…yes, you get racist hate mongering.
What will it take to get the Jewish community to wake up?
[Afternoon update]
Israelis unite against the Iran “deal.”
Because it’s a lousy deal.
More Hillary Problems
This isn’t really news — it’s been known for years, but it looks like someone’s finally seriously investigating Huma’s Muslim Brotherhood connections.
A Perfect Feminist Storm
I’ve joked for years that I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body, but someone should seriously do this to make their heads explode:
In the Perfect Storm scenario, the ex-boyfriend, when called before the tribunal, refuses to bow down. He does not beg for a lawyer. He does not offer pathetic, chauvinistic attacks against his victimized accuser. He does not beg for mercy.
Instead, the accused ex-boyfriend claims that the charge against him cannot possibly be true. The reality, he says, is that during the time he was dating his accuser, his gender identity was feminine. Not only was his gender identity feminine, it was also lesbian — and to the extent his appearance on campus was externally masculine, he behaved that way because he had discovered that he had much greater sexual success as a lesbian (with sexual success defined as encounters with other women) when those same women believed he was a man. He knew, however, at all relevant times, that he was a lesbian having sex with the woman now hiding behind a screen and accusing him of the heteronormative crime of rape.
Not only does the accused ex-lesbian boyfriend deny the charges against him, he counterattacks.
It would deliciously highlight the contradictions of the fascist SJWs.
First Restaurants Raise Wages
Americans spend a phenomenal amount of money consuming food outside their homes, and a major reason is that with restaurant labor so cheap, the convenience and price are attractive to people who don’t feel like cooking. If the wages go up, that calculus shifts. And unfortunately those “rich bosses” can’t just take it out of their profits, because margins in the industry are under 5 percent, and the difference between making that profit and closing up shop can be surprisingly thin. Empty seats don’t just cost you rent; they make it hard to get good servers, because empty seats mean lost tip income. You can end up in a vicious spiral where your service gets worse, so your restaurant loses more customers, so the service gets even worse . . . and it’s time to call the bank and tell them you won’t be paying off that loan.
The economic ignorami don’t seem to understand that restaurants have competition in addition to other restaurants — cooking your own meals at home. In fact, the high cost of dining out is one of the reasons (though not the only one, also I can feed myself more healthily, and I really don’t enjoy sitting around being served by people) that I rarely eat out unless I’m traveling. With 25% unemployment of black youth, raising the minimum wage (or in fact having one at all) is a moral atrocity.
“The Ferrari Of Rocket Engines”
This is what happens when a reporter has no idea what is going on, and is simply an uncritical stenographer for NASA PAO and officials:
“It is the most complicated rocket engine out there on the market, but that’s because it’s the Ferrari of rocket engines,” said Kathryn Crowe, RS-25 propulsion engineer.
“When you’re looking at designing a rocket engine, there are several different ways you can optimise it. You can optimise it through increasing its thrust, increasing the weight to thrust ratio, or increasing its overall efficiency and how it consumes your propellant. With this engine, they maximised all three.”
The resulting engine, according to Martin Burkey of the SLS strategic communications team, blows everything we currently have out of the water.
“They ‘maximized’ all three.”
Know what they didn’t optimize? They didn’t optimize on cost. Nowhere in that article does it mention that those are actually reusable rocket engines, from the Space Shuttle. But they’re going to throw them all away the next time they use them. Ferraris are expensive, too, but at least they don’t throw the car away each time they take it for a drive.
Sheltered Students
…go to college to avoid education:
Why is this happening now? How did colleges manage to guide generations of students through offense and outrage, only to founder at the dawn of the 21st century? Haidt and Lukianoff offer some plausible candidates: the increasingly sheltered lives that middle-class children now live, and expect colleges to sustain.”In a variety of ways,” they write, “children born after 1980—the Millennials—got a consistent message from adults: life is dangerous, but adults will do everything in their power to protect you from harm, not just from strangers but from one another as well.” Too, partisanship is higher, and angrier, than it was when I was in college. And today’s students, who live in a world where social media make it easy to launch crusades, may have stronger tendencies in this direction than my generation. (Once upon a time, an offense had to be outrageous enough for people to go to the trouble of exchanging phone numbers, attending meetings and printing fliers.)
There’s also a regulatory component: Under Obama, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has broadened the definition for what constitutes offensive speech. Colleges tremble in fear of lawsuits or visits from regulators, and they send legions of administrators forth to head off any threat by appeasing angry students and making new rules.
But here’s a candidate Haidt and Lukianoff don’t mention: the steady shift toward viewing college as a consumer experience, rather than an institution that is there to shape you toward its own ideal. I don’t want to claim that colleges used to be idylls in which the deans never worried about collecting tuition checks; colleges have always worried about attracting enough students. But cultural and economic shifts have pushed students toward behaving more like consumers in a straight commercial transaction, and less like people who were being inducted into a non-market institution.
Yes. The student-loan program has become a huge disaster.
The Lukianoff-Haidt piece she refers to is here:
There’s a saying common in education circles: Don’t teach students what to think; teach them how to think. The idea goes back at least as far as Socrates. Today, what we call the Socratic method is a way of teaching that fosters critical thinking, in part by encouraging students to question their own unexamined beliefs, as well as the received wisdom of those around them. Such questioning sometimes leads to discomfort, and even to anger, on the way to understanding.
But vindictive protectiveness teaches students to think in a very different way. It prepares them poorly for professional life, which often demands intellectual engagement with people and ideas one might find uncongenial or wrong. The harm may be more immediate, too. A campus culture devoted to policing speech and punishing speakers is likely to engender patterns of thought that are surprisingly similar to those long identified by cognitive behavioral therapists as causes of depression and anxiety. The new protectiveness may be teaching students to think pathologically.
I think we’re seeing a lot of that.
The Space Show
David Livingston is running an Indiegogo campaign to modernize the web site. There are two signed copies of my book available for $100 donors.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Lifeboat Foundation is also doing a summer fundraiser:
Peg Kay has generously offered to triple all donations made at
https://lifeboat.com/ex/summer.growth by August 15th which is
only 2 days away.
They’re both worthwhile causes.
Huma
It’s her turn to get grilled.
As someone noted on Twitter this morning, somewhere is an underpaid IT guy who’s not going to be willing to do time for Hillary. It’s really starting to look like the White House is getting ready to throw Hillary under the bus. Does that mean Biden? Hard to see who else they’d throw their support to. He’d be the natural one to be an Obama third term.
[Update a few minutes later]
A majority (and not just “likely voters”) want there to be a criminal probe. Because they’re not as stupid as the Democrats need them to be.
And it looks like she’s not going to get Ron Fournier back:
Where do I start? How about with the Clinton campaign’s ridiculous suggestion that coughing up the server and email were voluntary acts. We know that’s bunk—because Clinton herself said she wouldn’t surrender the people’s records without a fight.
As Safire noted in the 90s, she is a congenital liar. Of course, Democrats normally like that; so is Bill, but he’s a lot better at it.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Democrats are in near-panic mode. This is hilarious:
Trippi said another Democrat might well get into the race, but that beating Clinton was a very different proposition.
“I don’t think Joe Biden has given up on his desire to run for president and I’m sure there are others out there who want to get into this race. I just don’t see a path yet for how you get to the nomination,” he said.
…That leaves many Democrats in a painful place: Believing that, in the end, Clinton will be the nominee but worrying that her vulnerabilities could negate the many advantages — from demographics to the electoral college map — that they believe the party nominee should enjoy.
The progressive strategist wondered “how much longer this drip, drip, drip” of controversy surrounding the emails would continue.
“There’s a hesitance that emerges in terms of her trustworthiness,” the source said. “At some point, people will start to ask whether this hurts her electability in the general election.”
You don’t say.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, this is hilarious, too:
But concerned Democrats keep coming back to the same question: Why did the Clinton campaign not simply hand over the private server when the controversy first erupted in March?
“It’s bizarre,” said the Democratic strategist. “Let me give you some simple strategic communications advice: Put everything out first, on your terms. If you wait, or you are forced to do it, you always lose and look bad. … That is exactly what is happening here, and I find it inexplicable.”
I know this sounds crazy, but try applying Occam’s Razor. She didn’t turn it over for the same reason she set it up in the first place, in order to protect and cover up a lot of sleazy/criminal/duplicitous activity.
[Friday-morning update]
To illustrate why this matters so much, perhaps you will forgive me an analogy? Imagine that you are writing a manuscript by hand, and that your initial draft contains all the crossings out, substitutions, and spelling errors that initial drafts tend to include. Next, imagine that having completed that draft to your satisfaction, you make a perfect copy — minus all the changes and mistakes, of course — and then, lest anyone be privy to your imperfections, you burn the original. In such a case, handing over the finished draft would naturally be entirely useless to anyone who wanted to find out what changes you had made. Indeed, it would be of use only to those who believed that you were a perfect writer. That, effectively, is what Hillary Clinton has done here. As I noted yesterday, she may still come a cropper. But if so, it will be because she didn’t get rid of the incriminating materials when she had the chance.
As I noted in comments, one can plead the Fifth without an implication that one has done anything wrong. One cannot destroy evidence without that implication. The fact that she took this much trouble to make sure that even FBI forensics couldn’t get access to it will be viewed in court as having criminal intent.
[Late-morning update]
From a Democrat: The Party’s ticking Hillary time bomb:
For the past five months, those of us old enough to have lived through the 1990s have been enduring a deeply unpleasant bout of déjà vu-inspired dread. First the news breaks, inspiring the unavoidable thought, “How could [insert member of the Clinton family here] possibly have failed to realize that this would be a problem?” Then the barrage of counter-attacks from the Clinton machine against the story, poking holes, impugning motives, kicking up just enough dust to convince fair-minded observers that maybe, just maybe, there’s less to the story than it originally seemed. And finally, because journalists make mistakes and actually care about being able to stand behind the truth of what they publish, even those who ran the original story begin to backtrack, express uncertainties, and air self-doubts.
And then: Ka-Blam! The story is back and bigger than ever. Oh, that server we wouldn’t give to you? You can have it now, cleaned up all nice and tidy. There certainly weren’t any classified documents on there. Oh, there were? Oops, well, only those two — oh, I mean four — and don’t worry about how that’s just a “limited sample” of 40 emails out of tens of thousands; the inspector general of the Justice Department just got lucky. And hey, we deleted them, so who cares? (Freedom of information is for suckers.) Yes, of course, my “shadow” had access to that server and those classified emails, too. Why is that a problem? What, are you a member of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy?
Tick, tick, boom.
The amount of denial on display here is because they got away with so much in the 90s, the Dems just figure there is no limit to how much corruption, deception and cover up the American public will tolerate.
El Nino
A “Godzilla El Nino“?
A strong El Niño can shift a subtropical jet stream that normally pours rain over the jungles of southern Mexico and Central America toward California and the southern United States.
But so much rain all at once has proved devastating to California in the past. In early 1998, storms brought widespread flooding and mudslides, causing 17 deaths and more than half a billion dollars in damage in California. Downtown L.A. got nearly a year’s worth of rain in February 1998.
Of course, the problem with that is that most of it just goes into the ocean, no way to catch water that rains downtown. We really need snowpack up in the Sierra, and to fill the reservoirs, but at least amidst all the upcoming damage, it looks like that might happen this winter.
On another note, if the Panama Canal is low on water due to drought, couldn’t they pump it up the locks? But I guess they want fresh water in the upper canals, not salt.
Mark Steyn’s New Book
Some commentary from the author on its reception so far.
I’ll be interested to see what people like Phil Plait have to say. I suspect they’ll try to pretend it doesn’t exist.
[Thursday-morning update]
Thoughts (and a lot of excerpts) from Judith Curry.
I’m not sure that the fact he’s making a lot of money on the book reduces his chances of getting damages from Mann. I’m sure he would have preferred to have been writing other books, and he needs the money for his legal defense.