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Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

The Atlantic.

Allow me to explain my toilet theory of the internet. The premise, while unprovable, is quite simple: At any given moment, a great deal of the teeming, frenetic activity we experience online—clicks, views, posts, comments, likes, and shares—is coming from people who are scrolling on their phones in the bathroom.

Toilet theory isn’t necessarily literal, of course. Mindless scrolling isn’t limited to the bathroom, and plenty of idle or bored swiping happens during other down moments—while waiting in line, or sitting in gridlocked traffic. Right now, somebody somewhere is probably reading an article or liking an Instagram post with a phone in one hand and an irritable infant in the other.

I have a huge stack of Dilbert and Sherman’s Lagoon books in everyone of my bathrooms, so I never take the phone into the bathroom.

Watch it.

This expresses an eternal truth that is too seldom appreciated.

Check it out.

Tired of buying stuff from Communists? They’ve got you covered.

“My wife doesn’t know how to weld, cut metal, paint, fix chainsaws, cut trees, take a tractor apart, or operate tractor hydraulics. She can’t cut a tree. She has no idea who to call for a burn permit. She doesn’t know what one is. These things are not her problems. On the other hand, I don’t do laundry any more. I don’t wash dishes. I open drawers, and my ironed clothes are there. I open cupboards and see clean dishes.

It’s a pretty good system. God knew what he was doing when he designed it.”

— Stephen Harper

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I’m enjoying the conversation about Project Hephaistos engendered by the article on Dyson spheres. In particular, Al Jackson and Alex Tolley have been kicking around the notion of Dyson sphere alternatives, ways of preserving a civilization that are, in Alex’s words, less ‘grabby’ and more accepting of their resource limitations.

…

As pointed out in the article, a number of Dyson sphere searches have been mounted, but we are only now coming around to serious candidates, and at that only seven out of a vast search field. Two of these are shown in the figure below. We’re a long way from knowing what these infrared signatures actually represent, but let’s dig into the Project Hephaistos work from its latest paper in 2024 and also ponder what astronomers can do as they try to learn more.

StrategyPage.

The high cost of the war in Ukraine plus a decade of economic sanctions has hurt the Russian economy. To make matters worse Russia has no major allies in Europe or overseas. That leaves Russia dependent on China, which has the second largest economy in the world. The Chinese expect to be paid for the substantial economic aid they have been providing Russia. None of this aid is military, but a lot of it is dual use. That is, which means Russia needs only add a few key components to turn dual use materials into a weapon. This would include guided missiles, military communications and ground-based radars. Without these large quantities of Chinese dual use items, Russia could not maintain its production of many key weapons.

One problem remains, how does Russia pay for all this? China suggested, and Russia accepted, that long-standing Chinese claims on a quarter of the Russian Far East and most of its prime coastal areas be considered as a form of payment. China never canceled these claims, even in the 1940s and 50s when China was very dependent on Russia. These claims amount to about nine percent of Russian territory. The Russian Far East contains part of Siberia as well as the large Pacific Ocean coastline and the port of Vladivostok. The relatively small coastal areas are the most densely populated of the Russian Far East. The entire Russian Far East is huge, at 6.9 million square kilometers. That is nearly the size of the eight million square kilometer continental United States. While these 48 states have 310 million people, the Russian Far East only has a population of 8.3 million. The Far East region contains 40 percent of Russian territory and less than six percent of Russia’s population. The region contains many naval and ballistic missile bases as well as ports that provide the cheapest way to get goods from the rest of Russia to the Far East. The Trans-Siberian Railroad alone cannot support the population and economy of the Far East region.

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A data privacy amendment buried within the Federal Aviation Administration re-authorization bill will allow private aircraft owners to fully block aircraft registration information. Concealing this information will make establishing who owns private aircraft much more difficult, and render aircraft harder to track.

President Joe Biden signed the bipartisan Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) re-authorization bill into law yesterday. Last week, it passed a vote in the Senate 88-4, before going on to pass a vote in the House of Representatives by 387 to 26 on Wednesday. The bill was introduced into the House in June of last year.

The FAA re-authorization bill renews the agency’s authority for the next five years, and authorizes more than $105 billion in funding for it from fiscal years 2024 through 2028. The legislation aims to improve aviation safety, as well as tighten protections for both airline workers and passengers.

Some people on the Internet make it a hobby to track the flights of billionaires and other famous people and publish this information to their followers. The people thus tracked, of course, consider this a security threat. Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates are popular targets.

OffGuardian.

These guys aren’t known for their humor–they prefer to rain on any parade they can find–but this particular instance would grace the Babylon Bee.

My favorite:

16. If a friend recommends a Netflix show that is awful, don’t ever talk to them again. You don’t need friends like that.

24/7 Wall Street.

According to a survey by Gallup, a polling agency, 33% of Americans personally own a firearm. The motivations for owning a gun vary by person. Most Americans point to protection or hunting as the main reason behind their decision to purchase a firearm. However, some are required by their jobs to own a gun, and others cite sport shooting or owning a gun collection.

Whatever the reasoning behind owning a gun – firearm sales are booming. In 2023, the industry generated as much as $90.06 billion in total economic activity, as reported by the Firearm Industry Trade Association. (Click here to see the the top-selling gun of all time.)

It’s important to note that the rates of gun ownership vary significantly among diverse demographic groups, regions, income brackets, and other categorizations.

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The Bowie knife holds a significant place in history as one of the iconic blades. It was first created by James Bowie in the 19th century. Today, this knife continues to be a choice for enthusiasts, adventurers, and collectors. However, given the range of options in the market, choosing the perfect Bowie knife can pose a challenge. In this guide for buyers, we will delve into factors to consider when selecting a Bowie knife that aligns with your preferences and requirements.

I prefer an Arkansas Toothpick, actually, but that’s just me.

And, of course, when you’ve said Ka-Bar, you’ve said it all, as many Marines will testify.

The Antiplanner.

A little more than half of America’s incorporated cities collectively lost 2.7 million residents between 2020 and 2023, according to estimates released by the Census Bureau earlier this week. New York City alone lost almost 500,000 residents, or 5.5 percent of its population, while the next 20 biggest losers together lost about half a million people.

The biggest losers, other than New York City, were Chicago (-78,877), Los Angeles (-74,934), San Francisco (-61,530), Philadelphia (-50,142), San Jose (-39,664), and Portland (-22,846). San Francisco’s population slightly recovered between 2022 and 2023, but most major cities that have lost population have seen declines in every year from 2020 to 2023.

Out of 19,484 incorporated cities, population fell in 10,691, while the population of 8,049 cities collectively grew by 3.95 million people. (Some 744 small towns saw no change in population.) Of the cities that grew, the biggest growth was recorded by San Antonio (56,038), Fort Worth (54,866), Port St. Lucie (38,206), Phoenix (37,611), and Charlotte (35,559).

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There’s a war being waged for America’s elementary, middle, and high school students. But the leftist agenda-driven campaign that began behind the closed doors of teachers unions and government-run schools is now out in the open and has led to a “parent revolution,” says Corey DeAngelis.

The “teachers unions overplayed their hand and awakened a sleeping giant, which happens to be parents who want more of a say in their kids’ education,” says DeAngelis, author of “The Parent Revolution: Rescuing Your Kids from the Radicals Ruining Our Schools.”

DeAngelis—sometimes referred to as the “school choice evangelist”—dedicated his new book to “Randi Weingarten [president of the American Federation of Teachers] and the teachers unions for inadvertently doing more to advance school choice and homeschooling than anyone could have ever imagined.”

The New Neo.

How bad must it be for Anderson Cooper to admit that Michael Cohen appears to be a liar?

Of course, the jury might not care, because they hate Trump so much. And Cooper tries to limit the idea of Cohen as a liar to just this little itty bitty bit.

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Already in fiscal year 2024, more Chinese nationals have crossed America’s southern border than the three previous fiscal years combined. Under the Biden administration, “there is no serious vetting” of illegal aliens from China, Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., said during a House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability hearing held Thursday afternoon.

A five-question “limited interview,” as Bishop calls it, “combined with a lack of reliable information from China to verify biographical claims and limited translation services, severely constrain CBP’s ability to conduct rigorous vetting for criminal and national security concerns.”

John Derbyshire alway used to say that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that adding about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.

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n childhood, Tasliym Morales was always interested in civic affairs, so it was no surprise to those who knew her that as soon she turned 18, she registered to vote. What did take her family and friends aback, however, was the political party affiliation she chose.

“Republican,” she says with a broad smile.

The striking mother of six is sitting at the head table of the Delaware County Republican Party chairman’s dinner, dressed in a rich red jacket topping a paisley dress discussing her reasons for choosing the Grand Old Party when most of her peers and family – Morales is black – were Democrats.

The willingness of the Democrats to run a woke sock-puppet for President is opening a lot of eyes … and brains.

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Since the Stone Age, hunters have brought down big game with spears, atlatls, and bows and arrows. Now, a new study reveals traditional societies around the globe also relied on another deadly but often-overlooked weapon: our legs.

According to a report published today in Nature Human Behaviour, running down big game such as antelope, moose, and even kangaroos was far more widespread than previously recognized. Researchers documented nearly 400 cases of endurance pursuits—a technique in which prey are chased to exhaustion—by Indigenous peoples around the globe between the 16th and 21st centuries. And in some cases, they suggest, it can be more efficient than stealthy stalking.

The findings bolster the idea that humans evolved to be hunting harriers, says Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University. “Nobody else has come up with any other explanation for why humans evolved to run long distances,” says Lieberman, who adds that he’s impressed with the paper’s “depth of scholarship.”

Erik Prince.

It is painfully apparent to anyone of sound mind and judgment that there’s something gravely wrong with America’s current military capacity and our ability to project power in the world. The WWII-era fighting force composed of fourteen million GIs with a muscular industrial base backing them up is almost unimaginable today. In the last three years, five different US embassies have been hastily evacuated: Sudan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Ukraine, and Niger. Americans are held hostage in Gaza; commercial shipping traffic is blockaded and our ground and naval forces are shot at daily with impunity. How did America go from winning the Cold War and becoming the sole global superpower in the 90s to the state of disarray that we find ourselves in now?

ZMan does a deep dive.

A regular feature of the internet age is the emergence of what is called a “new right” that is supposed to supplant the “old right.” This is largely due to the collapse of Buckley-style conservatism over the last twenty years. The assumption is that the failures of mainstream conservatism and its dwindling demographic must lead to its demise and its replacement by a new, more contemporary right. As a result, there have been a lot of hats thrown into the ring from alternative rights.

What may be emerging as the real threat to win the competition is something that has yet to name itself. The recent hit piece on the publisher of Passage Press, the group responsible for rehabilitating Steve Sailer, led to a gathering of online friends and acquaintances in support of the publisher. This is the online character known as Lomez, who has written for Claremont sites and has a big following on Twitter. He is part of a loose network of influencers that could be called the Cosmo Right.

That is the first place to start with understanding this collection of people emerging into a movement of sorts. They are cosmopolitan in the old bourgeois sense of the word, as they often live in or around the trendy cities. Maybe they went to a college that is near a trendy city or they worked at a company in a hipsterville. Maybe they just like to hang out in places like Austin. It is not so much about location when it comes to their cosmopolitanism, but their attitude.

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When they were still in arts school in Seattle in the early 1990s, Jesper Myrfors and Sandra Everingham would sometimes look for inspiration by exploring Fort Worden, an abandoned 19th-century military base at the entrance of the Puget Sound. To them, it felt like a dwarven ruin.

One day they found a trap door hidden in the woods near the fort, which opened to reveal a rusty ladder leading to a series of underground bunkers filled with broken doors and graffiti. Myrfors snapped a portrait of Everingham as she stood near the base of the ladder, head limned by sunlight, and then forgot about it.

“Later I was looking for some good lighting reference for hair and I remembered the photo, so I took it out and started painting,” said Myrfors. Before he knew it, he had produced an image called The Fallen, one of the thousands of cards that populate the legendary deck-building game, Magic: The Gathering. That card still gives Myrfors the creeps, 30 years later. “It freaked me out a bit, how easily it was created. Almost as if it created itself.”

Welcome to the Heartland.

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The Florida Keys are a place where deer stand next to children at school-bus stops. They lounge on lawns. They eat snacks right out of people’s hands. So when the deer began acting strangely in the summer of 2016, the people of the Keys noticed. Bucks started swinging their heads erratically, as if trying to shake something loose.

Then wounds opened on their heads—big, gaping wounds that exposed white slabs of bone. Something was eating the deer alive.

That something, lab tests would later confirm, was the New World screwworm, a parasite supposed to have been eradicated from the United States half a century ago. No one in the Keys had ever seen it. If you had asked an old-time Florida rancher though, he might have told you boyhood stories of similarly disfigured and dying cattle. In those days, screwworms found their way into cattle through any opening in the skin: the belly buttons of newborn calves, scratches from barbed wire, even a tick bite. Then they feasted.

Kind of a metaphor for Democrat politicians.

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Results from a groundbreaking clinical trial of CRISPR gene editing in 14 individuals with a form of inherited blindness show that the treatment is safe and led to measurable improvements in 11 of the participants treated. The phase 1/2 trial called BRILLIANCE, was led by principal investigator Eric Pierce, MD, PhD, of Mass Eye and Ear, a member of the Mass General Brigham healthcare system, and sponsored by Editas Medicine, Inc. Findings are reported on May 6th in The New England Journal of Medicine.

“This research demonstrates that CRISPR gene therapy for inherited vision loss is worth continued pursuit in research and clinical trials,” said Pierce, director of Ocular Genomics Institute and Berman-Gund Laboratory for the Study of Retinal Degenerations at Mass Eye and Ear and Harvard Medical School. “While more research is needed to determine who may benefit most, we consider the early results promising. To hear from several participants how thrilled they were that they could finally see the food on their plates –that is a big deal. These were individuals who could not read any lines on an eye chart and who had no treatment options, which is the unfortunate reality for most people with inherited retinal disorders.”

Alex Tabarrok.

Alec Stapp points out that Canada is the only NATO country that has a free trade agreement with the United States. That’s quite remarkable if you think about it. NATO allies are bound by mutual defense commitments, support for military cooperation, and a dedication to democratic principles. Despite these shared commitments, the U.S. still enforces tariffs and quotas on our NATO allies including France, Germany, the UK, Denmark, Portugal, and Spain. This is like getting married and not having a joint checking account. If they are good enough partners to commit to their defense then surely NATO allies are good enough partners to commit to free trade?

Sarah Hoyt.

If you are talking to a communist, or another religious believer in science or theory, they will want you to prove that you are correct if you say that they are practicing magical thinking. Since magical thinking was evolutionarily favored for reason of making reactions fast, without stopping to reason, evaluate proofs or logic, a magical thinker might be closed to the most obvious proofs that they are indulging in such.

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Newly released images of China’s new aircraft carrier undertaking sea trials have further highlighted the scale of the country’s naval modernisation efforts as it continues to carve out of sphere of influence into, though, and beyond the western Pacific.

Publishing a series of images on 8 May 2024, China’s Ministry of National Defense stated that the Fujian had completed its maiden voyage as the vessel begins to undertake sea trials required before it can enter service with the People’s Liberation Army Navy, also known as the PLAN.

Beijing is set on spending enormous sums of money on expanding and modernising its armed forces with defence expenditure recorded a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.5% during 2019–23 and was forecast to register a CAGR of 6.6% from 2023 to value $323.7bn by 2028.

China’s Ministry of National Defense is also expected to spend $1.4trn over 2024–28 on the procurement of military hardware and the modernisation of its armed forces, according to GlobalData forecasts.

“You’d  be surprised by what you don’t need.” — Rollo Tomassi.

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If you had to identify a specific type of real estate that has seen its value increase because of changing consumer eating habits, global demographic shifts, worldwide pandemic preparedness, and US export policy — while its importance to reducing global carbon emissions and adapting to climate change rise in tandem — refrigerated warehouses may not be your first pick.

But there’s a strong case to be made that the expansion and evolution of the cold-storage industry — often called the “cold chain” — will play a significant role in energy, environmental, and economic news in the 21st century. Cold storage facilities aren’t fun places to visit; some are kept so frigid, at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, that the workers who toil in these windowless spaces rotate in 15-minute shifts, despite their heavy protective gear.

Power Line.

The Babylon Bee—”America’s newspaper of record,” as Glenn Reynolds likes to put it—has established itself as a premier humor and political satire site of our time. They’ve pretty much put The Onion out of business, though one reason for this is The Onion slowly succumbed to wokery, and hence has trouble in the humor department. (Check it out if you want; it’s pretty weak these days.)

Watch it.

Wisdom. Attend.

(Love me that pull-down shelving.)

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More than most technical procedures in the ancient world, drilling of hard stone such as quartz and granite has evoked awe and puzzlement. Neither wall paintings, nor textual information, nor excavated material has provided complete answers as to how drilling was done. As a conse­quence, there has been scholarly contro­versy. One such disagreement occurred between two eminent Egyptologists, A. Lucas and Sir Flinders Petrie. Their argument revolved around a difficult and important question, namely, how did the ancient Egyptians of the 3rd millennium B.C. drill granite?

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“If you’re not with me, then you are my enemy,” proclaims the young, rebellious Jedi Knight Anakin Skywalker during the emotional climax of Star Wars Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith. To this, his disappointed master, Obi-Wan Kenobi, replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes. I will do what I must,” as he switches on his lightsabre. Even though the lightsabre duel that follows is universally praised as a piece of cinematic brilliance, the dialogue has left many Star Wars fans annoyed and disillusioned.

The problem is this: To claim that 1) “Only a Sith” 2) “deals in absolutes” is in itself an absolutist statement; we have here an internal contradiction. If this is really the case, then Obi-Wan has just proven himself to be a Sith. It is safe to say that this is not what George Lucas had in mind. So, theoretically, the whole philosophy of the Star Wars franchise falls flat as a result of this claim.

There is a stark parallel between the frustration that Star Wars fans express about this piece of half-baked Jedi philosophy and that of the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor about the theory underpinning liberalism.

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Concerned by the increasing number of attacks on elected leaders, the German government is working on a plan to provide more protection for politicians, while ordinary citizens will be left to their own devices.

Europeans have always been more statist than Americans.

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New reporting from Forbes published last week outlines a host of college campuses employers are turning to instead of Ivy League institutions — including two in Texas.

The University of Texas at Austin and Rice University joined the rankings of new public and private school elites which are “attracting the smartest students and plaudits from employers.”

Forbes’ researchers said the evaluation came as the traditional Ivy League institutions have “faced a barrage of complaints in recent years” related to admissions policies, grade inflations at several elite schools and university officials’ responses to on-campus protests regarding the Israel-Hamas War.

For Forbes’ methodology, researchers removed the eight classic Ivy League institutions (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth and Cornell) as well as the “Ivy-plus yardstick”: Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Duke University and the University of Chicago.

I’d include UCLA in that latter category. However, the point of the Ivy League is that they are private institutions; UT Austin is a public school, and so wouldn’t qualify, nor is it really of the same quality as the Ivies, although Rice certainly is. If one is looking for value for money, Rice would be hard to beat.

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Think globally, self-harm locally.

Read it.

Guess wrong, get stuck.

Ride the fashion, get a mashin’.