Read it.

Childlessness is a self-correcting problem Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

I am putting all these links in one spot for my own convenience. If any reader of mine find this convenient also, please look at these items before YouTube removes them.

I have marked those I discovered had been removed.

It is rather remarkable how quickly Americans grow accustomed to censorship. It is now routine on every news and commentary channel I regularly watch, to hear the pundit simply state there are topics and words he cannot mention without being punished. Several mention their shadow banning and demonetizations.

Read it.

Something very similar is at work in the operations of Big Tech, acting as a political arms of the Biden administration. Using the pretext of suppressing “misinformation,” Facebook and other platforms are identifying and silencing the administration’s opponents and, even though this is happening in full view of anyone paying attention, you’re not going to know anything about it if you get your news from CNN, MSNBC or one of the broadcast network troika of NBC/ABC/CBS.

In fact, the liberal media are engaged in “fact-checking” that labels reporting about this censorship as (you guessed it) “misinformation.”

Read it.

News reports now recognize the challenges of vaccinating an entire population, but the sophistication of the current collective vaccine-promotion strategies have evolved more slowly and focus on alleviating vaccine anxieties related to efficacy and safety.2 However, for much of the estimated 39% of the US population currently not vaccinated or reportedly not planning to receive the vaccine as soon as possible,3 vaccine apathy rather than true hesitancy may be an important major concern, and addressing apathy necessitates an entirely different communication approach than addressing hesitancy.

I have an idea: Let’s discuss, not hesitancy, not apathy, but aversion. That would be a change.

Read it.

One of the great ironies of 20th century history: Marxist revolutionaries could only ever seize power in the wrong countries. Marx imagined a revolution of industrial proletariat; he expected that this proletariat would at first achieve its aims in highly industrialized nations like England and Germany. His theory of socialism presupposed that a successful transition from autocratic “feudalism” to a liberal bourgeois socio-economic system had already occurred. But of course, all of the world’s Marxist regimes were established in very different circumstances. The communist parties that successfully seized authority built their power in rebellion against non-democratic regimes, in countries where industrialization still lay far on the horizon. They justified their power in the name of an ideology whose own precepts predicted they should not exist.

Read it.

Consumers’ Research, a consumer advocacy group, launched a series of advertisements Thursday calling out Coca-Cola’s “woke hypocrisy” for its reported defense of China and alleged health concerns associated with its sugary drinks.

Part of the campaign is a video advertisement satirizing a Coca-Cola commercial, which is set to music with lyrics like “Just drink Coke, the road to obesity” and “China is our labor supplier that drives our stock price even higher.” The group also created a website, “alwayswokacola.com,” to continue to expose the company.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

It is fascinating in a way how so much of the current crisis parallels events in Europe a century ago, despite the many differences. This is supposed to be the peak of liberal democracy, but it feels more like the dying embers of the old aristocratic order that evolved out of the 19th century in response to the French Revolution and the changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Then as now, the one thing agreed upon is the current order is not satisfactory. The old order has failed.

The past is never a perfect parallel to the present, but the many points of comparison between then and now is what matters. The rise of industry forcing people into cities, altering the power arrangements in European societies set off massive cultural changes that resulted in two great industrial wars and the rise of communism. The technological revolution is having the same impact on the West today. The world after the internet is a very different place from the world before it.

“I wish the coronavirus would hold a press conference and explain how we can protect ourselves from our government.”

— Heard from Scott Adams, who quoted a guy who quoted a guy who didn’t reveal who first said it.

Read it.

A fund formed in response to the deadly racial violence four years ago in Charlottesville, Virginia, said Thursday it will award $3 million in grants to more than three dozen groups and sites nationwide to help preserve landmarks linked to Black history.

Lesson: Riot and they will give you money.

Yeah, that’ll work out great.

Read it.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Paul Fussell will have none of it. He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill – and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. He says he prefers the term “caste system” to “class system” when describing America, conveying as it does a more rigid and inescapable distinction, and that he uses “class” only out of respect for conventional usage.

Read it.

The FCC has granted Amazon permission to use 60GHz radar in some future device to monitor people’s sleeping habits and sense gesture commands.

Amazon requested a waiver [PDF] from the US communications regulator to build a gadget that emits radar waves and “operates at higher powers than currently allowed” in June. Ronald Rapasi, acting chief of the FCC’s office of engineering and technology, officially approved the request this month.

The mysterious gizmo, referred to as a “radar sensor” in the FCC’s response [PDF], would emit radar waves at frequencies between 57 and 64GHz. It was described as a “non-mobile device” that has to be constantly plugged into a power source to work. Amazon said the sensors would be used to help less physically able users interact with the device through gesture commands, and could promote for “sleep hygiene.”

Can mind-control space lasers be far behind? (Did you think Jeff Bezos was going into space just for fun?)

Read it

In a certain view, billionaires are not merely wealthy, they are nearly god-like in their influence. As the New York Times op-ed Abolish Billionaires reads:

Billionaires should not exist — at least not in their present numbers, with their current globe-swallowing power.

One practical upshot of this view is that we ought to increase the marginal tax rate, break up tech monopolies, sharpen the pitchforks and so forth.

Yet an equally valid interpretation is this: if you truly see billionaires as all-powerful oligarchs who exert enormous control over world affairs, you should try very hard to become one of them.

Ross Douthat.

But among Catholic writers there has been substantial fracture, experimentation, realignment, and division. The older categories certainly persist. There remain conservative Catholics who believe in the fusionist project of American conservatism, the Catholic reading of the American founding advanced by John Courtney Murray, and the virtues of the pre-Trump Republican party. Meanwhile, the Biden presidency has given a boost to liberal Catholics who believe that the Democratic party is their natural home and meliorist, welfare-state liberalism the obvious way Catholic social teaching cashes out.

But there are also new categories, revived and re­invented movements and tendencies, which matter more to intellectual debate than they did in years past and may eventually matter to Catholic politics as well.

My personal view is that what has happened to the Roman Church since Vatican II is a tragedy – which is why I am no longer Roman Catholic. It could all be summed up in a phrase I heard when I was a student, ‘Catholic is the new Eposcopalian’. But of course both sides of that equation have degenerated since then. The election of Pope Benedict gave me new hope, but his abdication and the election of Francis indicated that things were starting to circle the toilet bowl once more. Sad, but there it is.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, as we used to say in the Navy.

Victor Davis Hanson.

The grandchildren of the hippies and the children of the Yuppies? They are a different, a hybrid bunch altogether.

They combine all the worst traits of both leftist eras: selfishness, performance art, the I/me/my/mine self-infatuation (“my story,” “my truth,” “my narrative”), crudity, vulgarity and rudeness of the 1960s, along with the fixation on class, snobbery, elitism, money, careerism of the 1980s and beyond. And like both Hippies and Yuppies, their prolonged adolescence and child-like self-centeredness are signature traits.

Yet in this most recent manifestation of Leftist identity-searching, hyper-sensitive, fragile, and whimpering puppydom lacks even the small reservoir of good from both prior cultures: Puppies do not like 1960s unfettered expression, at least if it stands in the way of implementing Maoist-like woke correctness. And they want to scrutinize and audit all Yuppie pleasures, or rather ensure that the grasping middle classes never enjoy these carbon-spewing, planet-heating entitlements.

Read it.

Forget this year’s punchy headlines pitching Tim Cook against Mark Zuckerberg—it’s arguably now Google as much as Facebook that’s in Apple’s sights. This has serious implications for 1-billion-plus iPhone users as the fight for your data and your loyalty has suddenly intensified. This is the context behind recent updates from Apple and Google. And this is why it’s time to start deleting apps—including Google Maps.

While Google continues to play privacy catch-up with Apple, as seen in Android 12’s likely enhancements, Android Messages and Workspace client-side encryption, and the PR-friendly “privacy sandbox,” the reality is that Google is the world’s largest data-driven advertising company. Apple is not. Ultimately, who do you trust?

Location data has been central to the privacy debate for years now. First iOS and then Android have given us options to deny, restrict and approximate such data from the dozens of apps that would guzzle our data should we let them. Why exactly do all those trivial games and apps require my precise location, and all that.

But even as we have clicked to deny all these apps access under “Location Services” in our iPhone’s settings, we clearly cannot do the same with mapping apps. But while many iPhone users are tied to Google Maps, the alarming privacy label comparison between it and Apple’s alternative should give serious reason for concern.

Read it.

Superior Court Judge Kenneth Medel said Wednesday that victims and families in the Poway, California, synagogue shooting have adequately alleged that Smith & Wesson, the nation’s largest gunmaker, knew its AR-15-style rifle could be easily modified into a machine-gun-like or an assault weapon in violation of state law.

A 2005 federal law shields gunmakers from damages in most cases for crimes committed with their weapons. But it allows lawsuits if the manufacturer was negligent or knowingly violated a state or federal law, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

Read it.

The coronavirus pandemic has birthed a new historically-specific group: the lockdown refugees.

Read it.

It will not do to conceal the identity of police officers who kill people. Nor, as far as I know, has the identity of such officers been withheld for long in cases involving police shootings of Blacks. In fact, most police departments are required to release an officer’s name within days of a fatal shooting regardless of the race of those involved.

Furthermore, it will not do to withhold from the public the stated reasons for police killings or the circumstances that caused the officers in question to resort to lethal violence. Again, this information was not withheld in any case I followed where an officer killed an African-American.

Yet, it’s been half a year since a member of the Capitol Police Force shot and killed Ashli Babbitt on January 6. And still, the name of the officer who shot her has not been disclosed.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

I figure that’s how we got Evan Wolfson.

Read it.

We have the technology.

I wish somebody had slapped an AirTag on democracy before the proglodytes stole it, stripped it, and left it burning in a landfill.

Read it.

“Critical race theory” has become the latest “Republicans pounce” story. Liberal media outlets are upset that this is being debated before school boards. On July 7, CNN reporter Elle Reeve complained “relentless propaganda from some conservatives created a panic that white people and especially white children are under attack.”

Perish the thought.

There is zero doubt that after all the overwrought journalistic elevation of George Floyd’s death into a “landmark” historical event that exposed “systemic racism,” the schools would follow. The so-called “hard conversations” – one-sided “anti-racism” diatribes about how America remains hopelessly, structurally racist – are happening in classrooms all across America. But it’s the parents who are “pouncing.”

Read it.

Apparently the chief thing Diana will be remembered for is her yuppie Sloan Ranger job before she was plucked from obscurity by Prince Charles.

Read it.

Most people don’t think much about the food scraps they throw away; however, researchers in Tokyo have developed a new method to reduce food waste by recycling discarded fruit and vegetable scraps into robust construction materials.

‘Mommy, I’m hungry!”

“Go lick the wall, sweetie.”

Read it.

As far as railroads go, the First World consists of the United States and Canada, the only two major countries that haven’t nationalized their rail systems. Just about every other developed country is in the Second World. The Third World consists mainly of countries that don’t have railroads at all or have very few.

Where private owners attempt to earn profits, political leaders want to get re-elected. As a result, government ownership, especially in democracies, leads politicians to direct resources to the most visible activities. Passenger trains are more visible than freight, so Second-World countries dedicate their rail systems to passengers. Private rail systems in the United States and Canada are used mainly for freight because freight rail, unlike passenger trains, is profitable. Not coincidentally, these are also the most productive rail systems in the world.

Read it.

Eventually farming will be done by computer-directed robots, and farm jobs will be engineering and software jobs. The ‘family farm’ will be no more.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that DaVinci’s DNA was a ‘mystery’.

Hey, tenure doesn’t grow on trees….

Read it.

The résumé, a document that largely gained prominence in the past half-century, was once a key part of getting a job. Soon, it might just disappear entirely.

ZMan turns drama critic.

Politics in a liberal democracy is a drama run by the ruling class. Think of it as a big stage on which politics is acted out for the masses. In America, this means the Left opens the show by demanding action against some threat to “our democracy” or demanding action to defend a victim group. Their fluffers go into the crowd to get the audience excited for the next drama. The actors perform the familiar story, sometimes combining the two into a single story.

At this point, the so-called conservatives waddle onto the stage in their comfort-fit chinos and golf shirts. They dismiss the claims of the Left, either claiming they are exaggerating or that the issue is just not important. The crowd is encouraged to boo and hiss at them, which causes their knees to shake. Before long, some of them break ranks and join the Left in jeering at their old colleagues. The crowd keeps booing and the conservative are eventually run off the stage.

Every once in a while, for reasons science has yet to explain, the conservatives do not start to shiver and quake. They hold their ground. This is when the the spotlight illuminates the right side of the stage and we see the Hitler outfit. Over the sound system comes, “Who in the crowd will perform this vital role?” Sure enough, some idiot from a group fond of weird flags runs up on stage, dons the costume and begins to strut around on stage as the crowd throws rotten vegetables.

Read it.

“Like a lot of people, I criticized Trump back in 2016,” Vance said. “And I ask folks not to judge me based on what I said in 2016, because I’ve been very open about the fact that I did say those critical things and I regret them, and I regret being wrong about the guy. I think he was a good president, I think he made a lot of good decisions for people, and I think he took a lot of flak.

“And as you probably appreciate I’ve taken a lot of flak myself over the last few years for standing up for the president’s voters, but for all standing up for the agenda.

Read it.

It would be an understatement to say that the pendulum of public discussion has swung in favour of the so-called lab leak hypothesis of the origin of Covid-19. In the latest poll, a majority of the United States public said they believed SARS-CoV-2 originated in a laboratory. Alongside this, ‘fact-checks’ that claimed the virus couldn’t have originated from a lab were quickly archived, retracted, or substantially reframed, while several press articles were edited months after publication without warning.

Read it.

It’s been a rough few months for Sci-Hub, the beloved outlaw repository of scientific papers. In January its Twitter account, which had more than 180,000 followers, was permanently suspended. In response to a lawsuit brought by publishers, new papers aren’t being added to its library. The website is blocked in a dozen countries, including Austria, Britain, and France. There are rumors of an FBI investigation.

And yet Alexandra Elbakyan, the 32-year-old graduate student who founded the site in 2011, seems more or less unfazed. I spoke with her recently via Zoom with the assistance of a Russian translator. Elbakyan, who is originally from Kazakhstan, has a bachelor’s degree in computer science and coded Sci-Hub herself. She lives in Moscow now and is studying philosophy at the Russian Academy of Sciences. Back when she started the site, which offers access to north of 85 million papers, she didn’t expect to be fending off lawsuits and dodging investigations a decade on.

There is no such thing as ‘intellectual property’. The definition of ‘property’, both in law and in fact, is something that when one entity is using it other entities are necessarily excluded from using it, within which definition neither ideas nor information will fit. ‘Intellectual property’ is an artificial construct created an enforced by government, originally with the best of intentions, but which has been leveraged by rent-seekers (e.g. ‘patent trolls’, Disney Corp.) to squeeze money out of people without needing to work for it. (This is what enables corporations to buy up the rights to ideas that would hurt their profits and bury them — not my definition of progress, although it certainly fits that of the bureaucracy.)

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Read it.

A medical reversal is when an existing treatment is found to actually be useless or harmful. Psychology has in recent years been racking up reversals: in fact only 40-65% of its classic social results were replicated, in the weakest sense of finding ‘significant’ results in the same direction. (Even in those that replicated, the average effect found was half the originally reported effect.) Such errors are far less costly to society than medical errors, but it’s still pollution, so here’s the cleanup.

Psychology is not alone: medicine, cancer biology, and economics all have many irreplicable results. It’d be wrong to write off psychology: we know about most of the problems here because of psychologists, and its subfields differ a lot by replication rate and effect-size shrinkage.

Psychology is no more a science than is astrology or palmistry.

Read it.

The rigorous format in which the speedrunning community asks players to provide video proof of their runs is itself significant. For many games, you need to show not just a recording of your screen, but also a video of your hands on the controller or keyboard, so moderators can ensure that it really was a human—and not a script or a bot—that clinched the all-important record.

Science has been much slower to adapt, even after countless scandals. Researchers provide images for their papers entirely at their own discretion, and with no official oversight; when they aren’t faked, they might still contain cherry-picked snapshots of experiments that don’t represent the full range of their results. The same applies to numerical data, which are often—consciously or unconsciously—chosen or reported to make the best case for a scientist’s hypothesis, rather than to show the full and messy details. Only a few journals require scientists to do the equivalent of posting the screen-and-hands recording: sharing all their data, and the code they used to analyze it, online for anyone to access.

The most interesting thing is that video gaming won’t win you a lifetime cushy job at a university through tenure. So the rigor ought to align exactly the opposite of the way it actually does.

Read it.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that there was such a thing as a ‘fire scientist’.

I’m glad the ‘U.S. West’ is a single entity that can take action. I’m sure there’s a Federal agency for that.

Read it.

EVs are cool. They are not new. The history of EVs is a century of failure tailgating failure. In 1911, the New York Times said that the electric car “has long been recognized as the ideal solution.” In 1990, the California Air Resources Board mandated 10% of car sales be zero-emission vehicles by 2003. Today, 31 years later, only about 6% of the cars in California have an electric plug.

Read it.

Put a 20mm Bushmaster turret on top with a head-up display and I’m in.