13th May 2022
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The House of Representatives is set to announce it will provide taxpayer-funded monthly Peloton memberships to all of its staff, Fox Business reported on Friday. The contract comes just over one year after the fitness company set up a lobbying shop in Washington.
Sometimes it is good to work for the king.
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13th May 2022
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Last month, a student of mine here in Budapest had a surreal experience at an international debate he participated in. The western European moderator opened the event by inviting everyone to introduce themselves by sharing their “preferred pronouns.” The invitation was met with blank stares: in the Hungarian language, pronouns are not gendered.
This little episode is emblematic of woke doctrine’s amusing failure to translate into a central and eastern European context. Some conservatives stateside have started to notice that we here in East-Central Eruope are “based”—or at least, we’re remarkably resistant to wokeness. It’s worth reflecting on why that might be.
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13th May 2022
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More than two decades ago, the United Nations created a program to curb the trafficking of small arms. It’s done nothing but fire blanks. So now, the U.N. wants to control bullets.
In 2001, the United Nations started the Programme of Action to Prevent, Combat, and Eradicate the Illicit Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons in All Its Aspects. Its next meeting will be held in New York from June 27 to July 1.
The Programme isn’t a treaty. It’s a political gathering that’s meant to encourage voluntary cooperation. It meets every other year to produce an outcome document that’s politically (but not legally) binding.
It’s supposed to work by unanimous consent.
The Programme has achieved very little, if anything. That’s not just my view. The U.N. secretary-general said so in 2008. New Zealand said so in 2012. Its supporters said it was “firing blanks” in 2014. In 2018, the Red Cross said that governments in the Programme talk a lot, but do nothing.
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13th May 2022
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The research, published on May 4 in Nature, now shows that when female Aedes aegypti mosquitoes smell humans, a unique pathway—the “human glomerulus”—activates in their tiny brains. The glomerulus responds particularly to decanal and undecanal, which are volatile components of human sebum, an oily substance produced in the sebaceous glands dotted throughout our skin.
Ae. aegypti spread diseases such as dengue, Zika, and yellow fever. Given the choice, the insects prefer the smell of humans over other animals. “They have some ability to differentiate between a human host and animal hosts, but which odors and neuronal pathways are involved has not been known,” says Marcus Stensmyr, a biologist at Lund University in Sweden who was not involved in the study. The authors have “managed to pinpoint a specific circuit that is detecting a human volatile, and this circuit is not activated when you present mosquitoes with the odor of animals,” he adds. “The paper is a technical tour-de-force.”
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13th May 2022
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A team of researchers led by Yale University scientists can now quantify the factors causing changes in the DNA that contribute most to cancer growth in tumors of most major tumor types.
In a new paper published in the journal Molecular Biology and Evolution, they say that their new molecular analysis approach clarifies a long-standing debate about how much control humans have over cancer development over time.
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13th May 2022
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Mark Esper, President Trump’s last confirmed Secretary of Defense, has been the toast of all the networks this week for his new memoir, starting with the high-profile debut on “60 Minutes” with CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell. Then came CNN and MSNBC and PBS and NPR and Fox News.
That doesn’t even count the massive sharing of soundbites from these interviews, mostly dedicated to the unending hunger for “tell us all the crazy crap Trump said next” anecdotes. The last president’s failure to accept the certified election results and his failure to call off January 6 rioters may be the craziest stuff.
Other than Bret Baier of Fox News – surely the most skeptical of the lot – the toughest question Esper faced was how could he stand ever taking a job with Trump, and why on Earth did he hang around?
Put that parade aside for a minute for a much more general point about “tell-all books.” Try for a few minutes to remember the tell-all books that emerged from Bill Clinton’s cabinet and White House inner circle. Maybe you can come up with Locked in the Cabinet by Labor Secretary Robert Reich (1997). That wasn’t a rip-roaring “tell-all.” Then there’s All Too Human by George Stephanopoulos (1999). The network interviewers threw questions about how he looked like an “ingrate” and a “backstabber,” inquiries which aren’t often thrown at Republican tattlers. But by that time, he was an ABC News star.
Posted in Dystopia Watch, The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | No Comments »
12th May 2022
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Yesterday I wrote about the fact that NIH officials including Anthony Fauci have been paid hundreds of millions of dollars in patent royalties by pharmaceutical companies and others, raising obvious conflict of interest issues which the NIH has covered up rather than trying to address.
But it gets worse: remember how Fauci constantly undermined President Trump during the early stages of the covid epidemic? It turns out that he was paid to do the exact opposite of his job–to subvert his boss, the president.
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12th May 2022
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Whistleblowers allegedly provided evidence to House Republicans showing the FBI targeted parents who raised concerns about local education issues through its counterterrorism unit, according to a letter from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
The FBI’s Counterterrorism Division opened “at least dozens of investigations” into concerned parents through an EDUOFFICIALS “threat tag,” according to a letter from Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland that cited anonymous whistleblowers. Examples allegedly provided by the whistleblowers detail complaints made by those who opposed parents’ viewpoints on school curricula, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements.
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12th May 2022
Joel Kotkin.
‘We have two parties here, and only two. One is the evil party, and the other is the stupid party… I’m very proud to be a member of the stupid party… Occasionally, the two parties get together to do something that’s both evil and stupid. That’s called bipartisanship.’
So said the late conservative journalist M Stanton Evans. It is commonplace, even among Republicans, to label the Republicans ‘the stupid party’, while lambasting the Democrats as ‘the evil party’. Today, both parties are working overtime to live up to their reputations, to the detriment of all Americans.
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12th May 2022
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Stagflation: Check. Russians invading a neighboring country: Check. Terrible music and fashion: Check. Energy Crisis: Check. Brother/Son of President is a sleazeball: Check. And now… gas rationing.
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12th May 2022
Babylon Bee.
Harry Splugwarp, a deacon at Straight & Narrow Church, began searching the scriptures fervently for Jesus’ teaching about funding Lockheed Martin following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comments that funding a war in a foreign land was tantamount to feeding someone who was hungry.
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12th May 2022
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Mostly by just holding out their hands with a For Sale sign around their necks.
To truly understand the gentrification of the Democratic Party, we need only observe how the class composition of the Democratic presidential primary electorate shifted between 2008 and 2020. Looking at the 16 states that voted in both 2008 and 2020 before the winner was all but decided, the trend is the same: poor and working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the Democratic electorate, while middle-class and affluent voters are growing.
In these 16 states, counties where the median household income (MHI) is under $60,000/year went from contributing 35.3% of the presidential primary vote in 2008 to just 28.6% in 2020. By contrast, counties where the MHI is over $80,000/year rose from 24.5% to 30.7%, with about half of that growth in counties where the MHI is over $100,000/year.
“Will Steal For Votes”
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12th May 2022
The Other McCain is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.
“The most important thing about this vote is that we’ve got 49 Democrats on record supporting abortion up until birth. Remember that this November.”
Indeed.
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12th May 2022
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The bar for doing a yoga practice couldn’t be any lower: all you need is a mat and a body, although even the mat is optional. You don’t have to be flexible. You don’t have to be strong. You don’t have to do a single thing — as we yoga teachers are fond of saying at the start of classes — except be present, and breathe.
As fitness goes, then, yoga has always been among the most accessible forms of exercise. Yet the community surrounding the practice is paradoxically plagued by anxiety about access, led by critics who are less interested in doing yoga than in obsessing about everything that yoga does wrong.
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12th May 2022
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A new enzyme variant can break down environment-throttling plastics that typically take centuries to degrade in just a matter of hours to days. It was created by chemical engineers and scientists at The University of Texas at Austin
This discovery, published on April 27, 2022, in the journal Nature, could help solve one of the world’s biggest environmental problems: what to do with the billions of tons of plastic waste piling up in landfills and polluting our natural lands and water. The enzyme has the potential to supercharge recycling on a large scale that would enable major industries to reduce their environmental impact by recovering and reusing plastics at the molecular level.
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11th May 2022
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Marseille is possibly the most culturally enriched city in France. Yesterday a culture-enricher suddenly set upon and nearly killed a man with a knife outside a Catholic school in Marseille. The victim was said to have received cuts to his throat.
After a culture-enriching attack such as this one, the attacker is often described as stabbing his target “in the neck”. This is, of course, in obedience to the instructions given in Koran to behead the unbelievers. Most of the time the mujahid fails to achieve full decapitation, although it does happen sometimes, as in the cases of Lee Rigby and Samuel Paty.
Witnesses reported that the knifeman in Marseille shouted “in the name of Allah” as he stabbed his victim in the neck, yet investigators said that “terrorism” in this case seems unlikely.
Just a reminder that (a) Muslim terrorists are still out there, (b) They’re still terrorizing in the name of Islam, and (c) our ruling class is still ignoring the problem.
Posted in Living with Islam. | No Comments »
11th May 2022
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Peter Wood’s essay provides two necessary and overdue contributions to understanding the madness that has gripped America’s college campuses—and by extension our ruling class: a forthright recognition of false political language and an account of the sociological origin of the Critical Race Theory movement. But while it is necessary to understand the faulty intellectual wiring that has been laid within the university, it is insufficient to explain the power surge that has short-circuited our public discourse and—it seems—essentially fried so many bright young brains.
A new force has emerged that deforms young minds before they ever arrive at university: the social internet. College campuses no longer shape young souls. Rather, colleges are being reshaped by the students. These students arrive with brains pre-wired to rebel against the university’s most basic cognitive demand: reflective contemplation.
The true roots of our societal obsession “with race” may owe less Derrick Bell and Kimberlé Crenshaw than it does to Facebook and Twitter. Our obsession “with gender” may owe less to Judith Butler and John Money than to Tumblr and TikTok. The woke ideas gestating for decades in academia have not suddenly swept through society because of their inherent strength, but rather because they are uniquely well-suited to shallow, impulsive minds. College is not more important now than ever. It is less. The university has become handmaiden to the metaversity.
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11th May 2022
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But truth be told, the Taliban has nothing to brag about. The group learned fairly early that overthrowing a corrupt government that couldn’t extend its writ past a few major cities is not the same as governing a country of about 40 million people, the vast majority of whom are spending every minute of every day doing what they can to put food on the table. By any objective measure, the Taliban’s administration of Afghanistan has been as bad as the Afghan governments that came before it (and at least those governments had access to billions of dollars in foreign assistance every year).
Be careful what you wish for.
Posted in Living with Islam. | No Comments »
11th May 2022
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To produce hydrogen from water, for example, we can use either immensely expensive platinum or nickel-iron alloys that are cheap but much slower. Other reactions, such as the breaking down of pollutants from car engines, rely on even more obscure metals like rhodium and palladium.
In the Journal of the American Chemical Society Au, a team from the University of Minnesota describes tuning an ultrathin layer of alumina over graphene to behave like other metals.
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11th May 2022
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Combination of nucleic acid nanotechnology and cryo-EM gives unprecedented insights into the structures of large and small RNAs, advancing RNA biology and drug design.
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11th May 2022
Steve Sailer.
Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, which attempts to be “Moneyball for your life,” crunches the numbers on this and other intriguing topics.
Gaming the system is the new American Dream.
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11th May 2022
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The UK government will start informing some illegal immigrants this week of its intention to relocate them to Rwanda, the Home Office confirmed on Tuesday.
The recipients will be warned that they may not be admitted to the UK’s asylum system because they had “travelled through safe countries where they could and should have claimed asylum,” the Home Office said.
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11th May 2022
Joel Kotkin.
The Department of Homeland Security revealed last week that it was creating a Disinformation Governance Board to distribute “best practices” for countering disinformation. The new board joins a growing chorus—which includes President Biden and former President Barack Obama—that views disinformation disseminated on social media as one of the biggest threats facing our democracy.
But there’s a much bigger threat to democracy coming out of Silicon Valley and it’s this: America’s largest financial and tech companies increasingly act as independent countries, routinely exporting jobs, money and technology to our most significant global adversary. These companies, their assets, and increasingly their workers, exist wholly outside of America’s democratic borders and under the auspices of China’s anti-democratic ones. And they are bringing these undemocratic pressures back home with them, subverting our democracy from within.
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11th May 2022
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A whistleblower lawsuit filed last month alleges that Rutgers University’s business school artificially boosted its rankings by using a temp agency to hire MBA graduates and place them into “sham positions at the university itself,” according to NJ.com, which first reported the news. Though shocking, the scandal is the natural result of the incentives the federal government has set up for schools through uncapped student loan subsidies for graduate programs.
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