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Washington, D.C., is my least favorite city in the world. I see all these unbelievable monuments to government, agencies that have no reason for being on the planet — the Department of Agriculture, Transportation, FEMA, Health, Education, Commerce — all these huge erections of brick and mortar and masses of people running around redistributing wealth. The whole thing drives me absolutely into a freaking funk.
— Scott McNealy
Reading Time: 4 minutes 45 seconds
Today is Tuesday, September 27th, the 270th day of 2022. There are 95 days left in the year. It is Ancestor Appreciation Day, National Chocolate Milk Day, National Corned Beef Hash Day, and World Tourism Day.
On This Day
In 1777, Lancaster, Pennsylvania became the capital of the United States for one day after Congress evacuated Philadelphia.
In 1854, the steamship SS Arctic, making its way from New York City from Liverpool, collided in fog with the French steamer Vesta. More than 300 people perished.
In 1908, production of the Model T began at Ford’s Piquette Avenue Plant in Detroit.
In 1938, comedian Bob Hope premiered a new song, “Thanks for the Memory,” on his eponymous NBC radio show.
In 1940, the Tripartite Pact was signed in Berlin by Germany, Japan, and Italy.
In 1956, U.S. Air Force Captain Milburn G. Apt became the first person to exceed Mach 3. Shortly thereafter, his Bell X-2 spun out of control, and Apt was killed.
In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring. A wildly inaccurate screed against pesticides, the book helped spark the “environmental” movement, and contributed to the banning of DDT, which cost millions of lives around the world.
In 1996, the Battle of Kabul ended in a Taliban victory, and the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan was established.
In 2012, in Minneapolis, a gunman shot seven people, killing five, and then killed himself.
In 2020, Azerbaijan launched an offensive against the self-proclaimed Republic of Artsakh, inhabited predominantly by ethnic Armenians.
Today’s Birthdays
Baseball Hall of Famer Mike Schmidt is 73. Comedian and actor Marc Maron is 59. Actress and dingbat Gwyneth Paltrow is 50. Singer-songwriter Avril Lavigne is 38.
The Links
Christian Nationalism Is Bad. Green Apocalypticism Is Worse. (D. Dowd Muska)
“[W]hite evangelicals, 14 percent of the respondents, are far outnumbered by the religiously unaffiliated or ‘nones’ — 23 percent. In fact, the ‘nones’ now outnumber white mainline protestants (16 percent) and white Catholics (12 percent).”
When Did Trump Change His Mind about Lockdowns? (Brownstone Institute)
“And so the country locked down. Not that Trump had the legal power to do this but, based on his own words, he believed he did. The administrative state — the unelected machinery that surrounded him and had plotted this caper all along — made it so, with only South Dakota resisting all lockdowns.”
Hey, Covidian! Leave Those Kids Alone (The Daily Sceptic)
“Could it be that the common thread which connects all the headline-followers, the unquestioning, the frighteningly readily compliant, is a lack of something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives? Might there be a link between the modern world’s malaise, the tragic lack of connection and community, and a very public hankering after connection and community? You don’t know your neighbour, you’re not invested in your town, you couldn’t possibly overcome the awkwardness involved in helping the elderly lady down the road — why not get your phone out instead to prove how good you are at Joining In and Helping Out?”
Greenwald: ‘Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition’ (JusttheNews.com)
“I can’t stress this enough: at its core, Democratic politics is about criminalizing opposition to their party and ideology. Dissenting ideas are ‘disinformation’ and must be censored by Big Tech. Trump voters are inherently criminal (‘insurrectionists’) and should be imprisoned.”
Zoomers Have Made Peace With Constant Surveillance, And It’s Scary (The Federalist)
“We know Big Brother doesn’t have the people’s best interests at heart. That’s why our founders came up with this whole idea of limited government in the first place. It’s disturbing to know that America’s young people are willing to just accept — even happily — that the government is watching their every post, like, purchase, and search.”
The United States exported record amounts of petroleum products in the first half of 2022 (U.S. Energy Information Administration)
“U.S. motor gasoline exports increased by 11% (89,000 b/d) to reach a record of 910,000 b/d for the first half of 2022. U.S. jet fuel exports more than doubled in the first half 2022 compared with the same period last year.”
Sun So Hot .... Froze To Death (Tony Heller)
“Fifty years ago flooding in Pakistan was blamed on global cooling, but now it is blamed on global warming.”
Fossil Fuels Are the Greenest of Energy Sources (CO2 Coalition)
“One researcher found that global leaf area had increased by 5.4 million square kilometers between 2000–2017, an area equivalent to the Amazon rain forest. Another reported global tree cover had grown by 2.24 million square kilometers from 1982–2016 through reforestation of former agricultural lands rendered surplus by improved farm productivity and of former deserts.”
What Happened To The Ice-Free Arctic? (NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT)
“(Answers tomorrow!!)”
The Future of Urban Work (Randal O’Toole)
“In short, many of these cities may have attracted more members of the creative class, but that only set them up for a fall when the pandemic led many of these people to work at home and some of them to move their homes to suburbs and smaller cities.”
Ask a Pro-Life Atheist: Kelsey Hazzard (Secular Pro-Life)
“As atheists become more prominent in the pro-life movement generally, we’re excited for the opportunity to share their stories. Starting us off is none other than our founder and board president, Kelsey Hazzard.”
Elon Musk: Starship rocket “highly likely” to fly in November (Freethink)
“Because the Starship rocket is also designed to be refueled in space, it could potentially move huge payloads across the solar system, too — we could send armies of rovers to distant planets or people and equipment to Mars to establish human colonies.”
DART collides with asteroid in planetary defense test (SpaceNews)
“When it comes to the collision between DART and Dimorphos, said Chabot, ‘the spacecraft is going to lose.’”
When an eminent scholar relies on a straw man (Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft)
“Mead does not want American Jews to be blamed for whatever Israel does, and he certainly is right that such an attribution of blame would be unwarranted. But he does not seem to have any compunction about blaming Americans who talk about the Israel lobby for whatever antisemitism exists. And this attribution of blame is just as unwarranted as the other one.”
Should America Go All In on Ukraine? (The American Conservative)
“It’s deeply irresponsible not to try for diplomacy when the stakes are so high. As Max Boot’s Washington Post colleague David Ignatius urges in his latest column, the administration should ‘study the Cuban missile crisis’ for lessons on Ukraine. But as we have discussed, the key lesson of that crisis was to eschew hawkish military advice and pursue a compromise behind the scenes. Rather than attempting that, we keep dismissing Moscow’s security concerns as overblown, invalid, or a mere pretext for military aggression. Russia was similarly dismissive of our security concerns at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Fortunately, our leaders in 1962 kept trying for a diplomatic solution and found a creative way to make a deal.”
Your Turn
1. Are lockdowners people without “something raw, true, local, deep and meaningful in their lives”?
2. What’s your ancestry?
3. Why didn’t the federal government begin to do serious work on asteroid defense decades ago?
4. Ever been to Lancaster, Pennsylvania?
5. How does the Ukraine mess end?
Mitosis,
Has pinched off a daughter,
A local (Corrales) blog,
Perhaps not as locally focused,
As the Daily Blast mother blog.
Glen Greenwald's article shows a way,
Out of Polarization,
Which happens to be
A necessary part of . . .
Mitosis
1. Yes. They need to turn off t.v. and go outside. The madness and stupidity needs to stop. It should have never started to begin with.
2. Ireland and Spain
3. Because the government is too busy researching things that don't matter.
4. No.
5. I don't know. But I think we need to stop giving money to their government and stay out of it.