OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
Archive for 2024
August 11, 2024
JEFFREY CARTER: The Onslaught. “Over the past couple of weeks, there has been a coordinated effort by the media, and especially in social media, to show that Kamala Harris is popular and can beat Trump. It’s designed to break the spirit of Trump voters who were very fired up after the botched assassination attempt. They want you to think there is no chance and you should stay quiet and especially stay home.”
Related: A friend writes: “Democrats are hilarious. Everyone, them included, thought Kamala Harris was embarrassing. Now she is a mix of Angela Merkel and Margaret Thatcher.”
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: U.S. Army gears up for space warfare, drawing lessons from Ukraine.
MORE:
Hi, @Tim_Walz and @KamalaHarris—
Just wondering, did you also “misprint” your rank as Command Sergeant Major on your Congressional Challenge Coin?cc: @NBCNews https://t.co/KIILqMgj9S pic.twitter.com/fkZrb4luHv
— Bree A Dail (@breeadail) August 11, 2024
IT KEEPS GETTING WORSE:
🚨 Tim Walz gets TORCHED by his battalion commander pic.twitter.com/Z82VuCsdrB
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) August 11, 2024
First the chaplain, and his replacement sergeant, now this. Can Tim Walz stay on the ticket? Or is he the 21st Century’s Thomas Eagleton?
And regardless, given that choosing him as her running mate was her first executive decision, Kamala’s not looking so good.
WHEN YOU’RE DONE, YOU HAVE BROCCOLI? Scientists Revealed a Healthier Way to Cook Broccoli – But There’s a Catch. Actually, I like broccoli, though I don’t digest it as well as I did.
HMM: Do Anxiety Pills Have a Dark Side? Research Reveals Dementia Risks. From reading the article, though, it seems that — as I have suspected for a while — the anxiety is associated with dementia, and the use of benzodiazepenes is more of a marker for anxiety than a cause. I suspect the same is true of Benadryl, which has shown a similar association with dementia, since lots of people use Benadryl as an OTC anxiety/sleep med.
QUESTIONING THE INEVITABILITY of the NextGen Bar Examination.
IT’S ALL ABOUT WHO HE REGARDS AS A THREAT TO HIS POWER:
Let me get this straight:
Keir Starmer is releasing violent criminals from prison just to replace them with people who commit thought crimes on @X.
And he is spending police resources investigating and going after people for retweets and Facebook posts when there is a shitload…
— Melissa Chen (@MsMelChen) August 10, 2024
READER BOOK PLUG: The Audit: Adventures in Canadian Policy: Data stories from the land that competence forgot. #CommissionEarned
NO, NEXT QUESTION: QOTD: Do You Want Fake Exhausts?
LIMITED TIME DEAL: DASH Rapid Egg Cooker.
SCIENCE: The abstemious scientists accused of using ‘flawed’ research to tell you to stop drinking.
Dr Tim Stockwell’s work – which has been published in The Lancet, among other esteemed organs – has inspired a new crackdown on alcohol that has seen daily drinking guidelines slashed in Canada and Australia. The US may next year follow suit, and the UK anti-alcohol lobby is using Dr Stockwell’s work as it warms up for a similar fight.
But many of Dr Stockwell’s respected peers say it is far from settled science and have cast doubt on his research. They question his motives and accuse him of being a front for a worldwide temperance lobby that is secretly attempting to ban alcohol.
Plus:
The research was widely reported without a hint of the row it had triggered in the scientific community. In common with other news outlets, The Daily Mail stated baldly that the longstanding belief that one or two drinks a day is good for you was based on “flawed” scientific research.
However, it was the final straw for many fellow academics and experts who told The Telegraph they read the report in disbelief, concluding it was yet another example of Dr Stockwell “cherry picking” the evidence to suit his agenda.
Former British government scientist Richard Harding, who gave evidence on safe drinking to the House of Commons select committee on science and technology in 2011, told The Telegraph that Dr Stockwell had wrongly taken a correlation to be causal.
“Dr Stockwell’s research is essentially epidemiology, which is the study of populations,” Dr Harding said. “You record people’s lifestyle and then see what diseases they get and try to correlate the disease with some aspect of their lifestyle. But it is just a correlation, it’s just an association. Epidemiology can never establish causality on its own.
“And in this particular case, Dr Stockwell selected six studies out of 107 to focus on. You could say he cherry picked them.”
Seems like the vegetarians have been running something like this for years.
WHEN EVEN THE CHAPLAIN IS DENOUNCING YOU. . . Chaplain of Tim Walz’s National Guard battalion calls VP pick ‘cowardly’ for abandoning unit.
DAVID BARON CALL YOUR OFFICE: How invasion of enormous wild beasts has left shocked residents in idyllic Wyoming mountain towns fearing for their lives: ‘I do a lot of praying.’
Pray for bearskin rugs.
THE 21st CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I HAD HOPED: The Working Woman’s Newest Life Hack: Magic Mushrooms. For a select group of moms in high-powered jobs, microdosing psilocybin has become the answer to a packed social and professional calendar with no time for hangovers
REMINDER:
"Far right" is a synonym for "poor".https://t.co/wve62gOTdQ
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) August 10, 2024
PARTY OF YOUTH UPDATE: Biden: Can’t Even Say How Old I Am.
To be fair to Joe Biden, he did follow up the remark about not being able to say how old he is by saying, “It’s hard for me to get it out of my mouth.” So what did he mean? Is he sometimes unable to remember his age? (He’s still 81, for the record. He’ll turn 82 a couple of weeks after the election.) I can relate to a certain extent. I’m getting ready to turn 65 and I sometimes have to pause and figure out my current age. This might also have been an admission that he realizes he trips over his words sometimes and he’s not sure if he would pronounce his age correctly. The most charitable interpretation would be that he knows how incredibly old he is and he finds it difficult to say it aloud. It’s left to the viewer to decide for themselves.
Also in the interview: Biden admits he was pushed out of presidential race, name-drops Pelosi in first interview since exit.
“A number of my Democratic colleagues in the House and Senate thought that I was going to hurt them in the races. And I was concerned if I stayed in the race, that would be the topic — you’d be interviewing me about why did Nancy Pelosi say [something] … and I thought it’d be a real distraction,” he told “CBS News Sunday Morning.”
“When I ran the first time, I thought of myself as being a transition president. I can’t even say how old I am — it’s hard for me to get out of my mouth,” he went on, adding that it was a combination of those factors and a key priority of “maintaining this democracy” that underpinned his decision.
But was it “his decision?” Pissed Off Top Biden Adviser Spills the Beans on What Really Happened and WHO Really Pushed Biden Out.
Bookending Greg’s view of Pelosi taking credit for pushing Biden out:
“They spent all this time accusing Trump of an insurrection…of a coup. But she’s actually saying they removed him. They put Kamala in place…she’s never been nominated. It just doesn’t seem like it’s legal.” pic.twitter.com/aEJRKQspuJ— David Asman (@DavidAsmanfox) August 10, 2024
STAND UP: Back Brace Posture Corrector for Men & Women. #CommissionEarned
OLD AND BUSTED: Tim Walz’s Stolen Valor.
The New Hotness? Kamala Harris’s Stolen Policy! Kamala Harris Laughably Steals Trump’s Idea to Not Tax Tips, but the Receipts Tell a Different Story.
Kamala Harris has made her first major policy announcement since being handed the nomination by a cabal of Democrat elites. During a rally in Las Vegas on Saturday night, Harris said that, as president, she would end the IRS collecting tax on tips.
If that sounds familiar, that’s because Donald Trump took the same policy position back in June. In true Kamala Harris fashion, after going almost a month with no policy platform, her first move was to steal a plank from her opponent’s platform. You can’t make this stuff up. That’s how absurd the 2024 election cycle is.
* * * * * * *
Let’s take a quick trip down memory lane because it’s going to be instructive.
Harris was for banning fracking before she was against it. She was for defunding the police before she was against it. She was for a federal gun buyback program before she was against it. She was for decriminalizing illegal immigration before she was against it. She was for eliminating private health insurance before she was against it.
Believe it or not, this “no tax on tips thing” is yet another flip-flop from Harris and perhaps her most egregious. While the positions listed above were rhetorical commitments, she was the deciding vote for the law on the expansion of the IRS that specifically targets people who don’t pay taxes on tips. Again, you can’t make this stuff up.
I eagerly await the press turning on her viciously for broadcasting such a “lame political stunt:”
UPDATE: “Harris bragged about casting the tie-breaking vote for the bill that allowed the IRS to crack down on service workers tips. Now she’s adopting Trump’s ‘no tax on tips’ proposal. Will she admit that her vote was a mistake and the IRA was bad for America?”
WHY WOULD TAXPAYERS WANT TO SUBSIDIZE INSTITUTIONS FULL OF PEOPLE WHO HATE THEM? The rise of academic hate: Faculty have gone from professors to extremists.
JUSTICE FOR ASHLI: Justice Department ordered to answer for Jan. 6 killing of Ashli Babbitt.
No justice, no peace.