HARSH BUT FAIR:
I have no sympathy for academic researchers and their staff who do shit science and live off NIH grants. I am sorry. Never have. Never will. They do work that cannot be reproduced, just say the same empty slogans that are in vogue. During the pandemic they failed society and…
— Vinay Prasad MD MPH (@VPrasadMDMPH) February 8, 2025
NEWS YOU CAN USE:
UPDATE (FROM GLENN):
#SuperBowl pic.twitter.com/dhJn4Dfx1z
— Jerry Dunleavy IV 🇺🇸 (@JerryDunleavy) February 10, 2025
OPEN THREAD: Ring out the weekend.
IN ENDORSING KAMALA, SHE CHOSE . . . POORLY.
This Super Bowl game is off to a great start.
The whole stadium BOOED Taylor Swift but ERUPTED in cheers for President Trump.
Based. pic.twitter.com/Z9PyGEERvr
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) February 10, 2025
GOOD. SLS IS A WHITE ELEPHANT. Boeing warns SLS employees of potential layoffs.
BRR: Unpacking the records of history’s cruelest summers.
GAME? WHAT GAME? A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Bird Flu.
THIS IS WHAT DEMOCRATS ARE GOING BATSHIT CRAZY OVER:
UPDATE: Reader John Steakley writes:
From some of what I see online and conversations with my lefty friends, the Dems seem to be coalescing around an innocuous-sounding theme of “Slow Down.” I.e., without debating the merits of what Trump is doing, can’t we just all agree that he’s doing it all way too quickly?
This avoids any awkward debates about the merits of USAID funding transgender basket-weaving classes in Patagonia, and skips right to the real Democrat goal of just stalling Trump until we are closer to midterm elections.
If the GOP indulges this for even a second, they deserve every midterm loss they will suffer.
Keep going. Don’t slow down. Don’t even slow down to talk to the bitter losers asking you to slow down. You have at best four years of a GOP Congress and probably only two. Don’t waste time.
Faster, please. (Bumped).
Plus:
Because…THIS pic.twitter.com/cnQUPEEKdd
— EFHutton (parody) (@EFHutton123) February 8, 2025
AMERICA’S NEWSPAPER OF RECORD:
Eagles Flagged For Roughing The Passer On Pregame Handshake https://t.co/1d3CZB7s78 pic.twitter.com/41p2bFJ47O
— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) February 9, 2025
‘STAY THE F*** OUT:’ MSNBC’s Chris Hayes Urges Dems To Double Down On Transitioning Children.
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes took his book tour to HBO and Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, where he urged Democrats to double down on telling Republicans to “just stay the fuck out of their business” when it comes to parents wanting to give their children gender-altering “health care.”
Maher had just finished lamenting that the recent forum for the DNC chair election, complete with a land acknowledgment and other progressive cringe-inducing antics, showed the party hasn’t learned anything when Hayes replied, “I think that, I don’t think there’s anyone who hasn’t had a moment across the political spectrum of some form of progressive communication that’s either left them bewildered or a little like ‘Eh, I don’t know about that,’ but at the same time, there is a message of what I would call common sense patriotic pluralism. That is a majority message.”
The first example he reached for was, “If some father and mother have health care for their kid lined up, who is trans, just stay the f**k out of their business. Like, and let them make that decision. That’s their decision to make. You don’t have to make that for your family. I’m not going to tell you what to do with your family.”
Maher pushed back, “I mean, but the argument is whether the child should make the decision.”
Hayes strained credibility to add, “But the child is never making the decision. The parents are always making the decision. Parents consent to medical care.”
Eventually, Maher would add, “They would say it’s disfiguring a child.”
Hayes was unmoved, “I think they should mind their business; I really do. I think they should mind their business, and I think that’s true about a lot of things.”
But this appears to be somewhat of a reversal in policy for MSNBC. In 2013 the network ran ads that their parent company Comcast-signed off in which the message was explicitly stated that “your kids are not your own.” Last year, Kamala chose a veep, who, as the Daily Caller noted, “Greenlit Law Allowing State To Take Child Custody From Parents Who Oppose Sex-Change Surgeries.” Now that there’s a Republican in the White House who doesn’t want to see them mutilated before they can consent as an adult to procedures that could permanently alter them, Hayes responds, “just stay the f**k out of [the parents’] business!” Past performance, etc.
MASS PLAYS A ROLE, THOUGH: Heavier Vehicles Actually DON’T Always Protect You More in a Crash.
OLD AND BUSTED: Ayahuasca Retreats.
The New Hotness? Retreat from the Ayahuasca! “The New York Jets and Aaron Rodgers appear to be on course for a split. FOX Sports reported hours before Super Bowl LIX on Sunday that the Jets told the four-time MVP they want to move on. It’s unclear how that will happen – whether it’s an outright cut or they trade him.”
GOOD ADVICE: Check It Out: Put your defensive firearm to the test before relying on it to save a life.
I test mine regularly by practicing with it.
THAT’S BECAUSE THE MEDIA WORLD IS MADE UP OF GARBAGE PEOPLE, WHO APPARENTLY ARE ALSO TAX-DOLLAR PARASITES.
The media has weird inconsistent standards pic.twitter.com/FNPU6vWfGg
— The Rabbit Hole (@TheRabbitHole84) February 9, 2025
GET IN SHAPE: I bought the Brooks Women’s Glycerin 22 Neutral Running Shoe this week and so far, they are great. I used to wear Asics but these will be my new go-to shoes for walking.
THERE’S $10 MILLION FOR ANYBODY WHO CAN DUPLICATE ABIOGENESIS: That’s the process way back in the very beginning when life emerged from non-life. If abiogenesis actually occurred — non-life producing life — then there is no need of a life-giver extrinsic to the process.
To win the cash, which was first offered in 2019, all you have to do is create “a purely chemical process that will generate, transmit and receive a simple code without any information snuck in from an intelligent designer,” according to Daniel Witt, quoted on HillFaith.
Just in case you are guessing the judges of the “Artificial Intelligence + Origin of Life” prize could be a couple of Bible Thumpers who never set foot in a scientific lab, they are George Church, a geneticist, molecular engineer, and chemist, and Professor at Harvard and MIT. The second judge is Denis Noble, one of the top 100 scientists in the UK and the first person to build a computer model of an organ. The heart. Using punch cards.
WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: A spine-zapping implant helped 3 people with a muscle-wasting disease walk better.
MY MIGRAINES DISAPPEARED FOR THE MOST PART WHEN I STARTED TAKING COENZYME Q10: The link between headache disorders and suicide—a 25-year Danish cohort study.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Trump inflamed George Floyd row to ‘distract from Covid’, Lammy claimed.
[UK Labour foreign secretary] David Lammy accused Donald Trump of inflaming tensions following the death of George Floyd to distract from Covid, The Telegraph can reveal.
Speaking to Lord Hermer, the Attorney General, on a podcast in 2020, David Lammy – then the shadow secretary of state for justice – accused Trump of attempting to “stoke the fire” of Black Lives Matter protests and marches both in support of and against the police.
The protests were sparked after Derek Chauvin, a former police officer, knelt on 46-year-old Mr Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes on a street in Minneapolis despite the dying man’s pleas.
Asked by Lord Hermer why the world had woken up to “systemic racism”, Mr Lammy pointed to two factors “that lay on top of where we are”.
“One is Donald Trump, and Donald Trump’s attempts, frankly, to stoke the fire.”
Mr Lammy said: “Donald Trump is a populist nationalist leader, and frankly, politically, I think it’s very, very clear that he would actually prefer the headlines in the United States not to be about the Coronavirus, which I think worldwide opinion is he’s dealt with incredibly badly.
Trump was initially furious when red states such as Georgia began to open up in late April of 2020. In sharp contrast, the American medical profession declared Coronavirus all but over at the beginning of June:
GOOD NEWS: Boeing Prepares for SLS Cancellation in March.
Some are arguing for the cancellation after the Artemis 2 and Artemis 3 flight. However, there are months of fixes needed for the human rated Orion. The heat shield is not safe. Rushing to get off two more flights will likely cost over $20 billion. It is not just two flights but working to fix and still run the program for about four more years. Costs and delays will continue to increase trying to fix the problems. The current contracts are cost plus contracts. Boeing and the other companies would run more costs through the cost plus program.
I have been calling for the cancellation of Space Launch System for about a decade.
Now we are in a series of government wide cuts which could eliminate a trillion dollars per year of waste and perhaps another trillion of inefficiency. There is no way we get to those cuts and a balanced budget trying to carry on ineffective corporate charity and theft by Boeing.
It’s time.
JOANNE JACOBS: You may have a few dings, but you’re not ‘broken.’
School curricula and culture “seem nearly to revel in the bad and the broken,” wrote Robert Pondiscio in The Unbearable Bleakness of American Schooling in Commentary in 2022. Children are told they’ve been born into “a country that is racist to its core” and a world that’s doomed to burn to a crisp.
Educators see “this pedagogy of the depressed — America the Problematic — . . . as a mark of seriousness and sophistication,” he writes. They think they’re inspiring children to “set the world right.” But, mostly, they are “creating a generation of overwhelmed young people paralyzed into learned helplessness.”
Related: How the ‘trauma’ cult took over mental health.
You may have noticed over the last decade a steady increase in the promiscuous use of the word “trauma.” A word that once referred exclusively to grievous injuries of body and mind (gunshot wounds, PTSD, that sort of thing) can now describe virtually anything. Psychotherapists and clinical psychologists are the main super-spreaders of this hyperbolic virus, though educators, politicians and of course celebrities are now getting in on the act.
But trauma is more than just an annoying buzz word. Its inexorable creep into common parlance is the culmination of a sustained campaign to politicize healthcare that has been going on for thirty years. Along the way it has resurrected some of Sigmund Freud’s more bizarre theories about childhood development, and married them with social justice concerns to become what is effectively a secular religion.
Anyone who is familiar with the work of Sigmund Freud knows that his psycho-sexual theories developed in two distinct stages. The first posited that people who were mentally or emotionally unwell had repressed traumatic memories (almost always of sexual abuse in their childhood). He eventually gave up on this theory. In its stead he developed his equally infamous theory of infantile sexuality, in which children experienced sexual feelings through different erogenous zones during distinct stages of their development. It may surprise and horrify you to learn that both theories are alive and well in the current mental healthcare establishment, where they have been rebranded into a pseudoscientific theory about childhood trauma that leads to brain damage, addiction, and disease.
The result, as Mark Manson wrote in his 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, is a nation of adults who have internalized the following beliefs:
The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways:
- I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.
- I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the middle. In fact, you will often see entitled people flip back and forth between the two. Either they’re on top of the world or the world is on top of them, depending on the day of the week, or how well they’re doing with their particular addiction at that moment…What most people don’t correctly identify as entitlement are those people who perpetually feel as though they’re inferior and unworthy of the world.
Of course, all of the above was written before the ultimate victims in life’s lottery identified themselves:
AS A KID, I HAD UNDIAGNOSED MIGRAINES FOR YEARS: Emergency room doctors sometimes don’t spot migraines in minority children.
TRUMP TRACES NIXON’S PATH: President Trump. Now More Than Ever?
Most presidents want to start with a bang. Donald Trump is looking to outdo them all. Over the weekend, the administration made important progress in the Western Hemisphere, bringing hostages back from Venezuela and driving Panama out of China’s Belt and Road Initiative. On Monday, Mexico and Canada barely avoided hefty tariffs by launching new border security initiatives. Trump then sent Elon Musk to launch a hostile takeover of the United States Agency for International Development, restarted the maximum pressure campaign on Iran, and, flanked by Benjamin Netanyahu, announced his plan to seize and rebuild Gaza.
Not for the first time, Trump has astonished and confused friends and foes alike. Just weeks ago he denounced the Biden administration for giving “unlimited funding to the defense of foreign borders.” Now, he is talking about making Canada the 51st state and adding Gaza, Greenland, and the Panama Canal to America’s overseas possessions. America seems to be contracting its international commitments while also expanding.
Trump is not, however, the first president to befuddle observers by talking about retrenchment and acting boldly: Although they hail from the opposite sides of the country and grew up in very different circumstances, Trump is walking in Richard Nixon’s path.
Except that Watergate was cooked up by left after Nixon’s 49-state reelection sweep in 1972. In contrast, Democrats threw everything they could at Trump during his first four years in office – and his four years out of office. To mix gaming metaphors here, in badly overplaying their hand, he’s clearly seen how their playbook works, and in his whirlwind first two weeks in office, is reacting accordingly.
Question: like Nixon, when will Trump begin to garner the proverbial “strange new respect” from the left who once professed to despise him?
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