Archive for January, 2021
15th January 2021
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The states siphoned off 21 percent of gasoline taxes and other highway user fees to pay for mass transit and other non-highway activities in 2019, according to table SDF of the 2019 Highway Statistics, which was posted this week by the Federal Highway Administration. The table shows that $9.8 billion in highway user fees were spent on transit and $15.1 billion were spent on other non-highway activities for a total of nearly $25 billion out of the $120 billion collected by the states from highway users.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The $25 Billion Theft
15th January 2021
John Hinderaker at PowerLine.
Under Minnesota law, the state’s Department of Education promulgates standards for K-12 public schools in a number of categories. The benchmarks for each category are revised by committee every ten years. This year, the Social Studies standard is being revised. The committee undertaking the revision, as you would expect in the Tim Walz administration, is hard left.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on We Are All White Supremacists Now
15th January 2021
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Boston mayor Marty Walsh (D.), President-elect Joe Biden’s pick for labor secretary, funneled nearly $1.2 million into a consulting firm that employs his longtime girlfriend.
Walsh’s mayoral campaign pushed the payments to LB Strategies, where his live-in girlfriend, Lorrie Higgins, works as a fundraising consultant. The firm received the cash through a contract that allows it to compensate its employees with the money.
What’s the use of having power if you can’t abuse it?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Biden Labor Secretary Pick FunnBiden Labor Secretary Pick Funneled $1.2 Million Into Girlfriend’s Consulting Firmeled $1.2 Million Into Girlfriend’s Consulting Firm
14th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
14th January 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
14th January 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
14th January 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
14th January 2021
Check it out.
The word aquafaba is the common name for the cooking liquid of beans and other legumes like chickpeas. You may know it as the typically discarded liquid found in retail cans and boxes of beans, or as the liquid left over from cooking your own.
Aquafaba can be used to replace egg whites in many sweet and savory recipes. Its unique mix of starches, proteins, and other soluble plant solids which have migrated from the seeds to the water during the cooking process gives aquafaba a wide spectrum of emulsifying, foaming, binding, gelatinizing and thickening properties.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Aquafaba
14th January 2021
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The Lincoln Project is a Democratic-aligned super PAC founded by schlubby white dudes with inflated egos and an unhealthy internet addiction. Despite raking in millions of dollars from wealthy libs in 2020, the group’s efforts to unseat incumbent GOP senators were not successful.
Lincoln Project cofounders such as Steve Schmidt, the former Republican strategist whose most notable achievement was persuading John McCain to choose Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, believe they are on the front lines of a noble crusade to defend American democracy.
Schmidt, a multimillionaire, regularly appears on MSNBC to attack Republicans from the comfort of his gaudy mansion. During one such appearance on the left-wing network, Schmidt went so far as to compare the Lincoln Project’s efforts to annoy Donald Trump and elect Democrat politicians to those of the actual heroes who risked their lives during the American Revolution, the Civil War, World War II, and the civil-rights movement.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Lincoln Project Schlub Lounges on Mansion Patio, Compares Self to WW2 Soldiers, Civil Rights Heroes
14th January 2021
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In late December, I posted Living in the Hate of the Common People, which was inspired by the comment of an anti-Brexit Brit who said “I think we need to find a way to stop the working class from voting altogether” and also “Idiots and racists shouldn’t be able to ruin the lives of people who do well in life by voting for things they don’t understand. The problem in this country boils down to low information morons having the ability to vote.” I cited other examples of the same kind of thinking.
Yesterday, it was reported (by Veritas) that a lawyer employed by PBS had resigned after being caught saying things like it was “great” that coronavirus cases were spiking in red states because they might infect Trump voters and suggested that Republican voters should have their children put in re-education camps.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Living in the Hate of the Common People, continued
14th January 2021
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For three days and counting, protesters in Portland, Oregon have gathered at a local bookstore to demand that it stop selling a new book critical of Antifa.
“Far-left activists surrounded Powell’s Books in Portland on Monday and demanded the store stop selling Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy, a book about antifa written by Andy Ngo,” Reason’s Robby Soave reports. “The protests forced the store to close early.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Mobbing of a Portland Bookstore Reminds Us Why Fahrenheit 451 Was Written
14th January 2021
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Unmentioned: Leftwing protesters are three times as likely to use force against police.
Seems fair to me.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on US Police Three Times as Likely to Use Force Against Leftwing Protesters
14th January 2021
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Dire wolves are iconic beasts. Thousands of these extinct Pleistocene carnivores have been recovered from the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. And the massive canids have even received some time in the spotlight thanks to the television series Game of Thrones. But a new study of dire wolf genetics has startled paleontologists: it found that these animals were not wolves at all, but rather the last of a dog lineage that evolved in North America.
I’ll bet you didn’t know that.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Dire Wolves Were Not Really Wolves, New Genetic Clues Reveal
14th January 2021
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To help design improved membranes, a team of researchers has used electron microscopy and 3D computational modeling for a nanoscale understanding of how water flows through the barriers. It turns out that uniform membrane density down to the nanometer scale, and not the thinness of the membranes, is crucial for improving water flow. Improving uniformity could increase efficiency by over 30 percent, the team, from the University of Texas, Penn State, and DuPont, reported in the journal Science last week.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Nanoscale Revelations Could Lower the Cost of Desalination
14th January 2021
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Hammer tech.

Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Feds Asks Tesla to Recall Vehicles Over Failing Touchscreen Displays
14th January 2021
Severian.
Below, reader Frip suggested that we need to stop being nice guys. Which violates the spirit of Joe Biden’s America, in which the people who stole the election and pissed in our faces have commanded us to come together in unity, so regretfully I have reported you to the Thought Police, comrade. With that unpleasant task out of the way, here’s a history lesson, on a topic totally unrelated to passive resistance to power, with no modern day applications whatsoever.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on A History Lesson
14th January 2021
Sarah Hoyt allows us to learn from her experience under socialism.
Now that our newspapers are mostly just making up bullshit, it is very important to know how to read the newspaper.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on How to Read the News In Totalitarianism
14th January 2021
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Radical liberal activists are in your head. They’ve conquered what passes for “mainstream media.” They’ve infiltrated Hollywood, social media, academia, and the Democratic Party. Now they’ve co-opted Madison Avenue. You cannot escape. Not if you watch television. Every ten minutes? A four-minute commercial break. Four minutes of clamoring, yammering, coaxing, cajoling, pandering in seven-, ten-, fifteen-, thirty-, and sixty-second spots. You think they are pushing insurance, breakfast cereal, gymnasiums, or chef-prepared home-delivered meals. You are only 25 percent right.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Wokewashing White America
14th January 2021
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This is hardly the only video on this topic, and hardly the only eyewitnesses whose testimony is available online. My own family was at the rally.
…
All the available signs so far point to a partial failure of Antifas to stir rage into the MAGA crowd, who are, by and large, law abiding, homeschooled, and middle aged. This may be due to Trump’s late arrival at the Ellipse throwing off the planned Antifas schedule. Clips exist of MAGA-men trying to pull Antifas back from barricades or to discourage violence while the Antifas try to urge the crowd forward.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on False Flags at the Capitol
14th January 2021
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“I lost two legs for Jake Tapper’s right to say whatever the hell he wants,” Mast told the Free Beacon in response to Tapper’s Wednesday remark. “But that free speech also protects the Republicans he is so eager to condemn for asking constitutional questions about the election.”
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Wounded Vet Brian Mast Slams CNN’s Tapper for Questioning His Commitment to Democracy
14th January 2021
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Sauce for the goose….
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Marjorie Taylor Greene Says She Will Introduce Impeachment Articles Against Biden
13th January 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
13th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
13th January 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
13th January 2021
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After banning President Donald Trump from their social media platforms, Facebook and Twitter have seen their combined market value plummet by $51.2 billion over the last two trading sessions. The news was first reported by Business Insider.
Following the Capitol upheaval last week, Facebook and Twitter indefinitely banned Trump’s accounts, claiming there was risk of additional violence. Their decision prompted a major tech sell-off.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Twitter, Facebook Lose $51 Billion in Value After Booting Trump
13th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
13th January 2021
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If you want to map the tiniest parts of a protein, you only have a few options: You can coax millions of individual protein molecules to align into crystals and analyze them using x-ray crystallography. Or you can flash-freeze copies of the protein and bombard them with electrons, a lower resolution method called cryo–electron microscopy (cryo-EM). Now, for the first time, scientists have sharpened cryo-EM’s resolution to the atomic level, allowing them to pinpoint the positions of individual atoms in a variety of proteins at a resolution that rivals x-ray crystallography’s.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Cryo–Electron Microscopy Breaks the Atomic Resolution Barrier at Last
12th January 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
12th January 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
12th January 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
12th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
12th January 2021
Democratic Socialists of America, Dozens Of Teachers Unions To Host ‘Day Of Resistance’
‘Disgruntled Staffer’ Reportedly Posted Trump, Pence State Dept Webpage Saying Their Terms Ended Monday
Facebook Is Purging All Content Mentioning “Stop The Steal” Doubling down on The Purge.
Dem Rep. Thompson Suggests Flight Ban for Republicans
New Google Union Will Help Build Labor Struggle Against Technological Oppression Or magnify it. FORWARD, COMRADES!
Amazon partner GoDaddy boots gun site from its servers
Duckworth demands Pentagon investigate if troops participated in Capitol ‘coup attempt’
Air Force Brass Order Removal Of All Offensive, Non-Inclusive Patches, Mottos And Emblems
The Great Purge: Twitter Has Suspended More Than 70,000 Accounts Since Friday
‘I Can’t Go Home Tonight’: Parler CEO John Matze Says He’s Getting Death Threats
UK Government May Only Let People Out Once A Week
Mark Zuckerberg and Other Leftist Billionaires Funnel Cash to Activists Through For-Profit Corporations
Facebook Tells Employees to Avoid Wearing Facebook-Branded Apparel
Leaked memos Amazon warn ‘be vigilant’ due to threats to blow up data centers
‘Walkaway Campaign’ Founder Says Facebook Purged Account
How Silicon Valley, in a Show of Monopolistic Force, Destroyed Parler Glenn Greenwald.
Homeland Security Chair Wants Sens. Cruz, Hawley on No-Fly List
Deutsche, Signature Bank Abandon Trump Over Capitol Unrest
House Democrats Seek Punishment For Republican Colleagues Connected To Capitol Riot
China ‘Virtually’ Admitted They Are Committing Genocide, Asian Studies Expert Says
Google’s New Union Is Already Addressing Political Issues You think they were Woke before — just wait.
Schumer Urges FBI To Add Capitol Rioter “Insurrectionists” To No-Fly List
Barbara Boxer, Now Formally Working for China
Gun Control Group Pushes For Credit Card Regulation Of Gun Purchases
CNN Analyst Says ‘We Are Still In The Tactical Phase Of A Counterterrorism Effort’ Against Certain Trump Supporters
Salesforce relieves Republican National Committee of its tools citing ‘risk of politically incited violence’ across the US
Conservative Mental Health Up 300% After They All Get Banned From Twitter Babylon Bee.
U.S. Pursuing Seditious Conspiracy Cases in ‘Unprecedented’ Probe of Capitol Riot
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg ‘Glad’ Trump Suspended from Platform
GoFundMe Bans Raising Funds for Protest Travel
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
12th January 2021
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Schumer’s message during the media gathering in Manhattan centered on asking the Transportation Security Administration to add last week’s Capitol rioters to the agency’s no-fly list. Near the end of Schumer’s statement, a mask-wearing woman stepped in front of the podium and hurled insults at the lawmaker, the New York Post reported.
“You racist socialists can dish it out, but you can’t take it and remember this, Adolf Hitler was a socialist and that’s exactly who you follow, you’re nothing but a coward!” said the woman, who added she was “glad” about the insurrection at Capitol.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Heckler Compares Dem Sen. Schumer to Adolf Hitler
12th January 2021
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Speaking to lawmakers on Monday (11 January), Prabhat Agarwal, an official who heads up the eCommerce unit at the European Commission’s DG Connect, noted how the EU executive’s Digital Services Act attempts to realign the balance between effective content removal and preserving freedom of expression online.
“It is no longer acceptable in our view that platforms take some key decisions by themselves alone without any supervision, without any accountability, and without any sort of dialogue or transparency for the kind of decisions that they’re taking,” Agarwal said.
“Freedom of expression is really a key value in this,” he told the European Parliament’s internal market committee.
Pretty bad when Europe has greater respect for free speech than America.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on ‘No Longer Acceptable’ for Platforms to Take Key Decisions Alone, EU Commission Says
12th January 2021
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In December, the first month after Donald Trump’s loss, the NFIB Small Business Optimism Index slumped 5.5 points to 95.9, falling below the average Index value since 1973 of 98, and missing expectations of a triple digit print. Nine of the 10 Index components declined and only one improved. Of note, owners expecting better business conditions over the next six months tumbled by a whopping 24 points to a net negative 16%, realizing that a Democrat admin is hardly conducive to small business growth.
Looks as if somebody is paying attention.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Small Businesses Freaking Out About Surging Taxes Under Biden
12th January 2021
Severian.
Marxism just seems right to teenagers of all ages. Teenagers’ only frame of reference is their parents, and to the inexperienced — as all teenagers by definition are — even the best parents seem willful and capricious, if not outright tyrannical. (The gray, wrinkled teenagers who refuse to learn merely substitute “society” for “their parents” in their emotional incontinence). Teenagers live in a weirdly binary world, where the switches can only be “on” or “off,” yet all terms are undefined.
That’s why the worst thing a teenager can think of is “unfair.” It’s wrong because it feels wrong, and anything that’s wrong must be somebody’s fault — again, how could it be otherwise? Parents can’t afford to let their kids learn big lessons the hard way. Literally can’t afford it, in that teenagers can’t see why, for example, you can’t take that turn at 85 mph on an icy road. You can explain it to them until you’re blue in the face, but as anyone who has spent any time around teenagers knows, there’s a large subset of them that will simply refuse to get it. Alas, those tend to be the brighter ones, and so a large part of the subtle art of teenager management is setting up smaller, less catastrophic situations for them to fuck up, such that they hopefully learn by analogy. Which is still, of course, the grownups’ fault…
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Marx Was Right After All (an ongoing series)
12th January 2021
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After her website faced repeated domain name revocations, Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan has registered her website on the distributed domain names network Handshake.
The pirated database of academic papers is now accessible directly through the service’s portals as well as through NextDNS, a privacy-focused, cloud-based domain name service resolver which converts IP addresses into domain names.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Pirated Academic Database Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’
12th January 2021
Freeberg nails it.
What we’re seeing play out now is a conflict about how one achieves, not the authority that goes with being President of the United States, but the basic respect that we expect to come our way once we’ve reached full adulthood. And I mean, by that, real adulthood not legal adulthood. True maturity. Two sets of rules.
To people who’ve fully reached adulthood there are two simple rules:
1. I can’t make you respect me. I can only inspire respect by way of my words, my efforts and my achievements.
2. I can also inspire you, in the same way, to disrespect me. It’s your choice how to see me, my choice how to inspire you.
To people who haven’t reached adulthood the two rules are much simpler:
1. I get to tell you what to do.
2. You can’t tell me what to do.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Two Sets of Rules
12th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
12th January 2021
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Right away a few observations come to mind. First, if you squint the right way, you can see that our leaders don’t really take BLM and Antifa protests very seriously, and hence the kid glove treatment they get. The property damage may be significant, but our government likely doesn’t think Antifa and BLM amount to a significant political threat. Hence the leniency of the government response at all levels to riot season last year. But if the government at all levels now tries to crack down on pro-Trump protestors, won’t they have to also tighten their rules of engagement with Antifa, or will there now be a political litmus test for rules of engagement? There is, this person said, a lot of hand-wringing going on about the fact that of the hundreds of people who invaded the capitol building, only about 50 arrests were made. (There may be more as law enforcement goes about identifying people.) But the point is: from the perspective of the Deep State, the mob largely got away with it.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Deep State Is Rattled
12th January 2021
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With ridership stuck at around 37 percent of 2019 levels, transit advocates have stopped claiming that transit is energy-efficient and climate-friendly. Even in 2019, transit wasn’t particularly green, but the fall-off in ridership associated with the pandemic has completely destroyed any claim that transit agencies may have that they save energy by providing an alternative to the automobile.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Transit: Browner Than Ever
11th January 2021
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It was entirely predictable that incoming vice president Kamala Harris would appear on the cover of the latest issue of Vogue magazine. Few, however, could have foreseen the backlash it would unleash among her adoring liberal fans.
It is easy to see why Vogue would choose a cover image featuring Harris’s signature Converse sneakers. Despite warnings from liberal activists that highlighting a female politician’s fashion choices amounted to “sexist” reporting, professional journalists repeatedly demonstrated an unhealthy obsession with Kamala’s trendy footwear.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Kamala Harris Vogue Cover ‘Scandal’ Portends Four Years of Insufferable Controversies
11th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
11th January 2021
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Trump Derangement Syndrome
11th January 2021
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
11th January 2021
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
11th January 2021
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
11th January 2021
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Twitter’s share price sunk 11% when markets opened Monday morning for the first time since the site banned President Donald Trump.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Twitter Stock Plummets After Banning President Trump, Purging Conservative Accounts
11th January 2021
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
11th January 2021
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On Sunday night’s PBS NewsHour Weekend, they bizarrely decided to discuss the “truth” and misinformation with… disgraced CBS News anchor/fake news purveyor Dan Rather, selling his old book What Unites Us that came out in 2017 (even the paperback is from 2019). His fraudulent smears of George W. Bush in 2004 never came up.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on To Discuss Truth and Misinformation, PBS Touts the Wisdom of… DAN RATHER??