THE NEW SPACE RACE: China rolls out rocket for Queqiao-2 lunar satellite launch.
March 18, 2024
MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Four years on, COVID damage remains while Fauci & Co. pay no price.
TAPEWORM CYSTS IN HIS BRAIN: Florida Man Discovers Alarming Reason For His Constant Headaches. “The best way to avoid this unwanted guest in your intestine, or brain where neither host nor parasite are happy, is good personal hygiene.”
LET A SMILE BE YOUR UMBRELLA: According to Scientists, Smiling Is the Secret to Seeing Happiness.
THE EV EXCITEMENT HAS COOLED: Analysis: U.S. automakers race to build more hybrids as EV sales slow.
IF TRUMP HAD BEEN REELECTED, WE WOULDN’T BE HEARING THIS KIND OF STUFF:
KBJ doubles down: “My biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways.”
That is, quite literally, the entire point of the First Amendment—of the entire Bill of Rights. pic.twitter.com/gWMCaHDG1W
— System Update (@SystemUpdate_) March 18, 2024
SO YOU CAN NOW BUY BIRTH CONTROL PILLS WITHOUT A PRESCRIPTION AND ONLINE.
RIP: Astronaut Thomas Stafford, commander of Apollo 10, has died at age 93. “After the moon landings ended, NASA and the Soviet Union decided on a joint docking mission and Stafford, a one-star general at the time, was chosen to command the American side. It meant intensive language training, being followed by the KGB while in the Soviet Union, and lifelong friendships with cosmonauts. The two teams of space travelers even went to Disney World and rode Space Mountain together before going into orbit and joining ships.”
THE WAR ON FREEDOM NEVER STOPS: Undaunted By Court Losses, Cali Lawmakers Push More Anti-Gun Measures.
LET THE SUN SHINE IN: In Latest A.I. War Escalation, Elon Musk Releases Chatbot Code.
GET OUT BEFORE THEY SEIZE YOUR ASSETS: ‘Escape From New York,’ Starring Donald Trump… and Every Other Developer.
READER FAVORITE: Van Heusen Men’s Dress Shirt. #CommissionEarned#CommissionEarned
I LISTENED TO PART OF THE ORAL ARGUMENT. IT SEEMED TO BE GOING WELL FROM MY PERSPECTIVE, BUT WHO KNOWS? Supreme Court Hears Oral Argument in Pivotal NCLA Case Against Gov’t Social Media Censorship.
PLEASE CLAP: Biden stumbles through sad excuse of a St. Patrick’s Day speech, tells crowd when to clap.
At one point, Biden even demanded those in attendance clap after praising Ireland for sharing U.S. values such as support of Ukraine and a stand against Russia’s “aggression” toward its neighbor.
“We celebrate the bonds of our friendship today connecting millions of Irish Americans and American people,” Biden said. “We celebrate the friendship between the two nations — one that has shaped our past, strengthened our present and inspires our future.”
“Ireland now is one of the top ten investors in the United States economy,” Biden said. “And our countries stand proudly for liberty and against tyranny. We stand together and oppose Russia’s brutal war of aggression in Ukraine. You can clap for that, please.”
ZONE OF DISINTEREST: Seth Mandel: Glazer’s Partners Refute Glazer.
It is immensely important that Danny Cohen, the executive producer of The Zone of Interest, has publicly repudiated the director Jonathan Glazer’s atrocious Holocaust statement at the Oscars.
In his speech, Glazer was at once self-loathing toward and obsessed with his own Jewishness. Upon accepting the Academy Award for his film and its portrayal of the Nazi commandant Rudolf Höss’s life next to a concentration camp, Glazer seemed express deep shame for his heritage while blaming Judaism for Palestinian suffering, and took the extraordinary step (for a director of a Holocaust movie!) of equating the Jews of today with Höss’s fellow Nazis of yesterday.
In his public comments on Glazer’s moral misconduct, Cohen made three separate points, all of which are significant for their own reasons.
First, and most obvious, was his repudiation of Glazer’s statement. “I just fundamentally disagree with Jonathan on this,” he told podcast hosts Jonathan Freedland and Yonit Levi. “The war and the continuation of the war is the responsibility of Hamas, a genocidal terrorist organization which continues to hold and abuse the hostages, which doesn’t use its tunnels to protect the innocent civilians of Gaza but uses it to hide themselves and allow Palestinians to die. I think the war is tragic and awful and the loss of civilian life is awful, but I blame Hamas for that.”
That is well said and correct in every particular. The relevance of Judaism to the current conflict is entirely contained in the fact that it was Hamas’s motivation to murder and torture and rape and kidnap men, women, children and the elderly. The war happened because there are monsters walking the earth who seek to eradicate Jews, and the war continues because those monsters refuse to stop trying.
As Ben Shapiro wrote last week on “Jonathan Glazer’s Evil Oscars Display:”
In reality, Glazer is the villain of his own film. In “Zone of Interest,” there are no Jews: all we can hear of them is their screams from beyond the wall. Otherwise, they are nameless, faceless victims. And those are precisely the kinds of Jews Glazer likes. He’s happy to use their corpses to win Oscars, even as he attacks the live Jews defending themselves from the ideological descendants of the Nazis, Hamas.
All of which makes sense. After all, as author Dara Horn has pointed out, people love dead Jews. It’s the live ones who are so problematic for people like Jonathan Glazer. The live ones have the unfortunate habit of fighting back and making life uncomfortable for doctrinaire left-wingers who want to be accepted in their morally benighted social circles.
Seth Mandel concluded, “We can only hope Cohen is right that Glazer’s stunt will fade in the public’s mind far sooner than will the movie’s ability to impart on a new generation the horrific reality of the Holocaust.”
But does it really? As Sonny Bunch wrote of the film in January:
I find The Zone of Interest somewhat flummoxing. Glazer has undoubtedly made a masterpiece of not-showing…I can’t help but wonder what the one-in-five young Americans who think the Holocaust was exaggerated will make of the very act of not-showing. I can’t help but wonder what the teachers who have noted a rise in antisemitic humor and students ironically praising Hitler as based will respond to it. Or how such a film will be received in a period of soaring antisemitism. Assuming knowledge that either isn’t there or has been warped by the vicissitudes of the online swamp alters the cinematic calculus in ways that I am not entirely sure how to grapple with.
Glazer was fine with audiences hearing in the background of his movie what Hannah Arendt dubbed “the banality of evil.” Actually showing it on the big screen? Obviously not, except in the most abstract form possible, alas.
NOTHING TO SEE HERE, MOVE ALONG: Apparent Hezbollah Member Caught Crossing Border.
I DON’T FIND THE PLANETOLOGY OF ARRAKIS PERSUASIVE: Dune: What the climate of Arrakis can tell us about the hunt for habitable exoplanets. I always doubted the energy budget for the sandworms.
VIDEO: Ian McCollum Defines Assault Rifle.
If you don’t have the time or inclination to watch a vide, Lawrence Person has done his usual excellent job of breaking out the, ah, bullet points.
BERNIE SANDERS UNVEILS HIS LATEST INSANE IDEA:
Back in reality, there’s no such thing as a free lunch. Any economic change has significant trade-offs, and you can’t get around them just by writing legislation that says everything has to work out great for everyone.
For one, this change would constitute an enormous increase in costs for many employers and businesses. And it’s just basic economics that when businesses’ costs go up, they have to raise their prices. Workers aren’t actually going to be better off if everything they consume gets more expensive.
Regardless, while the federal government could try to prohibit employers from reducing current workers’ wages in light of this legislation, that wouldn’t really work. After all, employers will still presumably be free to offer lower wages for all new hires.
More essentially, a worker’s real wage is not the number on his or her paycheck but what it can buy for the worker. And the government can mandate that the worker’s pay not be cut on paper, but it can’t stop prices from rising and his or her real wage from effectively falling.
Milton Friedman, and the Gods of the Copybook Headings, smile.
QUESTION ASKED AND ANSWERED: What happened to America’s capital?
Muriel Bowser is a woman with a plan. In late February the mayor of the District of Columbia unveiled a $400 million, five-year economic development strategy to revitalize the capital’s downtown.
* * * * * * * *
Bowser has drafted these desperate measures in a belated response to the desperate times. As the forty-two-page report concedes early on, “once a bustling employment center, Downtown DC has faced an outflow of office workers in response to remote and telework trends.” Doubtless the pandemic and resulting rise of remote work have played a role in the deterioration. Government employees have been particularly reluctant to return to the office five days a week — and given that they’d have to spend eight hours a day with other government employees, it’s hard to blame them. The knock-on effect is that the consultants and lobbyists hoping to influence or cajole the government don’t feel the need to return to the office either. Countless business meetings and happy hours have been reduced to Zoom calls and emails.
But there’s a more significant reason why DC workers don’t want to go downtown — and the word merits just a single mention in Bowser’s report: crime. Violent crime was up 39 percent last year in the city, with the murder rate rising to heights not seen since the mid-1990s. Why would you drive in to the office when your car could be hijacked in broad daylight by a perpetrator who won’t face consequences? Safer to stay in Virginia or Maryland.
It is deeply unfashionable in the left wing of the Democratic Party to acknowledge that urban crime has become a problem in the last four years — “public safety” is Bowser’s preferred phrase, and she’s ringfenced $31.5 million for it over the next five years. But if any of that money is intended for actually hiring more police officers, her report does not indicate it.
Life is rough for the few cops who still work for the Metropolitan Police Department — they have left the force by the hundreds, putting the department headcount at a half-century low.
Unexpectedly:
DC Mayor Muriel Bowser had "Black Lives Matter" painted onto 16th St. just down from the White House. Last night protesters added "Defund The Police" pic.twitter.com/1GElXtYiSD
— Doug Mills (@dougmillsnyt) June 7, 2020