OPEN THREAD: Because I love you and want you to be happy.
Archive for 2024
October 20, 2024
GOOD NEWS FOR SPACEX: U.S. government eases export controls on space technologies. “The changes would reclassify many space technologies as commercial items rather than weapons, removing commercial satellites from the U.S. Munitions List that is regulated under the highly restrictive International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), and placing them under the more flexible Commerce Control List.”
SO HEAT-TOLERANT ORGANISMS BETTER TOLERATE HEAT? Heat-Tolerant Corals Can Better Survive Marine Heatwaves, Study Shows.
SAY ANYTHING: Bernie Sanders On Kamala Flip-Flopping On Major Issues: ‘Goal’ Is To ‘Defeat’ Trump.
Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) admitted over the weekend that Vice President Kamala Harris is flip flopping on major issues because she is trying to beat former President Donald Trump, not because she believes her new alleged stances.
Sanders made the remarks during a Sunday interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” while discussing the state of the 2024 presidential election.
“In addition to the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-all single-payer for health care, and ending fracking, in addition to those being positions that you hold, Vice President Harris used to be with you on all three of them and now is against you on all three of them,” Tapper said.
“Is she making a mistake having reversed those positions?” he asked.
Sanders responded: “I think what we’re seeing is a coalition of people, more establishment Democrats and progressive Democrats and progressive independents — I’m the longest serving independent in American history — come together with the goal of defeating a very dangerous candidate. And that is Donald Trump.”
So it’s safe to assume that she still believes everything she espoused during the 2020 presidential campaign: Kamala 2020 Makes Obama 2008 Look Positively Right Wing.
ESTABLISHING A STANDARD: Nissan EVs To Gain Tesla Supercharger Access Next Year. Tesla’s NACS charging system is just better.
THIS IS THE WAY: The GOP Makes Democrats Pay the Price for Trans Insanity.
There used to be a time when Republican elected officials and candidates shied away from talking about trans issues.
They didn’t want to appear extreme or intolerant. Why bother wading in to a fraught cultural issue when there were so many other things to talk about? Deferring to “medical professionals” or “the experts” seemed the easy way out.
Now, though, Republicans have emphatically found their voice. Across the political landscape, GOP Senate candidates are hitting their Democratic opponents on their trans radicalism and have them on the run, while the Trump campaign is pounding Kamala Harris on the issue with perhaps the most prominent ad of this election cycle.
The chickens have come home to roost, and they are apparently all cisgender.
* * * * * * * *
For the longest time, Democrats have gone along with the steadily evolving trans orthodoxy as established by the cultural Left. Existing in a bubble, they assumed that doubters could be isolated or embarrassed into going along and didn’t realize just how wildly out of touch they’d become.
For his part, Donald Trump is airing an ad during football games highlighting how Kamala Harris said in 2019 that she supported government-funded transition surgery for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. As the ad notes, it’s hard to believe that anyone seriously seeking public office would advocate such a thing.
Now, in the final weeks of an extremely tight election, Harris and her Democratic colleagues are being held to account for their ideological excesses. They can cry foul, but they brought it on themselves.
As Roger Simon wrote in 2022: Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Big Lie to Sen. Blackburn Exposes Progressivism.
When Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) asked Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to define the word “woman,” during Jackson’s U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, she got the response “I can’t.”
When Blackburn responded with an incredulous “You can’t?” Jackson replied: “Not in this context. I’m not a biologist.”
It takes a biologist to define “woman”? Does Jackson think we’re morons?
In a way, yes. Or she doesn’t care.
She’s a progressive, and progressives have been redefining language—English and many others—to fit their purposes dating back to the Spanish Civil War and undoubtedly earlier. (See Davis Hunt III at The Pamphleteer.)
Jackson very well knows what a woman is. The nominee has known this all her life, as we all have. But these days, in her part of the political world, she’s not supposed to.
So she lied.
She simply parsed her words in order not to offend a constituency that has become imbued with “transgenderitis.” By that I mean a group taking what we all know—that a small percentage of people suffer from gender dysphoria to a degree that they seek to change sexes—and extending it into absurd public policy for reasons of power and control and, ultimately, money, not to mention a completely distorted and harmful view of gender itself. (In this case, see swimmer Lia Thomas.)
Those with that form of dysphoria, as do all with serious problems, deserve our sympathy and support, but no more so than everyone else with difficulties.
Nevertheless, they’ve been singled out for now and are being manipulated and exploited by the left, just as many minorities before them have been.
The transgendered are the favored class du jour. Tomorrow—I’m sorry to tell them—it will be someone else.
The one-two punch of Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissembling and Matt Walsh’s What is a Woman? documentary in 2022 should have been a reminder to the left at how over their skis they’ve gotten on this issue, but once the left collectively loses its mind on a topic, it’s very difficult for them to reverse course.
MCDONALD J. TRUMP: He Did It! President Trump Makes McDonald’s Fries (WATCH).
ICONIC 🍟 pic.twitter.com/TeSI0ffffO
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) October 20, 2024
Next up, the drive-thru: Trump Practices Drive Thru Diplomacy as Woman Begs Not to Let U.S. Become Like Her Native Brazil (WATCH)
“Mr. President, please don’t let the United States become Brazil!” pic.twitter.com/ZEgujQMS35
— Margo Martin (@margommartin) October 20, 2024
To be fair, this isn’t the first time Trump worked for McDonald’s:
Meanwhile, this is CNN:
Do they really not get it?
“It’s unclear why the former President has latched on to Harris’ McDonald’s employment”
Just. Wow. 😂 pic.twitter.com/hjb7qSj64i
— Spitfire (@DogRightGirl) October 20, 2024
Naturally, conservative media cannot penetrate CNN’s self-imposed firewall: The Washington Free Beacon first dropped the “did Kamala actually work at McDonald’s story at the end of August: ‘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?
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro 2 Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: How Do You Clean Your Shotguns?
READER FAVORITE: Apple iPad (9th Generation): with A13 Bionic chip. #CommissionEarned
HOW TO TURN OFF NORMIES, KAMALA HARRIS EDITION:
I’LL TAKE THIS HEADLINE AS A EUPHEMISM FOR “SHE NEVER WORKED THERE:” McDonald’s branch swears employees to secrecy over Kamala Harris’s employment history.
UPDATE: Achievement unlocked!
PRESIDENT TRUMP:
“Now I have worked at McDonald’s. I’ve now worked for 15 minutes more than Kamala. She never worked here.”
This whole scene is masterful. pic.twitter.com/BeUSQ4ebgb
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) October 20, 2024
IT HELPS IF YOU CAN ACTUALLY LAUNCH STUFF: SpaceX prevails over ULA, wins military launch contracts worth $733 million.
OLD AND BUSTED: Nixon’s imaginary “secret plan” to win the Vietnam War.
The New Hotness? Obama’s imaginary secret plan to beat Covid:
THE MAIN CAUSE OF POLARIZATION IS A SCREECHING, EXCITABLE, ONE-SIDED MEDIA ESTABLISHMENT: Megastudy tests crowdsourced ideas for reducing political polarization.
RICHARD FERNANDEZ: The Embarrassment of Success (VIP).
If we want to abolish failure one must perforce abolish success. Then society will move into the sunlit uplands more slowly, but surely at the speed of the slowest ship, a convoy commanded by the right thinking. Success only makes future unfairness inevitable. SpaceX’s technical achievements are unleashing inequity on a cosmic scale. JD Vance openly proclaims, “I believe the destiny of this country is to conquer the stars. Whatever your views of Elon’s politics, this is something that should inspire all of us.” Can Vance hear how evil that sounds? Destiny. Conquer. Could the danger be clearer? SpaceX is extending settler colonialism to the universe, exporting “surfacism” to the new “sacrifice zone.”
Space colonization has been discussed as postcolonial continuation of imperialism and colonialism, calling for decolonization instead of colonization. Critics argue that the present politico-legal regimes and their philosophic grounding, advantage imperialist development of space, that key decisionmakers in space colonization are often wealthy elites affiliated with private corporations, and that space colonization would primarily appeal to their peers rather than ordinary citizens. Furthermore, it is argued that there is a need for inclusiveand democratic participation and implementation of any space exploration, infrastructure or habitation.
Unless the American billionaires are stopped the US will seize or claim the inner solar system before North Korea or Africa even put a man into orbit. Something must be done or success will unleash poverty — or so the argument goes. But then the question arises: why then do new industries arise without the intervention of government? Why doesn’t old wealth dominate forever even with the help of government? Could success be due to something other than ripping the poor off?
As Glenn wrote on Columbus Day, “Musk favors expanding horizons – economically, technologically, and geographically (cosmographically?) as humanity expands through the immense resources of the solar system. This, too, is anathema to the left, since socialism is always about dividing up poverty, never actually about sharing wealth. Churchill called it the equal sharing of misery, but that was actually overly kind – misery in socialist countries is never shared equally. The folks on top always do just fine. You couldn’t easily sell socialism in America when people could set off for the frontier, and you won’t be able to sell it when people can set off for Mars, the Moon, or the asteroid belt. Or even get steadily richer on the product of those who do.”
GREAT MOMENTS IN PERFORMANCE ART: Al Sharpton and Donny Deutsch worry they’ll be imprisoned if Trump us re-elected.
MSNBC host Al Sharpton and frequent guest Donny Deutsch expressed fears Friday that Donald Trump would place them on an enemy’s “list” if he was elected president again, suggesting imprisonment or worse awaited them.
Deutsch, known for his excitable anti-Trump screeds on “Morning Joe,” said Trump would put enemies in jail and there would be no free media in another Trump administration, turning suddenly to Sharpton and asking, “Are you worried, going forward, that you’re on a list if Donald Trump is elected? Yes or no?”
“I’m convinced I’ll be on a list,” Sharpton said, with Deutsch chiming in “I am too!”
WELL, SURE, IT WORKS: When Big Tech Needs Power, They Turn to Nuclear and Not ‘Renewables.’
DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE:
A California teacher allegedly had students do a mock vote for Trump or Harris. Those who voted for Harris are rewarded with a pizza party while those who voted for Trump are not. pic.twitter.com/D7SHUsej6s
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) October 16, 2024
SPEAKER MIKE JOHNSON BLASTS NEWS OF US INTEL LEAK OF ISRAEL’S PLANS FOR RETALIATION AGAINST IRAN:
I spoke with my friend Prime Minister @Netanyahu today, and I am happy to report he is safe, in good spirits, and undeterred.
I told him America stands strong with Israel and reiterated our ongoing commitment to help counter Iran and its terrorist proxies.
This is a crucial moment and America must deliver. It is vital that the Biden-Harris Administration stop slow-walking needed weapons to Israel and implement the sanctions on Iran that Congress enacted this spring.
It might be interesting to note that while both Johnson and former President Donald Trump spoke with Netanyahu after the attack, neither President Joe Biden nor Vice President Kamala Harris has done so as of this writing. Neither has released a formal statement nor commented on X/Twitter regarding the attack (or the intel leak).
On Sunday, Johnson joined Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” and blasted the reported leak, indicating that he will be receiving a classified briefing on the leak later in the day.
“The leak is very concerning. There’s some serious allegations being made there, an investigation underway, and I’ll get a briefing on that in a couple of hours. We’re following it closely.”
Johnson added:
“I talked to my friend … Prime Minister Netanyahu, yesterday to encourage him. I think that the United States needs to stand unequivocally by our ally there… we’re on a precipice… of a new era of security and freedom for Israel. And I think we’re very close.”
Per RedState Managing Editor Jennifer Van Laar, a U.S. intelligence source has indicated the documents in question were leaked from the Pentagon’s office of low-intensity/special operations — notably, the office where Ariane Tabatabai works.
Funny how this keeps happening in what is effectively, Obama’s third term in office:
