Stuck In The Middle With ONT

Welcome to Thursday night! So, start with a question: What could you say or do to make your dad call you immediately?

Paging Dr. Welby, Paging Dr. Marcus Welby

'A Failed Medical School': How Racial Preferences, Supposedly Outlawed in California, Have Persisted at UCLA

One professor said that a student in the operating room could not identify a major artery when asked, then berated the professor for putting her on the spot. Another said that students at the end of their clinical rotations don't know basic lab tests and, in some cases, are unable to present patients. "I don't know how some of these students are going to be junior doctors," the professor said. "Faculty are seeing a shocking decline in knowledge of medical students." And for those who've seen the competency crisis up close, double standards in admissions are a big part of the problem. "All the normal criteria for getting into medical school only apply to people of certain races," an admissions officer said. "For other people, those criteria are completely disregarded."

DEI is no longer a stupid leftist thing, or something we can laugh at and not be too inconvenienced. Now it's manifesting with deadly results. It needs to be re-branded DIE.

Good Riddance

The ‘Butcher of Tehran’ Meets a Mountain

Thirty-five years after taking part in the massacre of thousands, President Ebrahim Raisi’s helicopter went down over a mountain. Inside the chopper was the body of the man viewed as the likely future Supreme Leader of Iran along with his Foreign Minister and various other officials of the Islamic terrorist regime.

The Iranian people celebrated the death of the man known as the ‘Butcher of Tehran’ with fireworks and dances. Many of those celebrating were the women whom he had tormented for so long.

President Raisi was said to have harbored a special hatred for women and he has been held responsible for everything from prison rapes to the torture of pregnant women. The cleric and former prosecutor had overseen the brutal suppression of human rights protests against the Islamic regime as part of a record of his crimes against humanity going back to the 1980s.

Inshallah.

Dance Break

A Great American

Augustus Wilson's obituary

Mr. and Mrs, Priest near Chambersville bought one of Mr. Wilson's farms, paying some money down – and giving a mortgage on the rest – soon after the transaction Mr. Priest died leaving Mrs. Priest with four small children and the mortgage – she was trying desperately to keep the payments up – one day she was washing clothes at the back of the house when Uncle Gus walked up – after a brief conversation Mrs. Priest said "Mr. Wilson, the next payment on the land will be due in about 10 days and I think I'll be able to meet it." Mr. Wilson said, "I did not stop by for any payment, I stopped by for a drink of water". Mrs. Priest said, "I'll get you a drink" and Mr. Wilson said, "No, you go on with your washing – I'll get it I know where it is" so he went into the kitchen for a drink. When the noon-hour came Mrs. Priest went in to prepare lunch and when she turned over a plate on the table – she found the mortgage marked "paid in full" – all payments cancelled out.

I say “We used to be a great country” jokingly a lot, but damn it, we used to be a great country. More stories about this old school Texas character at the link.

Advice Column

Advice for a Happy Life by Charles Murray

Start by jarring yourself out of unreflective atheism or agnosticism. A good way to do that is to read about contemporary cosmology. The universe isn't only stranger than we knew; it is stranger and vastly more unlikely than we could have imagined, and we aren't even close to discovering its last mysteries. That reading won't lead you to religion, but it may stop you from being unreflective.

Find ways to put yourself around people who are profoundly religious. You will encounter individuals whose intelligence, judgment and critical faculties are as impressive as those of your smartest atheist friends—and who also possess a disquieting confidence in an underlying reality behind the many religious dogmas.

They have learned to reconcile faith and reason, yes, but beyond that, they persuasively convey ways of knowing that transcend intellectual understanding. They exhibit in their own personae a kind of wisdom that goes beyond just having intelligence and good judgment.

Some good advice at the link. You may not agree with all of it, but you'll agree with some of it.

Where So, So Many Men Have Gone Before

Hollywood Is Rebooting ‘Star Trek’ Film Franchise … Again

And does America really want a fourth Star Trek franchise in nearly as many decades? The problem with the attempts to reboot this series is that none of the later actors can hold a candle to the icons that made up the original cast. William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and the rest looked like people who should be on the big screen — they are movie stars. The Next Generation had Patrick Stewart, but the rest of the cast felt like TV actors. The Chris Pine crowd never came off as adults. They always gave the impression of kids play-acting.

In today’s woke, anti-masculine, unisex world, it is hard to see this casting problem improving with a fourth franchise. You just know it’s going to be full of drag queens, transsexuals, transvestites, and gay stuff. The excuse for this icky crap will be that Star Trek has always been on the cutting edge of politics. Yeah, in the sixties, when the cutting edge was sane, when the cutting edge was about professionalism, equal opportunity, not being offended over words, individual liberty, the importance of every human life, and a masculine, forward-looking foreign policy based on peace through strength.

I've been a Star Trek fan for decades, but I have no interest in this. I haven't watched much of it since Voyager, although I did watch the 3rd season of Picard, which was very good.

Look, Up In The Sky!

Astronomers Accidentally Find A Galaxy That Hasn’t Birthed Any Stars

Astronomers may have found a dark, primordial galaxy — an enormous, undisturbed mass of cold hydrogen gas that has yet to form any stars — sitting in the modern-day universe. If confirmed, the object could offer astronomers a look at an early stage of galactic evolution. “I’ve been in this field for quite a few decades, and we’ve wanted to find something like this for a very long time,” study leader Karen O’Neil, an astronomer at the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia, tells Astronomy.

The first hint of something unusual was a discrepancy between observations made by the Green Bank Telescope (GBT) and the Nançay Radio Telescope in France as part of a coordinated survey of faint galaxies. Though they were supposed to be looking at the same patch of sky, the 100-meter-wide GBT was seeing something the Nançay Radio Telescope wasn’t.

“Upon looking a little bit closer at it and spending far too much time, we discovered that we had actually mistyped the coordinates in the GBT catalog,” O’Neil said Jan. 8 at a press conference at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society (AAS) in New Orleans. “This is something, unfortunately, astronomers do occasionally late at night.”

Pretty cool.

Armageddon It

Loose Talk About the End of Everything

But what has radically transformed are the delivery systems of mass death—nuclear weapons, chemical gases, biological agents, and artificial-intelligence-driven delivery systems. Oddly, the global reaction to the promise of Armageddon remains one of nonchalance. Most feel that such strongmen rant wildly but would never unleash weapons of civilizational destruction.

Consider that there are as many autocratic nuclear nations (e.g., Russia, China, Pakistan, North Korea, and perhaps Iran) as democratic ones (U.S., Britain, France, Israel, and India). Only Israel has an effective anti-ballistic missile dome. And the more the conventional power of the West declines, the more in extremis it will have to rely on a nuclear deterrent—at a time when it has no effective missile defense of its homelands.

Chilling indeed.

Tonight's ONT has been brought to you by P B & F:

We're gonna have a PB party tonight (Alright!)
We're gonna have a PB party alright (Tonight!)

We've got nothing better to do
Than smear PB on what goes under our shoes.

Don't talk about anything else
We don't wanna know
We're all perverted!
Sinking to new lows!

posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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