Mollie
@MZHemingway
Jill Biden was given her own entrance music and there is some dispute over how that came about (and whether it's atrocious or not), by @BecketAdams
‘Fanfare for the First Lady’
tbecketadams.substack.com
2:55 PM · Jan 5, 2022
The United States Marine Corps Band was instructed last fall to come up with an entrance theme for the pretend doctor, a source told the Washington Examiner. And just like that, the band now has in its repertoire an original composition titled “Fanfare for the First Lady.”
For Lt. Commander Colin Maclntyre, it began as a routine training flight over the Moon. For Dahak, a self-aware Imperial battleship, it began millennia ago when that powerful artificial intelligence underwent a mutiny in the face of the enemy. The mutiny was never resolved-Dahak was forced to maroon not just the mutineers but the entire crew on prehistoric Earth.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is fighting to preserve her right to trade stocks despite the blatant conflict of interest, and it’s obvious why: She and her husband have done well under the rules as they stand. Very well.
As The Post’s Lydia Moynihan and Theo Wayt report, the speaker — whose estimated worth tops $100 million — and hubby Paul Pelosi have amassed as much as $30 million from Big Tech stock trades, even as she’s supposed to be regulating that industry.
From 2007 to 2020, the speaker and her spouse raked in between $5.6 million and $30.4 million (the rules don’t even require exact disclosure) from just five Big Tech firms: Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft.
Never mind that the companies’ fortunes depend on laws Congress may or may not pass. As The Post has also noted, for example, Pelosi has been stalling legislation to ban Internet firms from favoring their own products in search results. Maybe it’s a coincidence she and her husband have also bet on Google, but it sure makes you wonder.
Remember, too, lawmakers are privy to info the public doesn’t see, so they may have an edge when trading stocks. (Perhaps that explains why the Pelosis have generally outperformed the market so nicely?)
Letting pols trade individual stocks, rather than investing only in index funds, raises such questions as whether they “have access to insider information” or if their trades will “impact policy-making,” warns the Revolving Door Project’s Jeff Hauser. //
It’s a strong argument for banning stock trades by lawmakers and their families altogether. Let them place their holdings in a mutual fund or blind trust. That’s smarter investing in any case (unless you, unfairly, have inside info). And if they don’t like it, well, consider it the cost of representing voters in Congress.
The site, also called “Door to Hell,” is located in the middle of the desert about 160 miles north of the capital, Ashgabat, and has become an attraction for the country’s few visitors.
The hellish hole, which measures 190 feet wide and 70 feet deep, was formed in 1971 following a Soviet Union gas drilling collapse, according to Turkmen news site Turkmenportal.
Geologists reportedly set fire to the site to prevent the spread of gas. It was expected to burn out after several weeks.
“First, let’s stipulate to an undeniable truth of history,” writes talk host, Steve Deace in a series of Twitter messages about the media, “whoever has control over the flow of information in any society ultimately has control.” And it’s why Mark Zuckerberg and his cronies want to have a bigger stake in local news.
During the last couple of days, PJ Media has highlighted an effort by the Facebook (now Meta) founder and other moneyed interests and foundations to save local newspapers and local news sources. Their idea has been to spend millions of dollars to embed reporters, in a program called Report for America (RFA), in America’s newspapers and public radio stations. Their stated objective is to tell “under-covered” stories in those cities, hamlets, and burgs out of the goodness of their hearts. //
But Zuckerberg’s overtures via the Report for America program can’t help but remind us of what Journalist H.L. Mencken is credited with once saying. “The urge to save humanity,” he said, “is almost always only a false-face for the urge to rule it.” He continued in the lesser-known second part of his axiom saying, “Power is what all messiahs really seek: not the chance to serve.” And so it is here.
And they use the one thing from which all local news sources suffer: a lack of money.
Because the news outlets must come up with only 25% of the salary of the Report for America soldier at first, the bait goes down easily. But, if past is prologue, there’s a hook. As I’ve forecasted, there will be trade-offs like there were when Democrats allowed Zuckerberg’s “Zuck Bucks” to buy their way into local election offices before the 2020 elections. //
Their bias isn’t in favor of objectivity or what we used to know as media fairness; it goes only one way. Their goal is to achieve political objectives, which they frame as the only true “democracy.” The term is being redefined in real-time.
Washington Post columnist Perry Bacon, Jr. in a Washington Post piece called “The rise of pro-democracy media” claims that “America’s news media is increasingly covering the growing radicalism of the Republican Party and its democracy-eroding behavior.” [emphasis added]
Canadian lawyer and popular YouTuber David Freihart has a term for that. He calls it “confession through projection.”
Now, what is this “democracy-eroding behavior”?
Well, coincidentally, it turns out that “democracy” is what the Left wants! This appears to be the destruction of norms, voting sanctity, borders, traditions, institutions, faith, the individual, the Constitution, and objective truth. For the moment, it is, Bacon claims, the “questioning of election results, targeting of election officials and push to ban discussions of race relations in schools [critical race theory, DEI] … and support for voting restrictions as the dangers to democracy that they are.”
The “pro-democracy” news media, Bacon says, is therefore no longer wasting time doing “a problematic ‘both sides’ approach to covering politics.” He says that the media could dispense with that “after Donald Trump became president,” because he claimed, reporters “couldn’t avoid covering him very negatively.” //
I have no doubt that some good coverage will come from this program, but let’s not kid ourselves; don’t expect any reportage on the “under-covered” areas of any western faith, preserving private property rights, border security, the U.S. Constitution, how farmers use water to grow food for the world, heroism, or individual freedom.
The erosion of trust in the Fourth Estate has been coming for a while as the mainstream media adopted a change in the way it does business.
A man in Hong Kong was assaulted by angry fans after shouting out spoilers to people lining up outside a cinema to see “Avengers: Endgame,” according to multiple reports.
According to Deadline, which cited reports in Taiwanese media, the unidentified man shouted major aspects of the plot at the fans before he was attacked.
while the city DOE says all families who have requested devices for remote learning have gotten them, the parents who are suing in Manhattan Supreme Court say poor kids and those who don’t speak English are still not getting “free and reliable Internet service or reliable, working iPads and laptops.”
“Untold numbers of low-income students, and especially low-income students of color, in New York City have been deprived and continue to be deprived, of the sound basic education that is their right,” the group of anonymous parents claim in the litigation.
Some of the children whose parents are fighting in court did not receive any devices for months into remote learning, according to the court papers. //
A July audit by the City Comptroller’s office found that as of March, the DOE was still reviewing 19,425 student requests for tablets, 16,000 of which dated to 2020, while 3,045 students were mistakenly sent more than one remote learning device.
The city has handed out more than 650,000 Internet enabled devices and more than 27,000 hot spots, and schools have bought more than 400,000 devices, said a DOE spokeswoman who called the city’s distribution of remote learning devices “robust.”
Unlearning money avoidance is hard. Don't waste time on regrets.
When you stumble — and we all do — Brewer says it's important to lead with curiosity, not criticism, because the latter option isn't productive.
Instead of falling into a pattern of self-judgment with constant "review and regret" every time you impulse-shop or avoid the utility bill, Brewer suggests approaching mistakes with a growth mindset. What could you learn from your misstep? What is it telling you?
What Jan. 6 showed us is that democracy really is delicate and bringing it to the brink has consequences.
Cable news anchors and other journalists in Washington act like that’s a truism only one side needs to hear and it’s not theirs, but the opposite is true.
History didn’t start on Jan. 6. The riot did not happen in a vacuum. And what preceded it wasn’t just Donald Trump telling his supporters that the election was rigged. It was months of discord and discontent instigated and inflamed by the very media who now swear that they’re the ones who understand just how sensitive our self-governance can be. //
Yeah, the riot in the Capitol building was disgusting and inexcusable. But in American democracy, recognizing the disgusting and inexcusable is supposed to go both ways. When it doesn’t, there are consequences.
Everyone has their breaking point. That’s not something that’s going to be only afforded to one side. Unfortunately, the media don’t want to learn that lesson of Jan. 6.
As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s January 6 Select Committee plans its colonoscopy-like partisan investigation, few have been held to account for the violent riots that laid waste to a once vibrant, dynamic Minneapolis and many other cities. According to the Major Cities Chiefs Association report in 2020, an estimated 574 violent riots took place in the weeks after Minneapolis burned, resulting in damage of up to $2 billion.
Pelosi made sure the capital was locked down and surrounded by the National Guard and coils of concertina wire, city leaders and governors left citizens at the mercy of thugs hurling Molotov cocktails, helpless as their homes and businesses burned to the ground.
America’s preeminent revisionist historian Nikole Hannah-Jones perfectly encapsulated the elitist mentality in a June 2020 CBS interview: “Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man’s neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence.” //
In his Tuesday op-ed, Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson wrote, “What happened last Jan. 6 was much bigger and more important than politics.” Of course it was, because it was about the elitist political and corporate media establishment. They continue to inflate the severity and lasting effects of the Jan. 6 riot because they have an outsized idea of their own influence and importance. The disparity of concern and reaction is telling: when their lives are inconvenienced, it’s a national disaster; when our lives are destroyed, they hand us a shovel.
Any suggestion of a threat to America’s credentialed class is presented as an affront to democracy and a sin equal to the worst treason in our nation’s history. Meanwhile, the destruction of dozens of cities and thousands of lives in middle America has been accepted as a necessary airing of grievances, a reactionary event in the name of social justice that inflicted pain on those who probably deserved it anyway.
It is an iteration of the divide between those who see themselves as rulers and the people over which they rule. It extends from the leftist media that needs to perpetuate democracy’s threat to fight off the ratings implosion since President Trump left office, to sanctimonious politicians who view the public as nothing more than the masked, faceless unwashed who should be grateful that the 2020 riots exposed their racist ways and now can correct them.
Have Democrats found the issue on which they can break what’s left of Senate traditions and parlay a 50-50 split into partisan domination? It’s far from clear that anything will be enough to move the two recalcitrant members of their caucus — Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., — to change their minds about voting to change the chamber’s rules that require a majority of 60 in order to invoke cloture and end filibusters. But if anything will do it, it might be the claim that passing their game-changing federal voting rights bill is the only way to defend American democracy against Republican insurrectionists. //
with their ambitious spending plans blocked, Democrats are pivoting in the new year to a renewed effort to pass something that is likely even dearer to the hearts of their left-wing base: changing voting laws to make it easier for Democrats to win elections. They are tying the “nuclear option” on the filibuster and passage of voting bills to their attempt to turn the one-year anniversary of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot into a festival aimed at demonizing all Republicans as “insurrectionist” traitors who present a threat to democracy.
With their cheering section in the corporate media treating “Insurrection Day” observances as if it were a new national holiday and more important than 9/11, they’ve created more leverage that could shift their two holdouts. If it does, that would allow Vice President Kamala Harris’ tie-breaking vote to transform the electoral landscape in a manner that will end federalism for all intents and purposes and give federal bureaucrats unprecedented power to help Democrats win elections.
Our national elite is united enough to have the vices of a ruling class, but not the virtues. In particular, they are cohesive enough to be perceived as oppressive by much of the populace, but they are rarely gracious and conciliatory when needed. They know how to make enemies, but not friends.
Culturally and ideologically, America’s elites have consolidated into a regime, with Big Tech, the legacy media, academia, Big Business, the entertainment industry, and, of course, the leaders of the Democratic Party, all singing from the same hymnal, even if they sometimes squabble over the key. But many citizens refuse to join in. //
The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).
But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class. //
But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class. //
The regime has similarly decreed that racists — by which they mean anyone who won’t repeat the dogmas of critical race theory and “anti-racist” hucksters like Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo — should be suppressed throughout public education, academia, and even the business world. Similar trends abound throughout the centers of entertainment, finance, culture, and even the newly woke military.
There is nothing democratic about this. Indeed, it is the elites who threaten our democracy, such as when corporate media colluded with Big Tech to censor accurate reporting about Biden family scandals, or Big Business imposes economic sanctions on red states over everything from election laws to LGBT issues. The hypocrisy of it all rankles.
Woke capital’s CEOs wave rainbow flags and Black Lives Matter banners at home while using slave labor abroad. Democrats and supposed policy experts pushing to ban misinformation are often leading disseminators of it, from the Russian collusion hoax to the dismissal of the lab-leak theory of COVID-19’s origin. //
Elites are inevitable; their legitimacy and continuity is not. Ours lack the virtue and wisdom needed for good governance and leadership. Instead of expertise, they offer incompetence, malice, and herd-like conformity to self-serving ideological fads. Hopefully, political defeat and cultural failure will force a reckoning.
Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York’s Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps
Oh, and about our "Virginia" reference in the headline. Most readers will know what we're talking about. For those who don't, and for those who might enjoy re-reading it, here's a link to the Newseum's posting of the New York Sun's 1897 editorial known as "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."
word is that they finally awarded their first contract for the tests yesterday. They still don’t have the website through which you could order the tests ready yet, and the tests wouldn’t be available to be shipped to people for several more weeks yet, according to White House officials. Then the 500 million tests wouldn’t all be available at once — when tests become available. They’ll be doled out over months. This means they’ll basically be out of tests quickly, and then doled out with an eyedropper afterward because 500 million for the whole country isn’t much of anything.
Translation? If you care about tests, you’re not going to get any real solutions from Joe Biden. So, this sounds like it’s going to continue to be a problem, especially for schools and/or businesses who may require testing, if you can’t find the tests.
The thing that gets me about all this is that they’ve had months to work this out and still haven’t figured it out.
Think about this for a moment. President Donald Trump was able to get multiple vaccines developed, up, and ready for distribution in record time from March to December of 2020 — a feat that usually takes years — through a unique private-public partnership.
Joe Biden can’t even get a test distribution plan together for tests that have been long developed in more time, despite promising more testing before he came in.
You can’t learn from your experiences if you can’t remember them in some capacity. As a child, you may have burned your hand by touching a hot lightbulb, or ran too fast down a hill and fell hard after you tripped over your own feet. These experiences teach you simple lessons. Don’t touch a hot lightbulb, and pace yourself when moving quickly down a hill.
Human collective experience is just like that. It’s imperative that we remember the mistakes we make in the past in order to avoid making them again.
In fact, one of the most important lessons we’ve learned is about this lesson in particular, and it was best put by George Santayana when he said “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” //
You’ve likely noticed the deletion of various parts of our history, or at the very least, the attempt at completely rewriting it. For instance, the “1619 Project” is an attempt at reimagining the history of the United States with more of a focus on slavery than every other aspect of our story that brought this nation to what it is today. If the people who push this monstrosity were given their way, they would actually achieve the opposite of raising awareness about the evils of slavery and racism.
The founding fathers created their nation in a time when slavery was so embedded into culture that it would have killed it if they had immediately done away with it, but they, being men who truly believed in freedom and opportunity for all, set things in motion that would slowly poison slavery to death and eventually see the nation cast it off. To be sure, it’s a moment that came to fruition under President Abraham Lincoln, who later said that he was finishing what the founders had started.
https://redstate.com/brandon_morse/2020/07/02/lincoln-debunked-dems-n245192 //
Perhaps it won’t take well, but future generations will be so far removed from the concept because we’ve taken the lessons out of the picture by completely stripping it from other forms of media.
In other words, we lose the lesson. We have nothing to learn from, and thus no one should be surprised when, at some point in the future, repeating the sin becomes a reality.
That slavery is a sin needs to stay right where it is. Moreover, how we dealt with that sin in the past also needs to stay fully intact.
We as a nation eliminated a great evil and at great cost, and that should never be forgotten. We should never forget why we eliminated it too.
The temperatures measured where the oxidizer enters the vehicle at an umbilical connection were about four degrees Rankine or Fahrenheit too high. “The requirement is about 169.1 Rankine, that’s -290.57 degrees Fahrenheit, so we didn’t quite get there on Monday,” Bassler explained. “What we saw at the temperature for the interface to the Core Stage was 173 Rankine, which is -286.67 degrees Fahrenheit.”
A slow flow rate of propellant chills down the facility and vehicle lines to start the loading process, so they aren’t shocked by the sharp, several-hundred degree drop in their temperature. Normally after the chilldown phase, the loading transitions to a slow fill phase, which is at a higher flow rate, and then a fast fill phase to load the propellant tank to the top.
The concern with the warmer propellant in the early phases of loading is geysering. “The thing that the team is trying to protect in the [temperature] limits that got tripped are relative to the concern of developing a gas bubble in [a] feedline,” SLS Program Manager John Honeycutt said. “[A bubble] could end up collapsing and then you could have quite a bit of energy released when the liquid oxygen above that bubble could release and fall back down the feedline.”
Tracon and Tracon II are two classic ATC games from Wesson, years before their efforts culminated in Tower. The description at MobyGames says it all about this pair of pioneers in aviation software: //
This game has been set up to work on modern Windows (10/8/7/Vista/XP 64/32-bit) computers without problems. Please choose Download - Easy Setup (1.82 MB).
"The last star will slowly cool and fade away. With its passing, the Universe will become once more a void, without light or life or meaning."
So warned the physicist Brian Cox in the recent BBC series Universe. The fading of that last star will only be the beginning of an infinitely long, dark epoch. All matter will eventually be consumed by monstrous black holes, which in their turn will evaporate away into the dimmest glimmers of light. //
let's take a look at how "material" – physical matter – first came about. If we are aiming to explain the origins of stable matter made of atoms or molecules, there was certainly none of that around at the Big Bang – nor for hundreds of thousands of years afterwards.
“One of the implications of being such a coal-dependent state is that when those coal plants retire, it presents a whole host of opportunities for new generation for utilities,” Jesse Kharbanda, executive director of the Hoosier Environmental Council, told Grist. “Utilities simply need to find a way to replace the 9,000 megawatts of predominantly coal-fired power that has been retired over the last 15 years. They have come to the conclusion that they’re better off investing in renewables and gas.”
For the small rural counties playing host to these new solar facilities, it often simply comes down to the money. That was the case with the Mammoth Solar facility in Starke and Pulaski counties. The tax revenue from the 1.65-gigawatt project will account for nearly one-fifth of each of their annual budgets. And for many landowners, the payments they will receive from Doral Renewables will be more than they make farming the land or leasing it themselves. Landowners can expect to receive between $600 and $1,000 per acre per year that they lease out for solar panels.