The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Biden and Trump in Wonderland Where's Lewis Carroll when we need him? DONALD JEFFRIES Donald Trump has been indicted yet again, this time for “attempting to overturn the results” of the 2020 election. This is an odd way to describe whining and complaining, interspersed with fragments of the plentiful evidence of massive vote fraud. Basically, he is going to be prosecuted for claiming he was unfairly denied a victory. The “Woke” Democrats have already all but outlawed any complaints about the 2020 election. The 2016 election? Sure, bitch all you want- Russia helped the Giant Orange Man beat our beloved Hillary. And Hillary, like Stacy Abramson and other prominent Democrats, can continue to publicly allege that  they  were robbed at the polls. Those kinds of allegations just can’t be made by Trump, or one of his endless series of subpar lawyers. Or any of the millions of followers who remain inexplicably loyal to him.  Those  allegations land you behind bars, wh...

  Men giving birth – how and why? By Roger Watson MEN can have babies. That is a truth so universally acknowledged that to say otherwise is to be branded a transphobe or even a TERF, a ‘trans exclusionary radical feminist’. Men can probably be TERFs too – I’ll need to check the MANual. Enough of that; there is a very serious side to all this. Last year the guidance given to midwifery students at a Scottish university was that some transgender birth-giving men (i.e. women) could still have  intact male reproductive organs . Shurely shome mishtake, Mish Moneypenny! A transgender man (i.e. a woman) does not and never has had intact male reproductive organs. While the midwifery lecturer (of unspecified gender) was clearly confused about male and female reproductive anatomy, the student midwives were not and leaked the guidance to the press. The guidance was later amended to say that ‘some men could give birth through a surgically constructed penis’. At this point words fail the fa...

 

 Thanks to MrZ for recommending this article... Vacation Autopsy by John Steppling  There’s something about a mass-market Luxury Cruise that’s unbearably sad. Like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex in its causes yet simple in its effect: on board the Nadir (especially at night, when all the ship’s structured fun and reassurances and gaiety ceased) I felt despair. — David Foster Wallace,  A Supposedly Fun Thing I will Never do Again , 1997 Leop­ards break in­to the tem­ple and drink all the sac­ri­fi­cial ves­sels dry; it keeps hap­pen­ing; in the end, it can be cal­cu­lat­ed in ad­vance and is in­cor­po­rat­ed in­to the rit­ual. — Franz Kafka,  The Zürau Aphorisms , 1931 This will constitute my end of summer report. Not that anyone commissioned an end of summer report, or even that there really is something called an end of summer report. But as an American in Norway, I have had to adjust (more than even in France) to this idea of an...

  Aliens are big in the news recently, fueled by congressional hearings about unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), formally known as UFOs. But while the idea of aliens visiting Earth may be exciting, the better bet is still the idea that aliens might exist on distant worlds. We already know potentially habitable planets are common and intelligent life has arisen on at least one world, so why not many? But after 60 years of searching for evidence of extraterrestrials "out there," we've found nothing. So what does that tell us? Although it seems odd at first blush, an absence of evidence can tell us things about the universe. Given the fact that we have found no definitive technological radio signals from an   alien civilization , we can't simply conclude that they don't exist. But a prolonged silence after decades of study does tell us something about the likelihood of   aliens , or at least the chances of us finding them. That's the focus of a new study in...

 The previous post! The AP 1000 Vogtle Unit 3 reactor in Georgia, 16 years in the making, became officially operational this week after several technical setbacks earlier this year had caused it to start up and power down again. The moment of commercial operation has been heralded in headlines and by the nuclear industry as a “milestone” but the   Financial Times   predicts that while Vogtle 3 may be the “first new US nuclear reactor in three decades” it also “may be its last”. The reactor came in seven years later than originally predicted and vastly over-budget. A second reactor, Vogtle 4, is expected to start commercial operation in 2024, but the total price tag for the two reactors is currently predicted to be $35 billion and could well climb higher. But, as the   Atlanta Journal-Constitution   reported, “Georgia Power ratepayers have already been paying for the two units in their monthly bills for years.” And, added the article, “Now that Unit 3 is complete...