At Amazon, Heather Mac Donald, When Race Trumps Merit: How the Pursuit of Equity Sacrifices Excellence, Destroys Beauty, and Threatens Lives.
Sunday, July 16, 2023
Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., In Hot Water After Comments Suggesting Chinese and Jews Were Spared Covid (VIDEO)
Kennedy's desperately denying things on Twitter.
But he says it.
At the New York Post, "RFK Jr. says COVID may have been ‘ethnically targeted’ to spare Jews."
And here comes the New York Times with the antisemitism angle: "Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Airs Bigoted New Covid Conspiracy Theory About Jews and Chinese."
You be the judge:
The 2024 Election Is a Fight Over America's Way of Life
Yeah. Isn't the next election always the one to save the American way of life? How's that been working out?
At WSJ, "GOP voters see a country corrupted by liberal ideals":
To win Jason Stewart’s vote, a presidential candidate should talk about stopping illegal immigration, taming inflation and keeping academic theories about race out of the classroom. But one overarching task is more important to the 51-year-old Republican than any single issue: rescuing American culture from liberals. “Democrats and liberals have invaded every aspect of culture for the past 40 or 50 years, and we’re at a line-in-the-sand moment for conservatives,” said Stewart, a sales executive and Army veteran who lives outside Philadelphia. “What I’m looking for in a candidate is someone who can put up a fight across multiple fronts.” The animating force in the Republican presidential primary, many voters and policy leaders say, is a feeling that American society—the government, the media, Hollywood, academia and big business—has been corrupted by liberal ideas about race, gender and other social matters. Democrats, in turn, feel that conservatives have used their political power in red states and in building a Supreme Court majority to undermine abortion rights and threaten decades of work to broaden equal rights for minority groups. That has turned the next race for the White House into an existential election, with voters on both sides fearing not just a loss of political influence but also the destruction of their way of life. “My biggest fear is about advancing that far-right agenda,” said Laurie Spezzano, 68, a Democrat and insurance agent in Louisville, Ky., who believes one of her own senators, Republican Mitch McConnell, subverted the legitimacy of the Supreme Court by using his leadership post to block a Democratic nominee to the court and to advance GOP nominees. Abortion rights have been diminished, she said, and gay rights in employment and marriage are at risk. “I’ve never been against all Republicans, but it’s gotten to where they’re really scary now,” she said. Republican Julie Duggan, by contrast, sees conservative values and traditional gender roles under attack amid social change that is moving too quickly. “It’s like half the country has lost their minds. People don’t even know what gender they are,” said Duggan, 31, a public safety worker in Chicago. If Republicans lose again, “it’s going to be the downfall of our society.” The Heritage Foundation, the conservative policy institute, has brought together 60 right-of-center organizations to compile a 900-page document of policy specifics to guide the next Republican president. But the group’s president, Kevin Roberts, says those specifics take a back seat to a broader goal. The next election, he says, “may be our last, best chance to rescue the nation from the woke, Socialist left.” “Their vision is to destroy everything that makes America America—our values, our history, our rights,” Roberts said recently at the group’s leadership summit. In an interview, he added, “We have lost our K-12 schools to radical-left activists. We’ve certainly lost our universities to the same, and other institutions,” including large businesses and even churches. “Everyday Americans,” he said, are being forced “to bend your knee to the rainbow flag.” Democrats and others say the GOP culture war is a backlash against greater acceptance of the nation’s growing diversity, which is long overdue in America, and that no one is being forced to bend a knee or otherwise get involved. Richard Blissett, 33, a Democrat and university staff member who lives in Baltimore, said that some Republican complaints are at odds with the party’s traditional faith in free markets. “There’s a big difference between government and Hollywood. If Republicans want more Republican movies, they can make them. No one is stopping them,” he said. The heightened feelings on both sides are reflected in a poll that found that about 80% of Republicans believe that the Democratic agenda, “if not stopped, will destroy America as we know it.” About the same share of Democrats had the same fear of the Republican agenda, saying it would destroy the country, an NBC News survey found last fall. The GOP’s sense that U.S. culture has gone off-track snarled legislation in Congress this week, as House Republicans pushed through a set of contentious social-policy amendments to an annual defense bill. The measures stripped money for diversity initiatives in the military and added restrictions on abortion and transgender care for service members. GOP lawmakers said they acted because liberal ideology was weakening the military. But the amendments endanger the bill’s path in the Democratic-controlled Senate. Many Republican voters say the pace of social change has left them off-balance, with schools and businesses pushing for racial diversity and transgender Americans raising difficult questions for parents, schools and sports officials. In Wall Street Journal-NORC polling this year, three-quarters of Republicans said society had gone too far in accepting transgender people. More than half said society had overstepped in accepting gay and lesbian people, and that businesses and schools had gone too far in promoting racial and ethnic diversity. Far fewer Democrats held those views. In an Ipsos poll this March, about half of Republicans agreed with the statement, “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country.” Fewer than 30% of Democrats agreed. While past GOP primary races have turned in part on policy disputes, such as remaking Medicare or scrapping the current tax code for a flat tax, the differences among candidates this year over matters such as abortion policy and aid to Ukraine have been a more muted part of the discussion. “Very few people are talking about tax reform, and everybody is talking about the cultural issues,” said Jondavid Longo, a Republican and mayor of Slippery Rock, a borough outside of Pittsburgh. Within both parties, he said, “they see politics as almost a life-or-death situation. Many voters believe that if their candidate does not win, then doom will follow.” Wes Anderson, a Republican pollster who recently conducted focus groups with GOP voters, said the feeling of cultural alienation among Republicans stretches well beyond issues of race and gender to include the economy. “It’s all one and the same—there’s a cultural glue that goes from taxes and inflation to transgender policy,” he said. “Our base believes that we’re losing our country, and that the left has become radicalized to a point that they no longer believe in America and want to burn it all down and remake it in their image.” GOP voters, he said, are asking two main things of candidates: Do you understand that we’re on the verge of losing our country? And can we trust you to fight back? ormer President Donald Trump’s defining characteristic as a politician is his eagerness to both challenge the norms of Washington and fight culture-war battles. He regularly uses heightened rhetoric to emphasize what he sees as a threat from the left, warning of “pink-haired Communists teaching our kids” and promising to “keep foreign, Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and socialists out of America.” Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is also responding to the hunger among Republicans to take up cultural battles...
Video Animation of Titan Implosion Gets 5 Million Views in 11 Days (VIDEO)
Interesting viddy.
At the New York Post, "Animation of Titan sub’s demise garners 5 million views in 11 days."
It's got 15 million hits now.
Wednesday, July 5, 2023
Cocaine Found in White House Library: The Big Mystery!
Apparently, Hunter Biden was at the White House over the weekend, though no one in the leftist media would dare mention the possible of the president's son blowing lines amid the presidential stacks.
At AoSHQ, "Secret Service Now Tasked with Solving the Mystery: Who Could Have Possibly Left a Bag of Cocaine in the White House?," and "Secret Service Promises We May Never Know Who Left the Cocaine in the White House; Karine Jean-Pierre Doubles Down on Blaming Anonymous Tourists."
Friday, June 30, 2023
Thursday, June 29, 2023
Supreme Court Strikes Down Race-Based Admissions at Harvard and U.N.C.
This is really something.
I've got CNN on. There's a bit of a freak-out happening, although I haven't been over to MSNBC yet, lol.
At the New York Times, "The decision is likely to reshape college admissions at elite schools. Here’s what to know":
Race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina are unconstitutional, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday, the latest decision by its conservative supermajority on a contentious issue of American life. Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said the two programs “unavoidably employ race in a negative manner” and “involve racial stereotyping,” in a manner that violates the Constitution. Universities can consider how race has affected a student’s life — a topic they may write about in an application essay, for example — but he warned schools not to use such considerations as a surreptitious means of racial selection. “Universities may not simply establish through the application essays or other means the regime we hold unlawful today,” he wrote. Justice Sonia Sotomayor summarized her dissent from the bench — a rare move that signals profound disagreement. The court, she wrote, was “further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic government and pluralistic society.”“The devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated,” she said. President Biden assailed the ruling in remarks hours after it was handed down in a televised address, saying the court had walked away from decades of precedent. He also offered guidance to colleges about how to move forward, proposing they take into account the adversity a student has overcome. “Discrimination still exists in America,” he said, pounding his lectern and repeating his words for emphasis. “Today’s decision does not change that.” Mr. Biden paused before leaving his remarks as a reporter asked if the court was “rogue.” “This is not a normal court,” he responded...
Via Memeorandum.
Also at the Wall Street Journal, "Supreme Court Strikes Down Affirmative Action in College Admissions."
Tuesday, June 27, 2023
Friday, June 23, 2023
Submersible Passengers Died in Implosion (VIDEO)
We all know now.
But this was the big breaking letdown for so many yesterday. I personally saw no hope of survival, and the more we saw the more my initial intuition proved correct.
At the Wall Street Journal, "Search crews found debris from craft on ocean floor near Titanic shipwreck."
There's more at NPR (a great piece), "James Cameron says the Titan passengers probably knew the submersible was in trouble."
And an incredibly lucid and scientifically-informed interview with Cameron, at CNN with Anderson Cooper:
The interview continues here, "James Cameron on the 'surreal irony' of Titanic wreck and Titan implosion."
Thursday, June 22, 2023
Debris From OceansGate Search Confirmed as Coming From External Body of 'Titan' Sub
It was almost beyond hope, but now we know.
The U.S. Coast Guard press conference on the loss of the OceansGate submersible is about to begin.
The company issued a statement, per CNN. Follow along:
JUST IN: Debris discovered within the search area of the missing Titanic submersible has been assessed to be from the external body of the sub, according to a memo reviewed by CNN https://t.co/AD7UcVJ3zQ
— CNN (@CNN) June 22, 2023
Monday, June 19, 2023
Friday, June 16, 2023
Why the U.S. Electric Grid Isn't Ready for the Energy Transition
Right.
And California is banning gasoline-powered, internal-combustion engines by 2035.
We won't be ready.
At the New York Times, "To start with, there is no single U.S. electric grid":
The U.S. electric grid is often described as a vast, synchronized machine — a network of wires carrying electricity from power plants across the country into our homes. But, in reality, there is no single U.S. grid. There are three — one in the West, one in the East and one in Texas — that only connect at a few points and share little power between them. Those grids are further divided into a patchwork of operators with competing interests. That makes it hard to build the long-distance power lines needed to transport wind and solar nationwide. America’s fragmented electric grid, which was largely built to accommodate coal and gas plants, is becoming a major obstacle to efforts to fight climate change. Tapping into the nation’s vast supplies of wind and solar energy would be one of the cheapest ways to cut the emissions that are dangerously heating the planet, studies have found. That would mean building thousands of wind turbines across the gusty Great Plains and acres of solar arrays across the South, creating clean, low-cost electricity to power homes, vehicles and factories. But many spots with the best sun and wind are far from cities and the existing grid. To make the plan work, the nation would need thousands of miles of new high-voltage transmission lines — large power lines that would span multiple grid regions. To understand the scale of what’s needed, compare today’s renewable energy and transmission system to one estimate of what it would take to reach the Biden administration’s goal of 100 percent clean electricity generation by 2035. Transmission capacity would need to more than double in just over a decade.... There are enormous challenges to building that much transmission, including convoluted permitting processes and potential opposition from local communities. But the problems start with planning — or rather, a lack of planning. There is no single entity in charge of organizing the grid, the way the federal government oversaw the development of the Interstate Highway System in the 1950s and ‘60s. The electric system was cobbled together over a century by thousands of independent utilities building smaller-scale grids to carry power from large coal, nuclear or gas plants to nearby customers. By contrast, the kinds of longer-distance transmission lines that would transport wind and solar from remote rural areas often require the approval of multiple regional authorities, who often disagree over whether the lines are needed or who should pay for them. “It’s very different from how we do other types of national infrastructure,” said Michael Goggin, vice president at Grid Strategies, a consulting group. “Highways, gas, pipelines — all that is paid for and permitted at the federal level primarily.” In recent decades, the country has hardly built any major high-voltage power lines that connect different grid regions. While utilities and grid operators now spend roughly $25 billion per year on transmission, much of that consists of local upgrades instead of long-distance lines that could import cheaper, cleaner power from farther away. “Utilities plan for local needs and build lines without thinking of the bigger picture,” said Christy Walsh, an attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Study after study has found that broader grid upgrades would be hugely beneficial. A recent draft analysis by the Department of Energy found “a pressing need for additional electric transmission” — especially between different regions. The climate stakes are high...America’s fragmented electric grid, which was largely built to accommodate coal and gas plants, is becoming a major obstacle to efforts to fight climate change. https://t.co/F35tJbxJMg
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 12, 2023
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
