THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA seeks logistics designs for Artemis moon missions.
Author Archive: Glenn Reynolds
October 9, 2024
WELL, TAKE THEM DOWN: Review links ‘black box’ warnings on antidepressants with increase in youth suicides.
JUST SAY NO TO HATE:
BREAKING:
Italy deports the pro-Hamas imam Zulfiqar Khan for reasons of national security
The Bologna-based hate preacher has been living in Italy since 1995
In November Khan said "In Italy, thanks to Allah, we are safe, we have the right to speak." Meloni wasn't having it… pic.twitter.com/bo7djRRRO7
— Visegrád 24 (@visegrad24) October 9, 2024
POSSIBLY THE DUMBEST MEME I’VE EVER SEEN ON FACEBOOK, WHICH IS SAYING SOMETHING: “In a world full of Elon Musks, be Dolly Parton.”
First, the world is not full of Elon Musks. There is exactly one. China has spent the last decade trying to find an Elon among its gigantic population and has utterly failed. He is, at present, a unique talent.
Second, Dolly is an entertainer. Being appealing to people — especially middle class white women, where this meme flourishes — is her entire job. She’s very good at it.
Elon builds things that no one has done before, like revolutionary rockets and satellites that can deliver cellphone service to disaster areas that have been entirely cut off. That’s his job, and he’s at least as good at it as Dolly is at hers. Appealing to middle class women isn’t his job. Dolly can’t build rockets, and I suspect Elon can’t sing very well. Each has their own competence.
Of course, this dumb meme has its roots in Democrats’ dislike of (hatred for?) Musk ever since he bought Twitter and wrecked their global censorship efforts, and in middle class women’s general vague contempt for tech nerds. Which makes it both dumb and hateful, something that Dolly might not approve.
YES. Eric Cowperthwaite: Trust in Voting Is Absolutely Necessary. “The controls over voting today are no different than in 1960’s Chicago. In fact, with early voting and mail-in voting and mail-in voter registration, arguably it is easier to commit fraud now than in 1960. . . . But here’s what we do know. Americans, ALL Americans, need to be able to trust their elections. And that means we need some changes. We can’t have elections where one party doesn’t trust the other to not cheat. So, put the controls in place to prevent or reduce cheating and give us back our trust. Voter ID, vote on the day of the election, vote in person, register in person with proof of citizenship. No electronic voting machines. Paper trail records of casting a vote. These are not hardships, they are part of the privilege of participating in a representative democracy. It won’t happen for 2024. But it can happen for 2028. Let’s demand it be so.”
HE RAISED FUNDS FOR DEMOCRATS AND NOW REGRETS IT: “Far from progressive, these Soros-backed DAs did more to hurt progressives than anything the Right has managed; to everyday Americans, the term ‘progressive’ now conjures up images of fentanyl overdoses, crime, defecation in the streets, and riots.”
And rightly so. Comment: “Interesting piece and sound analysis. Progressives are hurting the people they claim to care about. Democrats know it, but are doing the bidding of billionaires.”
A SMALL MEASURE OF ACCOUNTABILITY: Young Kansas City Chiefs Fan’s (and Family’s) Defamation Lawsuit Against Deadspin Based on Blackface Allegations Can Go Forward.
Make them pay.
WELL, JUST SAY IT’S KAMALA’S PROPOSAL AND YOU’VE PRETTY MUCH CAPTURED THAT: “It is difficult to overstate the irresponsibility, corruption, and insanity of this proposal.”
“NONPARTISAN,” I’M SURE: U. Washington students can apply for ‘social justice’ voter registration job.
“ACADEMIC FREEDOM” ORIGINATED AS A LEFTY COVER TACTIC: Anti-Israel agenda motivated professors to abandon academic freedom principles: While the AAUP claims that its recent embrace of academic boycotts is not intended to target Israel, make no mistake, it is clearly motivated by an anti-Israel ideology and, to some, smacks of antisemitism. The AAUP appeared as an effort to protect lefty professors from criticism. It wasn’t meant to protect others, except as a matter of political cover.
CIVIL RIGHTS UPDATE: Expert Panel Analysis of Supreme Court Arguments in Garland v. VanDerStok.
CENSORSHIP:
On Sept 27 @nytimes accused @elonmusk of being “misleading” for criticizing a new California law to censor parody. “The laws have exceptions for parody” said the Times
Five days later a judge ruled the law unconstitutional. Why? Because it banned a video clearly labeled “PARODY” pic.twitter.com/w1oj52ZWs3
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 7, 2024
Around the world, governments are trying to censor X. The way they want to do this is by letting newspapers like the NY Times decide what is true and false. Australia is about to pass a law doing this. It’s a recipe for totalitarianism.
— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) October 7, 2024
It’s meant to be.
SCIENCE: Nobel Prize in chemistry awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis and John Jumper for work on proteins. “Baker designed a new protein in 2003 and his research group has since produced one imaginative protein creation after another, including proteins that can be used as pharmaceuticals, vaccines, nanomaterials and tiny sensors, the Nobel committee said. Hassabis and Jumper created an artificial intelligence model that has been able to predict the structure of virtually all the 200 million proteins that researchers have identified, the committee added.”
MICHIGAN STATE SEEMS TO HAVE SERIOUS PROBLEMS ALL OVER: ‘A Mockery Of Education’: Dean of Michigan State’s Top-Ranked Ed School Is a Serial Plagiarist, Complaint Alleges.
JOHN LUCAS ON HURRICANE RECOVERY: The American Spirit.
THE DEEP STATE DOESN’T GIVE UP THAT EASILY:
Whatever you call it, you would expect a political force to attack a potent threat to its agenda.https://t.co/FNoVpVBqDe
— wretchardthecat (@wretchardthecat) October 8, 2024
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: After bungled response to Helene, demand a squeaky-clean election.
CHRIS BRAY: Stupidification: The Atlantic Effect.
I was baffled, because that’s not how any of this worked: locals trying to steal land from native people, the kind and gentle federal government trying to stop them. As I wrote yesterday, describing (among other things) the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and Andrew Jackson’s consistent policy of removal, “Flatly, the federal government was invariably the principal agent of American Indian dispossession.” But Jefferson Cowie is about as highly regarded in academia as it’s possible for a historian to be, with a long series of awards and honors and an endowed chair at a major research university. How could a well-respected historian also be someone who thinks that the federal government was trying to prevent Indian dispossession in the 1830s?
Today, with Cowie’s book on white resistance to federal authority in my hands, I can answer that question: he doesn’t. The Jefferson Cowie who appeared on a podcast with Anne Applebaum isn’t quite the Jefferson Cowie who writes books. In the discussion with Applebaum, the benevolent federal government tries to protect the Creeks against dispossession by mean local whites; in the book, federal objections to white settlement on treaty-protected Creek lands are a temporary effort by President Andrew Jackson to sustain an orderly but inevitable removal. . . .
The “he” in that sentence is the President of the United States, so if he was “dead set on Indian removal,” how does that prove the claim that the federal government was trying to protect Creek land rights against “white settlers” who were fighting the federal government to preserve their local “freedom to steal land?” The federal government was doing the stealing — a little more slowly than the settlers wanted. The claim in the book isn’t the claim in the podcast.
Okay then.
Plus: “The subtext underneath all of this discussion screams so loudly that it barely counts as subtext. A book about stupid, backward white people cruelly resisting the wisdom and benevolence of the wonderful federal government appeared in 2022 because Orange Man Bad. Read the reviews: they’re about how Jefferson Cowie’s history of Creek Indian removal in the 1830s shows how mean Donald Trump is.”
October 8, 2024
JORDAN SCHACHTEL: Are we witnessing President Biden’s revenge tour? A Kamala loss would mark the ultimate “I told you so” moment. “Hell hath no fury like a corrupt politician scorned.”
Related: Does Joe Want Kamala to Lose? “Joe has made all the right noises about supporting Kamala’s candidacy. But lately, his actions have been telling a much different story.”
OPEN THREAD: This is it, we’ll hit the heights. And oh what heights we’ll hit.
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: After bungled response to Helene, demand a squeaky-clean election.
TO BE FAIR, THEY SAID THAT ABOUT KATRINA, TOO, AND IT WASN’T SO: Hurricane Helene isn’t an outlier. It’s a harbinger of the future.
THE NEW SPACE RACE: Dominican Republic signs Artemis Accords.
GERMS ARE HARD TO KILL: Microbes Found Alive Sealed in Rock For 2 Billion Years. “This means that the microbe community can tell us things we might not have known about microbe evolution here on Earth. But it also suggests that there might be underground microbe communities still alive on Mars, surviving long after the water on the surface dried out.”
Flashback: Why I hope there’s no life on Mars.