During yesterday's Golden Globes acceptance speech for best supporting actor, Robert Downey Jr. ("Oppenheimer") seemed to be referencing stage fright when he said "Yeah, yeah, I took a beta-blocker so this will be a breeze." 

Let's ignore that he is pretending he has stage fright, and certainly that accepting an award would give him high blood pressure or heart palpitations, and discuss what we know it really means; celebrities have jumped on the beta blocker fad for social anxiety or depression. Unlike fentanyl or xanax, no one will judge you if you keel over while on beta blockers. No one is worried your propranolol habit is out of hand.

Even though author JK Rowling controversially believes that being a woman might be more than a state of mind, people bought "Hogwarts Legacy" in droves last year. It was the top-selling game, beating out new entries in the popular "Call of Duty" and "Diablo" franchises.

That is if current trends from November held up. December can be a real confounder because "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III" came out in November - and quickly rose to the number two spot. It could have beat Harry Potter but we won't know until Activision releases its numbers. Also impressive was "The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom", because it was only available on one platform, the Nintendo Switch, while Harry Potter was also available on Xbox, Playstation, and PC.

After Harvard leader (and Board member of Harvard Corp.) Claudia Gay dismissed concerns about anti-Semitism due to lack of protection from hate speech and violence directed at Jewish people, the broader community began to look at the scholarly work of this little-known activist who somehow was placed in charge of nearly $60 billion in money - and having a vote in hiring or firing herself.

There was an alarming amount of plagiarism, yet the New York Times quickly rushed to defend their political ally and reframe it as "duplicative language" - but that was not Joe Biden stealing British politician Neil Kinnock's life story for a speech, this was printed scholarship.

In arguably their most important 2023 legislative move, Democrats have given California a state...bat.

The rationale was that bats are 'as diverse as California' so why government immediately chose an official government winner, the pallid bat, is as mysterious as why we have a state goldfish, a state marine mammal, and a state butterfly.

There are overwhelmingly 4,000 species of mammals so California has a way to go before they pick an official member of each.

We all remember when progressives gushed over the Prius as the car that was saving the planet. In standard 'endorse the alternative until it becomes the standard and then sue them and collect checks along the way' fashion, environmentalists have no turned on them.

They are being declared NRE - which in this case isn't Not Really European, the NRE that white liberals on The Continent use to refer to immigrants, but Not Really Electric.

Electric Car Government Relations get paid to pave the road for their clients/employers, so they do what you probably expect; create trade groups and even entire nonprofits to advance their agenda. And pay those naturally inclined to help, or even those who are 'useful idiots.'(1)

NASA’s Voyager spacecraft is 15 billion miles away, out beyond Pluto, which means it can't be fixed if there is a mechanical issue. But FORTRAN is pretty elegant code, and it's self-powered, so if the CMOS isn't messed up and the telemetry modulation unit gets going it should be communicating fine for decades.

Maybe even long enough to leave the solar system - in 25,000 years.

With so many epidemiology papers published each month, everyone in a giant academic industry essentially created by Harvard School of Public Health in the 1980s is pushing out "correlation" between some common food or chemical and some disease or health benefit, it is hard to get noticed.

One way corporate journalists will notice is if a Republican says it. A WHO "miracle drug" was dragged through the mud for suggesting it might be a therapy for COVID-19 - after a Republican listed that peer-reviewed research.

There is an environmental playbook that hasn't changed in decades - because it works.
Find something useful that is a successful industry, advocate and lobby for an alternative to replace it, then turn against the alternative after it's successful.

It sounds cynical but if you look at hydroelectric power, natural gas, GMOs, and ethanol, they were all once demanded by environmental groups. Then when they succeeded, those same groups declared them bad.

Right now, solar is "the new new" - it's for wealthy white people, the biggest donors to activists, it's in opposition to the natural gas activists lobbied for until 20 years ago, and they can pretend the strip mining to get the precious materials to make panels and batteries doesn't exist.

Virtual water is one of those 1990s breezy claims created by activists, just like 'it takes a gallon of gas to make a pound of beef.'

Anyone with any middle school ability to do arithmetic knows it isn't true, or the Mid-East would have been fighting wars over water for 2,000 years, instead of fighting over everything but that. Virtual water uses estimates of all the water that goes into a process while ignoring that water is recycled. So you can believe it takes 30 gallons of water to make your cup of coffee, activists said just that and New York Times reporters repeated it as fact, but the water that went into growing coffee also went into aquifers and the sky and rained all over again. None of it disappeared.