s one account by James Bennet, who was ousted as opinion editor at the paper in 2020—you’ll know many Times employees see themselves as activists first, and reporters and editors second. You’ll also know that Times’ leadership has usually cowed before those activists.

Now, the paper’s staffers are locked in a new internal fight—over an investigation that Hamas committed horrifying sex crimes and rapes against Israeli women on October 7. But in this case, the Times’ top brass appears to have grown a backbone. Will they hold firm? Eli Lake reports.

* * * * * * * * *

Former Times journalists have also been a conduit for grievances on social media. Soraya Shockley, a former producer for The Daily, took to Twitter on February 10 and claimed many in the newsroom were “ringing the alarm bells for the last four months” about “Screams Without Words.” Another former Times journalist who resigned in November after signing a letter protesting Israel’s war in Gaza, Jazmine Hughes, has been another channel for discontent in the newsroom. In February she first posted to X a screenshot of the message Slack users receive when attacking colleagues.

One Times reporter confirmed that during the editing process of “Screams Without Words,” reporters and editors in the newsroom voiced objections to the article. “This piece was closely edited and bulletproofed,” this reporter said. “It was subjected to a high degree of internal hostility, and everyone knew they couldn’t afford to get it wrong.”

It’s unclear if the newspaper will eventually cave as it did in 2020. One factor that is different, though, is that the Times has at least officially warned its 5,800 employees that defaming colleagues on Slack will no longer be tolerated.

The problem for the Times is that many of its own staffers do not want to investigate the sexual violence that occurred on October 7. They see it as a vulnerability to their own side in the information war about Gaza.

“There are a huge number of people at the Times who are activists, and it is their job to tell a particular story,” one Times reporter told The Free Press. “The precedent was set that this works. If it doesn’t work through one means, they will find another.”

As Ben Shapiro wrote last week on “Jonathan Glazer’s Evil Oscars Display,” after Zone of Interest won for best International Feature Film:

In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In “Zone of Interest,” there are no Jews: all we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He’s happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.

All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It’s the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.

Similarly, it’s useful to know that many at the Times would be rooting for the Hoess family when they see the movie.

DUMBEST MANAGEMENT MOVE SINCE DYLAN MULVANEY: Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent. “Glassdoor, where employees go to leave anonymous reviews of employers, has recently begun adding real names to user profiles without users’ consent, a Glassdoor user named Monica was shocked to discover last week.”

ED MORRISSEY: 19 Senate Dems: October 7 War a Perfect Moment for Palestinian Statehood.

This should surprise no one who actually pays attention to this conflict for more than a five-second attention span. The Palestinians have been offered this deal before, at least twice, and rejected it for the “armed struggle” instead. Bill Clinton gets a mention because he got Israel to go along with this same plan at Wye River, only to have Yasser Arafat throw it back in his face (and the Saudis, who helped push it) and declare an intifada instead.

The nineteen Senate Democrats offering this proposal operate in a fantasy world. The Palestinians don’t want two states. They want one state, “from the river to the sea,” and they want no Jews anywhere in it. They support Hamas because they believe Hamas will deliver that outcome.

That’s in large part because they think Hamas will win this war — and they’re basing that on past experience:

PCPSR director Khalil Shikaki attributed the support for Hamas’s control of Gaza after the war to a lack of viable alternatives, and noted that the responses appeared to dovetail with opinions on whether Hamas will win the war, which grew among  Gazans and fell among West Bank respondents.

Emphasis mine. Why do more Gazans now think Hamas will win? In part, because they see Israel’s allies attempting to force an outcome that will guarantee Hamas’ survival, but in larger part because those allies always force Israel to stop short of defeating Hamas. This isn’t irrational at all — this is a pattern over seventeen years, and it’s why Gazans can’t even consider alternatives to Hamas rule in Gaza. The West keeps protecting them in the end, which is a victory for Hamas, albeit Pyrrhic for the Gazans.

Read the whole thing.