Archive for 2017

QUOTE OF THE DAY:

When you’ve dealt with Ted Williams and Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra and Stan Musial (Bunning faced “Stan the Man” in two all-star games), the people I’m dealing with now are kind of down the scale.

“Jim Bunning, RIP,” Power Line, today.

MY ADVICE WOULD BE, TO LOOK GOOD ON THE BEACH THIS SUMMER, START BACK IN JANUARY: Your Emergency Fitness Guide To Looking Good This Summer. I really intensified my workouts starting in February and I’ve lost about 10 pounds, though it’s mostly weight I gained while my Dad was in the hospital. But I think my overall body composition is better than it was. Don’t worry, though: No shirtless beach pics are forthcoming.

FRACKING CREATES JOBS EVEN WHERE THERE’S NO FRACKING: Sand industry back in business in western Wisconsin.

“The industry was fairly dormant for a while, but now it has reawakened,” Syverson said this month. “These mines are going full out again.”

Representatives of several companies with regional frac sand mining operations confirmed Syverson’s assessment.

“We are running pretty much full time, back to 24 hours a day,” said Sharon Masek, manager of mine planning and industrial relations for Superior Silica Sands in Wisconsin. “We’re pretty much back to our peak levels of employment.”

That means employment at Superior Silica’s five mines in Barron and Chippewa counties has reached close to 200, up from about 70 last year when two of the facilities operated part time and two were completely shut down, Masek said. The company, based in Fort Worth, Texas, is seeking to further boost its western Wisconsin workforce in the coming weeks.

Have you hugged a fracker today?

FLASHBACK: Elections Matter — Too Much. Including this Jerry Pournelle quote: “We have always known that eternal vigilance is the price of freedom. It’s worse now, because capture of government is so much more important than it once was. There was a time when there was enough freedom that it hardly mattered which brand of crooks ran government. That has not been true for a long time — not during most of your lifetimes, and for much of mine — and it will probably never be true again.”

AT INSTAPUNDIT, WE TAKE A FLOGGIN’ AND KEEP ON BLOGGIN’: Our power’s been out since a bit after 10 pm last night, thanks to a particularly intense thunderstorm, so we’re running on generator power. And our Comcast Internet went out a few hours ago, I guess after some router’s battery backup ran down, but we have backup Internet too. All to bring you the very best in blogging! Or, at least, blogging.

UPDATE: And now the power’s back, so it was about a 15-hour outage. The generator did a great job.

DISBANDED TERROR GROUP?: According to the BBC, surviving members of the Ansar al-Sharia terror group say their organization has disbanded. The announcement was made on-line.

Ansar al-Sharia was responsible for the September 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi.

Libya’s on-going civil war has been hard on Ansar al-Sharia murderers:

The Ansar al-Sharia group said that its leadership had been wiped out while fighting the Libya National Army.

Most of its members are thought to have defected to the Islamic State group.

So. Disbanded doesn’t mean the killers have disappeared. It looks like the survivors have migrated to another terrorist outfit and are still on the battlefield.

BACKGROUND: Libya’s continuing anarchy — a report dated May 25.

IF I WERE IN THEIR SITUATION, I MIGHT DO THE SAME: Hamptons bachelors are getting vasectomies so golddiggers can’t trap them.

When Scott, a male model who says he’s in his 30s, kicks off the Hamptons high season this weekend at his Sag Harbor waterfront house, the unattached hunk won’t have any reservations about hooking up with women he hardly knows.

“I had a vasectomy a few months ago. Having a house in the Hamptons and being fairly well-off, I’ve encountered some problems — women try to get pregnant,” said Scott, a regular on the society scene who earns a cool half-million a year.

He recalled sex partners who have lied to him about being on birth control. “It’s a trick. [They say] ‘I love you, [we] don’t need a condom.’ ”

Scott — who describes himself as “Tarzan with light eyes” — typically beds up to 10 different women per summer and estimates that 20 percent of the single ladies he encounters are looking to trap a rich guy with a baby.

The goal? At the very least: 18 to 21 years of child support and, in some instances, a green card for the mother, since their child would be born in the US.

Lying about birth control — the much-more-common female version of the latest panic-subject, “stealthing” — should be treated as sexual assault, they way they want to do with “stealthing.” I doubt this will happen, precisely because so many women do it.

ANN ALTHOUSE ON GIANFORTE AND BEN JACOBS:

Hamblin likes the idea of “redefining strength” by accepting, in the moment, that one has been “physically overpowered” and not getting caught up in “the idea of masculinity as an amalgam of dominance and violence.” Instead, Jacobs, speaking “as if narrating for the audio recorder,” said “You just body-slammed me and broke my glasses.” He also “started asking for names of witnesses to the assault who will be assets to his case as it plays out in courts of law and public opinion,” and reported the incident to the police.

Of course, Jacobs’s choices were not merely a matter of overcoming physical impulses and meritoriously eschewing violence. I don’t know how much of an impulse to retaliate on the spot he may have felt. I don’t really know how violently he was hit. I don’t even know if he did something first toward Gianforte and Gianforte was doing the old tit for tat retaliation. But narrating the audio, dropping it on line, going to the police, and taking names for litigation purposes is also a form of dominance. Some people would even call it violence. Why, here’s an article in The Atlantic from just last June: “Enforcing the Law Is Inherently Violent/A Yale law professor suggests that oft-ignored truth should inform debates about what statutes and regulations to codify.”

But personally, I’m now sufficiently woke to praise Gianforte for body-slamming rapist Ben Jacobs:

Thanks to male feminist Jordan Hoffman for enlightening me.

KOREA IS GETTING MORE INTERESTING. INTERESTING IS BAD. U.S. to deploy 3rd carrier group to deter North Korea. “The U.S. Navy has decided to deploy the USS Nimitz as a third carrier-led strike force to the western Pacific to increase pressure on North Korea to rein in its arms programs. Nimitz, one of the world’s largest warships, will join the USS Carl Vinson and USS Ronald Reagan there, sources close to the U.S. military said May 26. It is rare for the U.S. Navy to deploy three aircraft carriers to the same region at the same time. This latest decision means that three of the U.S. Navy’s 11 aircraft carriers will be deployed in the western Pacific.” Thanks to Michael Yon for emailing the link.