THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA’s VIPER Rover Braces for Ultimate Space Challenge. “NASA’s VIPER team is not only building the rover for the Moon’s South Pole but also preparing for its environmental tests. These tests are designed to simulate the harsh conditions of space travel and lunar operation to ensure the rover’s readiness for its mission.”
May 20, 2024
GREAT MOMENTS IN RADICAL CHIC: The U.S. Response to Iranian President’s Death Is Disgraceful.
A condensed listing of Raisi’s bloody track record — even before becoming president of the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism — from the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD) recaps his barbarism:
Raisi — the deputy prosecutor general of Tehran from 1985 to 1988 — facilitated the regime’s 1988 slaughter of thousands of jailed political dissidents by serving on a four-member panel known as a Death Commission, which decided who would live and who would die. The commission would conduct interviews of prisoners — often just a few minutes long — aimed at determining their loyalty to the Islamic Republic. Questions could include: “What is your political affiliation?” “Do you pray?” “Are you willing to clear minefields for the Islamic Republic?” The wrong answer meant death.
The executions were usually by hanging or by firing squad, and typically took place the same day as the interrogations. The commissions allowed neither lawyers nor appeals. Burials occurred in unmarked mass graves. The regime waited months before notifying the relatives of the victims, refused to tell them the locations of the bodies, and told them not to mourn in public. The victims included women and children as young as 13. Raisi has defended the killings, saying in 2018 that they were “one of the proud achievements of the system.”
What a guy, proud of murdering thousands of innocent Iranians, to mourn. FDD also noted that Raisi’s subsequent posts as deputy chief justice, attorney general, and chief justice allowed him to preside “over the prosecution, imprisonment, torture, and execution of countless detainees.”
Biden’s State Department formally expressed its “official condolences” in a statement Monday afternoon:
The United States expresses its official condolences for the death of Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi, Foreign Minister Amir-Abdollahian, and other members of their delegation in a helicopter crash in northwest Iran. As Iran selects a new president, we reaffirm our support for the Iranian people and their struggle for human rights and fundamental freedoms.
It wasn’t just the State Department that was issuing its condolences to a mass-murderer, of course:
For those keeping track:
U.S. Senate Chaplain
U.S. State Department Spokesman
White House Spokesman
NATOAll offered condolences for the Butcher of Tehran's death https://t.co/ugTiPVD1IV
— John Hasson (@SonofHas) May 20, 2024
Regarding the NATO spokesperson’s response, former California Assemblyman Chuck DeVore put it into sharp perspective:
Our condolences to the people of Germany for the death of Deputy Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, President of Interpol, and Director of the Reich Security Main Office Heydrich, who perished in the car crash. https://t.co/ppOKszLVnt
— Chuck DeVore (@ChuckDeVore) May 20, 2024
THE INTERNET OF THINGS SUCKS: How I upgraded my water heater and discovered how bad smart home security can be.
Being a home automation nerd, and thereby a Home Assistant enthusiast, I searched for a better way. I found an unofficial Rinnai component and installed it, and then I had real control. I could set recirculation to run on whatever schedule I wanted, triggered by anything, at any temperature. If I wanted to start hot water flowing on winter mornings as soon as the bedroom lights came on, but only if the moon was in Aquarius, I could do that (and I am not joking). The future felt warm, but not too warm, and on-demand. . . .
The calls Control-R made to Rinnai’s servers were “very basic,” Barbour said. Digging into the undocumented API calls, Barbour saw something he didn’t think was real: You needed only a registered email address to retrieve information, or change settings, on a connected water heater.
“I thought this was crazy until another GitHub user reached out and we started collaborating and came to the same conclusion. You could control any Rinnai water heater that was connected, as long as you knew the registered account’s email address,” Barbour wrote me.
Bottom line: “Knowing only your email address, I can set your water heater’s temperature to very cold or scaldingly hot. I can put it into recirculation mode continuously so that it uses lots of gas… I can see your home street address that you have entered into the Control-R app when you registered your water heater.”
No thank you. And this kind of thing is, sadly typical, for “connected devices.”
GOOD LUCK, GUYS: Check Out Honda’s Fuel-Cell Big Rig, Part of a ‘Hydrogen Future.’
I drove a GM fuel-cell car for Popular Mechanics over a decade ago. My thoughts: “The car advertises itself as petroleum-free, which is true. But—and here’s my problem with hydrogen cars—it’s not really fossil fuel free. Most hydrogen is made by “steam reformation” of natural gas, which is still a fossil fuel. You can also make it out of water, via electrolysis, but unless you’ve got a non-fossil source of electricity the hydrogen is really just functioning as an energy-storage medium, rather than a source of energy. Of course, build lots of nice, clean nuclear plants, or orbiting solar power plants, or whatever, and that problem goes away.”
But if you don’t do that, it’s basically a gimmick.
PROCUREMENT: GDLS delivers first tranche of M10 Booker vehicles. “Booker will be assigned to the Army’s Infantry Brigade Combat Teams. The vehicle moves rapidly in a variety of terrain conditions to engage and destroy enemy combatants, bunkers, machine gun positions, fortifications and other Armoured combat vehicles.”
It looks like a tank and it’s crewed like a tank but it is not a tank.
AT AMAZON, Shop the Memorial Day Sale. #CommissionEarned
HE’S THE HONEST KIND OF CROOK WHO STAYS BOUGHT: Biden’s ’Inflation Reduction Act’ Enriches Commie China.
INFLATION WAS BECAUSE OF GREEDY BUSINESSES BUT NOW THEY AREN’T GREEDY ANYMORE SO THAT’S NICE: Target starts price war with Walmart by slashing the cost of 5,000 popular items.
EMBRACE THE HEALING POWER OF AND: Funny or Sad? Now Biden Says He Was Vice President During the Pandemic.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirTag. #CommissionEarned
HOW IS STARTED: What the right’s gas stove freakout was really about. “Republicans and conservative pundits have spent the past week nonetheless expressing alarm about the fate of Americans’ ranges and cooktops — in line with previous GOP complaints about real or imagined threats to hamburgers, toilets, air travel, incandescent light bulbs and gasoline-powered cars.”
(It’s almost impossible to believe that Alex Guillen and Ben Lefebvre wrote that with straight faces.)
How it’s going: New research shows gas stove emissions contribute to 19,000 deaths annually. “We certainly don’t want to be alarmist. On the other hand, day after day, year after year, using a stove that the exposure really does build up and does increase the risk of all these respiratory diseases.”
But are the results reproducible?
THAT’S MOSTLY CHANDLER’S DOING: Neural network trained on ‘Friends’ can recognize sarcasm.
DAN MCLAUGHLIN: Let Harrison Butker Be Himself.
The worst response came from the NFL, which insisted on distancing the league from Butker’s opinions. Notably, unlike Colin Kaepernick, Butker did not use the NFL’s property or airtime to spread his opinions; he did so in his free time. There’s already a long and inconsistent record of the NFL and other sports leagues attempting, and failing, to come up with a consistent approach to punishing non-game-related things done by athletes off the field. The league wasn’t nearly this quick in the past to denounce violent crimes committed by its players. Nobody actually believes that it has been, or will in the future be, vigilant about making statements every time a player says or does something politically or socially controversial from the left. The point of this is to send a message that people who believe what Butker believes are apt to face discipline in the workplace for their faith and opinions. (That’s not just private action, either, given that the NFL is an association of franchises, one of which is publicly owned by the government of Green Bay, Wis.) And it is, to boot, a misreading of the NFL’s fan base: Do we really think that pro football fans are overwhelmingly left-leaning on cultural matters?
Plus: “So, let Harrison Butker be himself. His opinions are outgrowths of virtues in short supply today: faith, fidelity to the traditional family, and respect for the different, complementary, and mutually supporting roles played by husbands and wives. These are mostly opinions that were not even controversial until a few decades ago, and it should alarm us to see so little tolerance for their mere expression in the public square.”
Everyone must genuflect to the pieties of the Gentry Class, even though the Gentry Class itself doesn’t really live by them.
The richer you are, in general, the more conservative your life choices are. Most left wingers talk left but live right. They live in gated communities, put kids in private schools, maximize tax avoidance, have stay at home wives, pay attention to what they do not what they say.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 18, 2024
Not one single NFL player has criticized Harrison Butker for what he said. You know why? Because almost all of them agree with him. The gap between what players — and coaches — believe and what the sports media who covers them believes is seismic.
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) May 18, 2024
THIS TIME IT’LL WORK! ADDING ‘BELONGING’ TO FIX DEI. Now it’s DEIB? At this rate it’s going to have as many letters as LGBTQQIAA+ soon.
The Israel-Hamas blowup on campus post October 7 is all the evidence one needs to end the DEI bureaucracies forever. It turned out that the result of spending billions, ruining the lives of dissenters, and warping the purpose of education in an effort to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” is campuses that explode with ethnic unrest and violence when a war erupts on the other side of the planet. You had one job, DEI bureaucrats, and you failed in spectacular fashion. For a situation like this, Cromwell put it best: “It is not fit that you should sit here any longer. You have sat here too long for any good you have been doing lately … In the name of God, go!“
BRAVE SIR ROBIN BRAVELY TURNED AND FLED: Alarmed Democrats flee Biden’s ailing brand in battleground states.
“If you go out there and do a focus group, the focus groups all say, ‘He’s 200 years old. You got to be kidding me.’ And the worst part about it is for unaffiliated voters or people that haven’t made up their mind, they look at this and say: ‘You have to be kidding us. These are our choices?’ And they indict us for not taking it seriously,” said a Democratic senator who requested anonymity to discuss the alarm sparked by Biden’s weak poll numbers in battleground states.
Polls have shown that 40 percent of registered voters in battleground states were not too satisfied or not at all satisfied with the candidates in the presidential election.
The senator said Democratic colleagues “know this is a problem” but also realize it’s too late to do anything about it and that “this is the ticket we have to get behind and we have to win with this ticket.”
“We’ll see how much gravity we can defy,” the lawmaker said of senators in tough races who are polling better than Biden.
A second Democratic senator when asked about Biden’s poll numbers said that the president’s age is a persistent concern among voters.
“Biden’s showing his age in ways weirdly more than Trump,” said the senator, who noted that Trump, who is 77, is only four years younger than Biden, 81.
“People keep saying, ‘Why didn’t he take a pass he’s just so tired?’” the senator said of constituents who are baffled over Biden’s decision to run for a second term. “That is such a prevalent feeling.”
Even in a story about Biden’s troubles specifically and the Democrats generally, the first third is mostly “BUT TRUMP!” The Hill has to bring its readers over to the truth as gently as possible.
I’d just add that if Trump has maybe lost half a step over the last three years, Biden has been on the decline for much longer — and started with far fewer steps he could afford to lose.
#JOURNALISM:
You see, the mattresses under which the wealthy hide their money have magical money-multiplying properties.
— Neal McCluskey (@NealMcCluskey) May 19, 2024
I’M GLAD HE’S DEAD: Here’s How (and How Not) to Celebrate the Death of the Butcher of Tehran. “Iranian strongman Ebrahim Raisi — aka ‘the butcher of Tehran’ — is dead in a Sunday helicopter crash that his countrymen and women are celebrating, so now would be the perfect time for the New York Times to avoid interviewing the Iranian dissident he tried to have assassinated. Wait, what?”
THE 21ST CENTURY ISN’T TURNING OUT AS I’D HOPED: Brixham, England, residents forced to boil water after contamination.
WOEING: Boeing Blasted for Prioritizing Racial Quotas Over Performance and Safety. “By tethering itself to DEI benchmarks instead of prioritizing performance and safety, Boeing not only risks the lives of those who fly its aircraft, but also subjects the company and its executives to liability.”
WHEN THE ARTISTS ARE WAY TOO AHEAD OF THE CRITICS: 110 years ago, The Rite of Spring incited a riot in a Paris theater.
It began with a bassoon and ended in a brawl.
One hundred years ago today, Russian composer Igor Stravinsky debuted The Rite of Spring before a packed theater in Paris, with a ballet performance that would go down as one of the most important — and violent — in modern history.
Today, The Rite is widely regarded as a seminal work of modernism — a frenetic, jagged orchestral ballet that boldly rejected the ordered harmonies and comfort of traditional composition. The piece would go on to leave an indelible mark on jazz, minimalism, and other contemporary movements, but to many who saw it on that balmy evening a century ago, it was nothing short of scandalous.
Details surrounding the events of May 29th, 1913 remain hazy. Official records are scarce, and most of what is known is based on eyewitness accounts or newspaper reports. To this day, experts debate over what exactly sparked the incident — was it music or dance? publicity stunt or social warfare? — though most agree on at least one thing: Stravinsky’s grand debut ended in mayhem and chaos.
50 years ago, when Monty Python’s Flying Circus debuted on American television on PBS, many critics had a similar reaction:
THE EXODUS IS HERE: At OpenAI. Some of my friends are convinced that OpenAI has a much more sophisticated unreleased AI that it is using to generate the versions that are being released to the public. If so, why would people bail?
HEATHER MAC DONALD: California’s Looming Crime Catastrophe: Recent legislation makes it easier for felons to claim racial bias—potentially putting them back on the streets in large numbers. This is all by design, of course.
KEVIN DOWNEY JR: How the West Was Woke, to the Point of Near Extinction.
