Let’s Review 109: Snoops, Banners, and Civil War Enemies

James Bond’s Tactics for Figuring Out If Someone’s Been Snooping in Your Room  “Doing all this, inspecting these minute burglar-alarms, did not make him feel foolish or self-conscious. He was a secret agent, and still alive thanks to his exact attention to the detail of his profession. Routine precautions were to him no more unreasonable than they would be to a deep-sea diver or a test pilot, or to any man earning danger-money. Satisfied that his room had not been searched while he was at the casino, Bond undressed and took a cold shower.” —Casino Royale, by Ian Fleming

 San Francisco Bans Everything    The straw ban was the brainchild of Supervisor Katy Tang. Katy was excused from the straw vote because she had to take her bar exam. She had previously won a proposal to ban sales of fur coats. In her press release, Katy noted that “fur farming contributes to water and air pollution” because each mink produces “44 pounds of feces in the mink’s lifetime.” The press release doesn’t state how many pounds the Board of Supervisors produces a year. Or how much the homeless population that San Francisco’s insane government has cultivated does.

The Hunt for Earth’s Deep Hidden Oceans     This hydrous mineral isn’t wet. But when it melts, out spills water. The discovery was the first direct proof that water-rich minerals exist this deep, between 410 and 660 kilometers down, in a region called the transition zone, sandwiched between the upper and lower mantles.

Leave the shirako, take the cannoli: Shirako – Gastro Obscura Creamy, briny, and filled with sperm, shirako is the sort of seafood delicacy that some folks prefer to savor before they learn of its provenance. But dishes featuring these sperm sacs of fish, also known as milt, sell for a pretty penny when they’re in season in Japan.

Crime without punishment :   My first shocking discovery about the “modern” liberal is, that while he might give lip-service still to some “antiquated” ideals, and gratuitously pose as virtuous, his first instinct when faced with serious responsibility was to cut and run. My second was to find that he was now brainwashed by ideologies and slogans; that it was impossible to argue with him from reason or fact; that faced with any difficulty he would present himself as the helpless victim of forces he would not even try to define coherently. My third was the discovery that he was now, instinctively, on the side of the criminal; that he identified with the lawless; that he admired “the transgressive,” trespass, violation.

The Eternal Poor Sports: Democrats Pull Out of Annual Softball Game with Republicans

The Commerce Department reported today that more Americans than ever went to work in July, and that unemployment hit a historic low. The latest jobs report virtually dooms President Trump’s Republicans in the 2018 mid-term elections, because Trump’s son, Donald Jr., met with Russians, his former campaign chief, Paul Manafort, bought an ostrich coat, and the president won’t apologize to CNN reporter Jim Acosta for calling the news media “the enemy of the people.”

This isn’t a culture war. It’s worse. Culture has nothing to do with it. It’s war on normality by Brownshirts, incited or paid for by the likes of George Soros and Tom Steyer. It has now graduated from street-fighting to trying to take down the U.S. government.

Modern anthropology — now the various “Studies” — is useless, because they’ve gone all-in on relativism.   Everything is a “social construction” to these folks, which makes not just anthropology, but the humanities in general, worthless.  What could, say, the Ancient Greeks have to teach us, other than the self-evident fact that it’s possible to “construct” a society in the way they did?

Bill Kristol, Hedgehog King Remember when Bill Kristol said the Iraq War would last two months? It (officially) lasted nine years and cost Americans more than $2 trillion—and we’re still there. How about when Kristol boldly stated that Barack Obama wouldn’t win a single primary against Hillary Clinton? Or when he claimed Iraq was “not in a civil war?” What about when he predicted that 1993 would be the “high water-mark” for the gay-rights movement?