Category: Knowledge and News
“Ancient pathogens released from melting ice could wreak havoc on the world, new analysis reveals” — Didn’t John Carpenter already cover this?
“Estimates suggest we can expect four sextillion (4,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) microorganisms to be released from ice melt each year. This is about the same as the estimated number of stars in the universe.”
In Tennessee, apparently. Tennessee had 34 deadly crashes per 100,000 people in 2021, compared to the national average of 12 per 100,000.
That state produced four of the twenty worst cities, including the very worst.
“The study by ConsumerAffairs reviewed crash data from the U.S. Department of Transportation and information included in the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration’s Fatality Analysis Reporting System. The site then ranked cities based on four factors: crash fatalities per 100,000 people, the number of fatalities (per 100,000 people) due to bad driving, positive blood alcohol content, and speeding. “Bad driving” included driving the wrong way in one-way traffic; failing to yield; aggressive and careless driving; making an improper turn; following improperly; inexperience operating; passing where prohibited; and improper or erratic lane changing.”
Green Bay, Wisconsin represented America’s best drivers!
The state of California managed to get two cities in the bottom ten and two in the top ten!
In related news, New Hampshire was deemed to have the best roads in America, while California had the worst.
“This is no joke. This is for real,” Burger King said in a Sunday social media post.
If they commit suicide, he’ll teach them a lesson!
Obviously one cannot punish somebody for having committed suicide, so Kim Jong Un has declared that he will punish any local authorities unable to reduce the suicide rates in their domains.
“Kim Jong Un characterized suicide as an ‘act of treason against socialism‘ in the directive and emphasized that local government officials would be held responsible for failing to prevent such incidents within their jurisdictions.”
“We might have accidentally killed the only life we ever found on Mars nearly 50 years ago”
Oopsy-daisy!
Fortunately, Kim Jong Un has ordered the indigenous organic compounds back to life, so it’s all good.
They have rejected Biden’s plan to forgive some student loan debt, saying that he exceeded his authority.
I have mixed feelings about this one.
I think Biden did exceed his authority. One man should not, with a stroke of the pen, be able to throw away hundreds of billions of dollars owed to the government of the USA. That should be the job of Congress. Biden’s claim to that authority was based on an overly broad interpretation of the HEROES Act.
Moreover, he made an end-run around the Constitution. Both houses of Congress voted to cancel Biden’s decision, but he had the power to veto their decision. Nevertheless, it is clear that Congress does not approve that forgiveness, and it should be their decision. Using this process, the President could declare any executive action he cared to, and no action of Congress could prevent him from doing so as long as he had enough votes in either house of Congress to avoid an override of his veto. This would mean that American policy would be made by a third of one house of Congress (plus one vote), since it takes 2/3 of both houses to override a veto. This is not the way laws should be made, and only the Supreme Court has the authority to settle that question, as they did.
To illustrate: If Trump regains power, he might declare an end to Obamacare by executive action. Congress would likely bristle at this blatant usurpation of their authority, and reinstate it, but Trump would veto, and would need only 146 members of the House on his side to win the day (the House needs a 290-145 vote to override a veto). That would hold true even if his veto were overridden 100-0 in the Senate. As we know from experience, it would not be difficult for Trump to find 146 blind loyalists in the House. The only remedy would be to take the case to court, where the Supremes would rule (I presume) that the president had usurped the authority of Congress, precisely the same ruling they made in this case.
I think the court took a sensible position on the merits of the case.
Standing, on the other hand, is a separate matter. It seems to me that the plantiffs in this case really had no valid standing to sue, which was the (rejected) position of the administration’s lawyers.
I am neither a lawyer nor a constitutional scholar, but it seems to me that both sides had a case for plenty of legal nit-picking.
What about the policy itself? As a taxpayer, I found it ridiculous that a family making $249,000 a year should get relief on $10,000 in debt. Those suckers should have that much in their checking accounts, especially since they have not had to make a debt payment on that loan for the last several years! Perhaps some degree of debt relief is necessary, but if so, this particular scheme didn’t seem to be the solution.
This is not from The Onion. It’s a real headline from Newsweek.
To be fair, Newsweek is not your father’s Newsweek.
The WAPO featured this headline:
“State affirmative action bans helped White, Asian students, hurt others”
A quick look at the data indicates that the headline should read “State affirmative action bans helped White, Black, Asian students, hurt others.”
The headline does not say that, presumably because it is extremely inconvenient for the liberal narrative to admit that Black students do better in the states that ban affirmative action.
As you can see in WAPO’s own chart (below), the main beneficiaries of AA, by far, are Hispanics, who are brought from significant underrepresentation almost all the way to population parity by Affirmative Action.
If you want to design a program that benefits Hispanics, there’s a much easier and totally constitutional way: just give admissions preference to any student who is totally fluent in more than one language. If, on the other hand, you want to extend a helping hand to Black students, the great brains at Harvard and elsewhere should be able to create a system that works better than the existing Affirmative Action models, which don’t seem to have worked at all for that purpose.
(Note: black students are still dramatically underrepresented in both groups, with or without AA, when measured as a percent of the population. In other words, even those who actively seek diversity should realize that it was probably time to shelve the existing Affirmative Action programs and replace them with some new schemes. The Supreme Court’s action will apparently have a negative impact on Hispanic students, but not so much for other minorities, who have apparently not been helped significantly by any of the existing admission models, with or without AA.)
Following in the footsteps of their abortion decision, the Supreme Court again struck down decades of legal precedent.
Affirmative Action has essentially been ruled unconstitutional for determining college admissions – for both public and private universities.
This is a case where the court is in line with public opinion.
That decision leaves New Jersey as the only state without self-serve gas.
A historic total of 102 names will be on the ballot in the Toronto mayoralty election, including 101 humans.
I would go even farther than this guy.
Granted, I am a skeptical man, but here’s what I see:
- Prigozhin challenged Putin with an armed rebellion, but was allowed to re-settle in Belarus, with all charges dropped. (Oh, that Putin – always the forgiving guy!)
- Prigozhin is going to end up in Belarus, unpunished, not as a lonely exile, but with his mercenary army.
- The Wagner group potentially could have access to the nuclear weapons that Putin conveniently started moving there last week.
- It is only about 100 miles from Kyiv to the nearest point in Belarus.
All of the bullet-points above seem to be undisputed facts, yet few people seem to find that concatenation of circumstances to be alarming.
Add one more possibility. Russia and Belarus have been in talks to unite as a single country. Even if that does not happen, Belarus is just a vassal state, so as Putin sees it, Prigozhin is just in another part of his empire.
Some Ukrainians have noticed. One Ukrainian blogger wrote:
There will be a threat from the north. There is no need for “patriotic heroism,” but a sober approach to the current situation is needed. It was too easy for Putin and Prigozhin to reconcile. For Russia, a couple dozen corpses and five downed planes are a trifle when implementing a secret operation to “kindly” transfer Wagner specifically to Belarus. And think about why, under an agreement and “good will,” Prigozhin was sent specifically to Belarus and not to Africa or Syria, where Wagner has existing bases.
Another opined:
Even if there are only 15,000 mercenaries, in order to prevent any provocations on their part, we need to redeploy 5-6 brigades to the North. Under the conditions of the offensive in the South, this is a lot.
Silvio Berlusconi, former Italian leader and media tycoon, dies at 86.
He was the self-styled “Jesus Christ of politics,” which gives him about two more days until he holds his first post-mortem press conference.
They found, among other things, that “73 percent of wild male primates masturbated, but females lagged behind at 35 percent.”
“Trump, who first revealed the news earlier Thursday in a post on his Truth Social platform, faces seven counts, according to his lawyer and another source. The charges include false statements, conspiracy to obstruct and a charge related to the Espionage Act, sources said.”
Complete indictment here
Data published by the Pew Research Center in 2019 highlighted how federal prosecutors have a 99.6% conviction rate. This is true because federal prosecutors almost never file charges unless they have the accused dead to rights. That seems to be the case here as well. Given that the former President almost certainly did everything he is accused of, given that there is a mountain of testimony and physical evidence, and given that his own words have exacerbated his problems, his lawyers have a real challenge. What’s the defense? Most federal defendants (nearly 9 out of 10) plead out, but Trump is not one to negotiate a plea deal, so his lawyers will need to concoct some strategy as yet unforeseen.
Since a legal defense has not yet emerged, the Trump loyalists will undoubtedly try to muster a full-throated political defense. Don’t look for any of them to try to prove that Trump is innocent, although they may generalize that “he’s an innocent man” without taking any questions after making such a claim. They know what he did, and they know it was illegal. Instead, they will be screaming about the fact that the charges are politically motivated, and they will be creating a false equivalency to the Pence and Biden documents. Those red herrings will convince many in the general public that Trump is somehow being treated unfairly, but will not help him obtain a “not guilty” verdict. Even if it were true that the investigation was politically motivated, that argument is irrelevant in court, where the issues are (1) “which crimes is he accused of?” and (2) “did he actually commit them?”
What cracked up medieval peasants? Killer bunnies and poop jokes, apparently.
“Ford, the parent company of Lincoln, and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration are warning owners of nearly 143,000 Lincoln MKC compact SUVs to park them outside and away from buildings and other vehicles because they could potentially catch fire, even when not running.”
“They found those that were moderately sized and had more volume in the area above the nipples — called ‘upper pole fullness’ — scored highest.”
So, scientists finally devised a scheme to see their first breasts! In the 1980s, Golan and Globus would have acquired the rights to this story.