Archive for May, 2019
25th May 2019
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The accusations of Huawei stealing trade secrets from across the world are hitting a fever pitch, thanks to a new Wall Street Journal expose that blows open accusations of theft and stealing of trade secrets. The article includes insights from lawsuits, Huawei’s competitors and former employees. Allegations run the gamut against the company: from its business practices, to the science behind its 5G, all the way down to copying the text it used in its user manuals.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Huawei “Spent All Their Resources Stealing”, Stunning New Exposé Shows
25th May 2019
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Yoga is not, apparently, a survival skill. Good to know.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Missing Maui Yoga Instructor Found Alive After Two Weeks in Hawaii Forest
25th May 2019
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Three weeks ago, a CNN executive suggested that talk of impending layoffs were nothing more than a “crazy rumor.” Last week, the network laid off nearly all of the Atlanta-based staff that cover health care, according to Fox News and confirmed by TVNewser – a media watchdog site founded by CNN’s Brian Stelter.
Help us, Obi-wan Kenobi. You are our only hope.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on CNN Lays Off Staffers After Massive Ratings Drop
25th May 2019
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
25th May 2019
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
25th May 2019
Treat everybody like royalty.
Don’t speak to them unless you are directly addressed.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Rule for Living
25th May 2019
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The Outdoors Right fishes and hunts. The Extreme Outdoors Right shoots big game and/or hunts par force du chien. The Outdoors Right wears safari jackets, canvas hunting coats, camo for duck and turkey hunting, and Scarlet Hunt Uniforms for fox hunting.
The Outdoors Left hikes, bicycles, kayaks, rafts, rock climbs, and skis. The Outdoors Left wears the latest artificial fabric in Life -Saver-flavor colors.
The Outdoors Right remembers shopping at the old (the real) Abercrombie & Fitch and Wm. Mills, and buying from the Herter’s catalogue. We still shop at L.L. Bean, Filson, Woolrich, and Cabela’s. We used to buy from Orvis, but now they do.
The Outdoors Left buys from Patagonia, Northern Mountain, and REI.
We lust after custom shotguns. They yearn for custom bicycles and hiking boots.
The Outdoor Left thinks that every area of the world is Just Like Portland. This often leads them into foolish behavior that gets them eaten, dismembered, raped, or beheaded.
Think of it as evolution in action.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A Fatal Story from the Outdoors Left
25th May 2019
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Boiled in hydrogen peroxide and compressed, the wood can passively manage heat.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Stronger Than Aluminum, a Heavily Altered Wood Cools Passively
25th May 2019
Freeberg speaks wisdom.
So in politics, before you start doing things everyone knows are bad things, make sure you falsely accuse your political opponents of doing it first, then you can get away with it. People don’t remember what was done. They remember what was said. And when each side is accusing the other, they’d rather watch Kardashians.
That’s why democrats say Republicans disbelieve science, wreck the economy, waste money on useless wars, look down with contempt on poor people, ruin public education, divert precious resources on dumb useless investigations, create constitutional crises, abuse offices, discriminate…always accuse the other side of doing what you’re doing.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Let’s Grind Up Some Puppies
25th May 2019
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For more than a half a century, the United States automatically has supported more European integration and opposed efforts to reassert national sovereignty. As recently as 2016, President Obama traveled to the United Kingdom to warn the British that as far as America was concerned, they would be sent to the “back of the queue,” if they dared to approve Brexit. In contrast, then-private citizen John Bolton remarked,“Americans should welcome Britain’s coming Declaration of Independence.”
With the advent of the Trump Administration, automatic support for continued EU centralization and reflexive opposition to national sovereignty has ended. Pompeo, speaking directly to the Europeans in Brussels, forthrightly declared: “Our mission is to reassert sovereignty, reform the liberal international order, and we want our friends to help us assert their sovereignty as well.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Virtues of Patriotism
25th May 2019
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
24th May 2019
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on This Self-Made Millionaire Invented a ‘Gun’ That Shoots Salt at Flies
24th May 2019
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The study confirms what we’ve been hearing for years: Cooking from scratch and eating “real food” is better and healthier. The problem is that knowing this doesn’t make it any more doable for the average family.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Ditching Processed Foods Won’t Be Easy — The Barriers to Cooking From Scratch
24th May 2019
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When certain classes of people receive privileges under the law, then others will impersonate them.
This comes as a surprise to a lot of statists.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Drivers Are Turning to Sex Dolls and Mannequins to Use HOV Lanes
24th May 2019
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I left my fart
In San Francisco….
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Blue State Blues – San Francisco: An Expensive, Shit-Coverd Cesspool Marked by Crime and Depression
24th May 2019
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
24th May 2019
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
24th May 2019
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How about that GREAT government-provided health care? Don’t you wish we had a system like that in the U.S.?
We do — it’s call the VA. Look it up if you want to find out how such a system works. (Hint: It doesn’t.)
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on UK: ‘Difficult if not impossible’ to check safety of NHS cancer screening programmes amid litany of failings, expert warns
24th May 2019
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The technical term for vegetarians is ‘herbivore’ and the function of a herbivore within the context of nature is ‘prey’.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Swedish Vegan Couple Almost Starves Their Baby to Death With Restrictive Diet
24th May 2019
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I think I qualify. Is there a cash prize?
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on “You Might Be A British Right Wing Extremist If…”
24th May 2019
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How unfortunate.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Blue City Los Angeles is Drowing in Trash Due to Homeless Population; Experts Fear Rising Rat Populations and Return of “Medieval” Diseases Spread by Rats’ Fleas
24th May 2019
Ramesh Ponnuru takes a look.
If you want to model the APA, you could do worse than a giant firehose that takes in pharmaceutical company money at one end, and shoots lectures about social justice out the other.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on On the American Psychiatric Association
24th May 2019
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But you have to bear in mind that Trump has accomplished ABSOLUTELY NOTHING during his term in office.
Just remember that.
Absolutely nothing.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Trump’s Presidency Linked to Decline in Racial Prejudice
24th May 2019
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
24th May 2019
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If I actually had an ‘white privilege’, I would use it to send all the white people who wish they were black people to Africa. I doubt that it would take more than about a week to turn them back into white people again.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on What Does Teaching ‘White Privilege’ Actually Accomplish? Not What You Might Think (Or Hope)
24th May 2019
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Interior Growth Increasing, Coastal Growth Tanking in California
24th May 2019
Tyler Cowen, a Real Economist, writing in Bloomberg.
On the state and local level, they often favor policies that make it harder for new arrivals to the U.S.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Democrats Are the Anti-Immigrant Party
24th May 2019
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Encore’s decision to feature a Dominican on its cover is a typical attempt at using the unexpected otherness of a young man wearing a medieval religious habit to attract readers to its pages and ads. Thus, the magazine partakes in one of the known attractions of medievalia in the 21st century, its otherness, in the same way that we casually associate cathedrals, castles, and chivalry with the medieval past. At the same time, Reisenauer’s presence signals that the cover photo is more than a mainstream medievalist meme without any link to a historical reality. In fact, like the existence of the Cistercian and Monastic Studies Center, his picture reminds us of the manifold real cultural continuities between the medieval and our own world.
For the record, I might note that Dominicans are friars, not monks; although readers of Medievalists.net surely know that, outsiders might not.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Of Monks and Medievalists
24th May 2019
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After a decade of training Afghan military pilots in the United States the Americans have decided to train all Afghan pilots in Afghanistan. The problem was that more and more of the trainees deserted while in the United States and many sought to gain legal residence as asylum seekers in Canada or even the United States. This is not a new problem, the first pilot trainee desertions took place in 2015. Eventually over 40 percent of the pilot trainees deserted while in the United States. It is not much better in Afghanistan where the government accepts desertion by soldiers and police as a customary, if annoying, custom. The Afghan Air Force has additional problems.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Attrition: Hit the Books Then Hit the Road
24th May 2019
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According to Bloomberg, anti-trust authorities are looking into allegations that members of the Realtors Association conspired with brokerage companies like Realogy Holdings Corp and Re/Max Holdings to stop home sellers from negotiating their commissions. Bloomberg learned about the investigation from sources at CoreLogic, a data provider that offers real-estate data to government agencies, lenders and brokers.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on DoJ Launches Anti-Trust Probe Into Real Estate Brokerage Industry
24th May 2019
Steve Sailer.
Affirmative action was set up 50 years ago in part as reparations for American slavery, but it has tended to evolve into a bizarre system of preferences for those least impacted by American slavery.
Here’s a classic example of the 2004 complaint of Harvard professors Henry Louis Gates and Lani Guinier that a huge fraction of Harvard’s affirmative action for blacks goes to individuals who aren’t descended from American slaves, are instead descended from foreign elites and/or white parents or grandparents.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Affirmative Action vs. Reparations
23rd May 2019
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
23rd May 2019
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
23rd May 2019
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The prophylactic effect of the ‘heartbeat’ abortion law seems to be very robust.
Apparently, nothing works better to keep proglodyte ‘celebrities’ out of your state.
Can’t wait until Texas gets one — perhaps it will keep the Californicators away.
Posted in News You Can Use. | 2 Comments »
23rd May 2019
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Samson is a bodybuilder from Sudan, who attended high school in Tennessee. Samson came to the U.S. in the 1990s and was a legal resident at the time of the shooting.
…
Sampson left a note on his vehicle, which said “Dylann Roof is less than nothing,” and “the blood that 10 of your kind will shed … in terms of vengeance,” according to prosecutors. Prosecutors also stated that Sampson entered the church “with the intent to murder a minimum of 10 white churchgoers.”
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Suspected Nashville Church Gunman Laughs About Shooting Victims With Girlfriend
23rd May 2019
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Unlike, oh, say, Democrats raising taxes and the minimum wage.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on National Retail Federation Warns Trump’s Tariffs Could Be Devastating for Consumers
23rd May 2019
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Tungsten is just as heavy and a lot harder. That’s why anti-tank penetrator rods are made of it, when they can’t get depleted uranium.
There’s a thought: Depleted uranium….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on California Statewide Lead Ammo Ban Goes Into Effect July 1
23rd May 2019
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This could get quite entertaining, not to mention instructive.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Judge Rules that Jussie Smollett Case, Sealed by Corrupt Prosecutor, Must Be Unsealed
23rd May 2019
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And these are the sort of people that we’re supposed to put in charge of our health care. Oy.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Hackers Now Demand $10k Per Day in Baltimore Cryptocurrency Ransomware Attack
23rd May 2019
Posted in Democrats: Party of Fear--Party of Hate--Party of Death | Comments Off on Trump Jr Fires Back at Pelosi: ‘I Don’t Think the Party of Infanticide Is Praying for Anyone’
23rd May 2019
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day: Peak Oil
23rd May 2019
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This tradition—whose foundation is the business suit—is one that changes at a geological pace, and at the moment its magma is hissing. “The U.S. men’s suit market has shrunk 8% to $1.98 billion since 2015,” the Wall Street Journal reported, in March, in a piece that quoted an investment-bank analyst who matches his blazer to his Lululemon stretch pants. Later that month, the top three guys on the management committee of the Goldman Sachs Group devoted their absurdly valuable time to approving a five-sentence e-mail with the subject line “Firmwide Dress Code”; the message alluded to “the changing nature of workplaces generally in favor of a more casual environment” and urged employees to “dress in a manner that is consistent with your clients’ expectations.” In April, Patagonia announced that its corporate-sales program would no longer pursue new business in making co-branded fleece tops for big, scary B2B entities like financial firms, say, or super-tall-tower developers. Instead, Patagonia would develop accounts with companies whose environmental and social values reflect its own.
In these degenerate modern times, even how you dress is political.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Goldman Sachs, Patagonia, and the Mysteries of “Business Casual”
23rd May 2019
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They’ll be sorry,
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Japan Begins Experiment of Opening to Immigration
23rd May 2019
Joel Kotkin.
Overall, data suggests that we are not seeing a great “return to the city” but, with few exceptions, a continued movement out to the suburbs and less dense cities, notably in the sunbelt. The spurt of urban core growth that occurred immediately after the housing bust turned out to be remarkably short lived, with the preponderance of metropolitan growth—roughly 80 percent—returning, as has been the case since at least the late 1940s, to the suburbs and exurbs. Indeed, at no point did Census Bureau estimates show net domestic migration from suburbs to core cities, only a reduced rate of migration in the opposite direction.
Even the country’s most influential urbanist, scholar Richard Florida, now suggests that the great urban revival is “over.” Rather than the usual belief that density leads to productivity and innovation, a new Harvard study demonstrates that, between 1970 and 2010, suburban areas have overall steadily increased their economic advantages: the share of suburbs making up the top ranks of all urban and suburban neighborhoods (measured as the top quartile) went from roughly two-thirds in 1970 to almost three-quarters by 2010.
So where’s the shame?
In the past, the traditional urbanist notion, advanced by the late Jane Jacobs, maintained that cities grew best not by “luring” talent but by “creating” a middle class from its existing residents. Yet now, according to two recent Oregon studies, lower-income people in cities experience less upward mobility than people from rural areas. Indeed, according to Pew research, the largest gaps between the bottom and top quintiles can be found in some of the most progressive metropolitan areas, such as (in order from largest to smallest divides) San Francisco, New York, San Jose, Los Angeles, and Boston. In all these “superstar” cities, the middle-class family is rapidly disappearing, even as poverty remains stubbornly high.
Ah,
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The New Shame of Our Cities
23rd May 2019
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School of Resentment is a term coined by critic Harold Bloom to describe related schools of literary criticism which have gained prominence in academia since the 1970s and which Bloom contends are preoccupied with political and social activism at the expense of aesthetic values.
Broadly, Bloom terms “Schools of Resentment” approaches associated with Marxist critical theory, including African American studies, Marxist literary criticism, New Historicist criticism, feminist criticism, and poststructuralism—specifically as promoted by Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The School of Resentment is usually defined as all scholars who wish to enlarge the Western canon by adding to it more works by authors from minority groups without regard to aesthetic merit and/or influence over time, or those who argue that some works commonly thought canonical promote sexist, racist or otherwise biased values and should therefore be removed from the canon. Bloom contends that the School of Resentment threatens the nature of the canon itself and may lead to its eventual demise. Philosopher Richard Rorty[2] agreed that Bloom is at least partly accurate in describing the School of Resentment, writing that those identified by Bloom do in fact routinely use “subversive, oppositional discourse” to attack the canon specifically and Western culture in general.
It’s in Wikipedia, so it must be true.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on School of Resentment
23rd May 2019
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Using advanced technology at UChicago-affiliated Argonne National Laboratory, the team studied a class of materials in which they observed superconductivity at temperatures of about minus 23 degrees Celsius (minus 9 degrees Fahrenheit, 250 K)—a jump of about 50 degrees compared to the previous confirmed record.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Scientists Break Record for Highest-Temperature Superconductor
22nd May 2019
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The Earth is unique in our solar system: It is the only terrestrial planet with a large amount of water and a relatively large moon, which stabilizes the Earth’s axis. Both were essential for Earth to develop life. Planetologists at the University of Münster (Germany) have now been able to show, for the first time, that water came to Earth with the formation of the Moon some 4.4 billion years ago. The Moon was formed when Earth was hit by a body about the size of Mars, also called Theia. Until now, scientists had assumed that Theia originated in the inner solar system near the Earth. However, researchers from Münster can now show that Theia comes from the outer solar system, and it delivered large quantities of water to Earth. The results are published in the current issue of Nature Astronomy.
And the odds of alien life just plummeted.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Formation of the Moon Brought Water to Earth
22nd May 2019
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Yet another disadvantage of ‘public transportation’.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on New York Has a Supervillain Pulling Emergency Brakes and Destroying Subway Commutes
22nd May 2019
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Pass the popcorn.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on North Korea Has a Whole List of Insults for Biden: He’s ‘A Low-IQ Idiot’
22nd May 2019
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome