May 6, 2024

COLORADO: Mountain lion hunting ban working its way towards Colorado’s 2024 ballot.

If it makes the ballot and passes, Initiative #91 would bar what the measure refers to as the “trophy hunting” of mountain lions—along with bobcats or lynx–in Colorado. The measure has been approved for circulation and the group “Cats Aren’t Trophies” had already raised nearly $220,000 by the Jan. 16 campaign finance filing date. The next filing is due May 6. The group also registered with the Secretary of Sate as a licensed petition entity on April 11, meaning they can pay people directly for signature gathering. Proponents must gather more than 126,000 valid signatures from registered voters by August to make the ballot.

Trophy hunting is generally considered as the hunting of wild animals just for sport and not for food, but Initiative 91 broadly defines the practice as the “intentional killing, wounding, pursing or entrapping of a mountain lion, bobcat or lynx.”

Trophy hunting is banned in most places in the US unless there is a temporary need to balance out a population. In Colorado, the hunting of mountain lions (as well as bobcats and lynx), which runs yearly from November to March (with additional hunting in April if needed) is already prohibited unless the meat of the animal is harvested for consumption.

If it makes the ballot, I suspect it will pass.

Posted at 4:50 pm by Stephen Green

WOW: CRIPSR gene editing leads to improvements in vision for people with inherited blindness, clinical trial shows. “While more research is needed to determine who may benefit most, we consider the early results promising. To hear from several participants how thrilled they were that they could finally see the food on their plates –that is a big deal. These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.”

Posted at 3:48 pm by Stephen Green

NEWS YOU CAN USE: How to watch NASA’s first Boeing Starliner crewed flight launch today “Watch along today as NASA’s Boeing Starliner Crew Flight Test finally — most likely — blasts off to the International Space Station (ISS). NASA should start streaming its coverage at 6:30PM ET on its YouTube channel, with the official launch set for 10:34PM ET. The spacecraft will carry two astronauts, Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore.”

Posted at 2:46 pm by Stephen Green

REGULATORS AT WORK: The long, frustrating wait for better sunscreens in America. “The Food and Drug Administration’s ability to approve the chemical filters in sunscreens that are sold in countries such as Japan, South Korea, and France is hamstrung by a 1938 U.S. law that requires sunscreens to be tested on animals and classified as drugs, rather than as cosmetics as they are in much of the world. So Americans are not likely to get those better sunscreens — which block the ultraviolet rays that can cause skin cancer and lead to wrinkles — in time for this summer, or even the next.”

Posted at 2:30 pm by Glenn Reynolds

LIGHT RAIL IS USUALLY A VERY EXPENSIVE AND UNFUNNY JOKE: Is Austin’s Toy Train Finally Dead? “Austin’s liberal establishment has been trying to trick taxpayers into pouring billions into their light rail boondoggle for decades, finally winning an apparent victory when voters approved a scheme in 2020. But it turns out that the terms of the ballot language may have doomed the project.”

Posted at 1:44 pm by Stephen Green

KAROL MARKOWICZ: Brainwashing campus activists starts long before college.

What we’re seeing on our campuses is the culmination of many years of leftist activists pushing kids to the forefront to spread their propaganda.

And it’s not remotely just board books like “A is for Activist” that introduce toddlers to the idea of protest before they even set foot in school.

Teachers push their agenda; whether climate change, gun control or the war in Gaza, they’re focused far less on teaching children how to think than what to think.

The goal is to turn kids into activists, and the sooner the better.

After all, children can be valuable for shutting down debate.

Their youth implies innocence and seems to confer moral authority: How could anyone argue with an innocent child?

Greta Thunberg famously quit school to campaign against climate change.

It was impossible to challenge a pig-tailed child, even if she demanded the world stop functioning.

Recall her tearful “how dare you!” in front of the UN Climate Action Summit in 2019?

It reverberated widely because of her age.

A grown-up making the same plea would be seen as unbalanced.

Yet the idea of Greta as a climate-warrior spokesperson was born when a grown-up activist saw how teen anti-gun crusaders, after the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS in Parkland, Fla., viciously attacked ideological foes with minimal pushback.

No one could argue with a traumatized teen — and that was the point.

The concept has only spread since.

It’s nothing new for the left — Thomas Sowell was writing about “Mascots of the Anointed” back in 1995, and long before Greta, there were earlier enviro-youth programmed to inflict maximum guilt:

But as Iowahawk warns the rest of us:

And as America’s Newspaper of Record noted in 2019 at the height of Green Nude Eel mania: Democrats Introduce Debate Strategy Of Holding Up Small Child Whenever Their Positions Are Challenged.

Posted at 1:22 pm by Ed Driscoll

THE RATCHET EFFECT: Biden Races to Trump-Proof His Agenda. “The past few months have seen a frenzy of regulatory activity. In April, government agencies finalized nearly three dozen economically significant regulations, more than during any single month of Biden’s presidency, according to the George Washington University Regulatory Studies Center. New policy announcements from the White House are being rolled out multiple times each week on issues ranging from tighter environmental rules to new restrictions on noncompete agreements.”

Posted at 12:42 pm by Stephen Green

GREAT MOMENTS IN ENVIRONMENTALISM:

And now we know what happened to rest of the forests prior to the events in Silent Running:

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll

WELL, PROGRESSIVES ARE KOOKS AND MORONS, SO. . . Progressive Attitudes Towards Sex Are Pretty Damn Incoherent Right Now. “It’s not just that the arguments for “no sex in movies” are unconvincing to me. It’s that I don’t even believe that the people making them are convinced by them. Instead I think that it’s pure visceral emotion being sold as actual argument – most of these people are simply scared of sex. They find it icky and frightening. The good news is that they are of course free to avoid sex in their own lives, to whatever degree they choose. The trouble is that they want to consume pop culture and, because sex is a big of life and narrative art must be free to depict all elements of human experience, they often find themselves confronted with the existence of sex in movies and TV. And it appears that, because they’ve been brought up in a social and political environment that has taught them that their momentary psychic comfort is the only thing that matters, they assume that all of the rest of us have to accept sexless and sanitized movies and television.”

Why we listen to the ravings of self-centered neurotics is a mystery. But as a culture, we unaccountably do. More mocking and shaming of self-centered neurotics would help.

Plus: “I just find it so bizarre, where we are as a culture when it comes to sex – there’s a lot of explicit “sex positivity” married to a society full of people who find sex scary, in a way that’s connected to a broader fear about human experience and its many risks. The result is a culture where a young woman starting an OnlyFans on her 18th birthday and immediately filming herself performing sex acts for cash is seen by many as a matter of feminist empowerment, but where there’s perpetual controversy about whether it’s OK to talk to a stranger on the street. (You know, the reason a lot of us exist, because our parents or grandparents struck up a conversation on the street.)”

Posted at 12:20 pm by Glenn Reynolds