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Can trees sponge metal from the soil? Researchers use an experimental metal farm to find out.

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The most important axiom for understanding how the U.S. corporate media functions is that there is never accountability for those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state. The opposite is true: the more aggressively and recklessly you spread CIA narratives or pro-war manipulation, the more rewarded you will be in that world.

What strikes me is not the rather obvious message in the specific text but the ease with which the “given” (i.e. that there are those who serve as propagandists for the U.S. security state) is just plopped on the table. From this point on, it is clear that everything he imparts in the rest of the piece about the identity and mission of these assets is completely known by everyone involved. They all know the game and their part in it. They are all part of it.

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Identity politics is the new religion of the United States. Some will dissent from this claim. There are those who simply don’t want to see how deep-seated the factionalism of the public square now is. And there are those who have a vested interest in minimizing the righteous religiosity of what is commonly called “wokeness.” But in its demand for full conformity, its rituals and liturgies, and its unfailing ability to sniff out heresy, it resembles nothing so much as a religious cult. And this, ironically, is where the man whom many consider the founder of the feast, Karl Marx, may prove useful to those of us wondering how to respond.

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Combining a monitor, keyboard, and modem all in one beige plastic package, the Minitel terminal — known as the “Little French Box” — was once a common sight in French households. With it, writes Julien Mailland in the Atlantic, “one could read the news, engage in multi-player interactive gaming, grocery shop for same-day delivery, submit natural language requests like ‘reserve theater tickets in Paris,’ purchase said tickets using a credit card, remotely control thermostats and other home appliances, manage a bank account, chat, and date.” All this at a time when, as Schofield puts it, “the rest of us were being put on hold by the bank manager or queueing for tickets at the station.” And what’s more, the French got their Minitel terminals for free.

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With many still living with little to no access to electricity, American politicians are pursuing the most expensive ways to generate intermittent electricity with offshore wind turbines on the East and West Coasts.

Cue hand-wringing.

The U.S Energy Information Administration (EIA) has already documented that offshore wind continues to be one of the most expensive forms of electricity generation.

Cue hand-wringing.

Energy poverty is among the most crippling but least talked-about crises of the 21st century. Electricity is the one of the simplest solutions to improved health, economic opportunity, education, nutrition, and comfort in the developing world, especially for women and girls.

Cue hand-wringing.

In the world’s poorest countries, there are 11 million children in the world dying every year.

Cue hand-wringing.

Those fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no, or minimal, access to electricity or to the thousands of products from oil derivatives enjoyed by the wealthy and healthy countries.

Cue hand-wringing.

The insistence that we should limit future access to electricity, fossil fuels, and the products made from oil derivatives has an even more dramatic cost, because cheap and accessible power, and products from fossil fuels are lifesaving, and one of the best ways out of poverty.

Hey, we finally got to the point.

Look, I understand that a lot of people in the world are poor. That’s not our problem. That’s their problem. We were just as poor once, and we fixed it. It’s their problem to fix. If they’d quit listening to lame-ass socialist politicians (who are, by and large, not poor), the fixing would be a lot easier.

Our problem is that our own lame-ass socialist politicians are rapidly spending more money than we can afford on shit tat does not work and probably won’t every work, with the result that people in this country are rapidly getting poorer. Let’s solve that problem first, then worry about the rest of the world.

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But they’ll keep building the propeller type, because that’s what gets the government subsidies that makes a ‘wind farm’ profitable — when it is profitable.

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

At the gym today, I saw a Karen exercising alone, masked up of course, making sure to maintain six feet social distance from everyone. I confirmed the latter experimentally — I saw her heading towards the water fountain, so I set course to intercept. Her ostentatious vaudeville veer away from me would’ve done Buster Keaton proud. Naturally, being the asshole I am, I gave her a cheery “good morning!,” but that’s neither here nor there. What’s important is: This little episode shows why I’m an idiot.

Like lots of folks watching the Great Kung Flu Freakout unfold, I figured it would be over in a month or two, three tops. My reasoning was simple: Once Karen realized she was stuck inside with the kids, and couldn’t spend her days out self-actualizing at the shopping mall and the nail salon, she’d demand Fauci’s head on a pike, and that would be that.

ZMan does some anthropology.

Over the last forty years, American politics has been taken over by actors, performers, producers, storytellers and so on. It is just a show. If you want to be in politics, it means being a show man. You have to have an act, something you do that sets you apart from the other acts on the stage. Ocasio-Cortez is a national figure because she came up with an act that appeals to the women of her generation. She is as dumb as a hamster and has no useful skills, but she may be President one day.

This new high status type, the shameless attention whore interested only in appealing to the base instincts of the mob, is having an effect on society. Younger generations, especially the women, are relentless drama queens. The “woke culture” stuff is really just a way for talentless young women to get attention. Male video game culture seems to be a similar phenomenon. It is a way to be special without having to do anything that is difficult or demanding. You get to be a hero from the couch.

Read it.

Not the sort of thing you expect to see in the Washington Post.

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A provision in President Biden’s American Jobs Plan to make housing more affordable by giving cities incentives to abolish single-family zoning has a number of flaws. Most important, single-family zoning didn’t make housing expensive and abolishing single-family zoning won’t make it more affordable.

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A divided panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco reinstated a Trump administration order that permitted removal of the guns from the State Department’s Munitions List.

 

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The Babbitt family, he said, disagrees with the Department of Justice’s move to not pursue criminal charges against the officer, adding “clearly, the officer required willfullness … he could clearly see that she was not armed” and didn’t present an immediate threat. The officer also didn’t give ample warning before the shooting, Roberts said.

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Hunter Biden, the president’s son, seemingly faces no legal consequences for a possible deception during a background check while buying a gun.

It’s not clear whether the younger Biden broke the letter of federal gun law, although several legal experts and commentators say the question warrants an investigation.

Biden bought a .38-caliber revolver in Delaware on Oct. 12, 2018, according to an account by Politico published last month.

Politico reported: “Hunter responded ‘no’ to a question on the transaction record that asks, ‘Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?’”

Does it surprise anybody that he lied?

Does it surprise anybody that he’ll never suffer any consequences in a situation where anybody not named Biden would probably go to jail?

Read it.

Next up: Republican lawyers launch ad urging Americans to sue the government.

Victor Davis Hanson.

A multiracial democracy of the 21^st century has abruptly begun worshiping superficial appearances, as it announces that everything from the order of vaccinations and farm aid to cash vouchers for the poor and dorm selections will be determined by race, in utter violation of the U.S. Constitution that is increasingly despised, especially its Bill of Rights. (Have you noticed that the Left now feels about the First Amendment the same way it always despised the Second?)

Victor Davis Hanson.

Our finally irony this week? Who is the White Privileg-ist of all? Hunter Biden, of course.

He’s got a  point.

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Everything is content. We all “pray in swear words,” to borrow Barlow’s phrase, and emerging forms of art are conspicuously products, characterized by their sale prices and ownership status as much as aesthetic merit. Free or not, content is still a commodity, inherently shaped by the platforms that circulate it and responsive to their incentives, monetary or otherwise. Rather than overthrowing the corporate entertainment industry, the internet has led us to internalize that industry’s logic, precipitating what is often called the “creator economy.” A host of intermediaries providing payment management systems, distribution infrastructure, marketing support, and systematized artificial scarcity are emerging to help individuals commodify and monetize more of their online presence. Intellectual property hasn’t faded away; instead it has become even more embedded in the fabric of the internet.

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President Biden claimed that Derek Chauvin’s conviction on Tuesday “ripped the blinders off for the whole world to see the systemic racism” of police. With the police shooting that same day of 16-year-old girl in Columbus, Ohio, the White House again pushed the racism claim, noting that this was just another example of how “police violence disproportionately impacts Black and Latino people.”

But where is the evidence for these claims? In Chauvin’s trial, the prosecution never once mentioned evidence that the now-former officer is racist. A day after the verdict, the Biden administration announced plans for a pattern-or-practice investigation of the Minneapolis Police Department to determine if there is such racism, but the administration’s comments sure sound as if they have already determined the study’s outcome.

What are mere facts, compared to The Narrative?

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We hear all the time that “children are our future”. We must spend more money on education because children are our future! We must spend more money on social welfare services because children are our future! We must destroy school lunches because our children’s future depends on it! We must wage war on climate change because it’s our children’s future! (You never hear these same people say we must manage the debt for our children’s future. Weird.)

Matt Taibbi.

The effort by the “SALT caucus” to hold a $2 trillion relief bill hostage in order to help what they’re calling “struggling families” in the “middle class” is just the latest development in a years-long saga revealing Congress at its phoniest and most shameless.

This issue that “means so much to the American people,” according to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is really a niche matter concerning a sliver of the most well-off Americans in a handful of blue states, who were made the target of a political prank of sorts by the Trump administration in 2017.

The problem with the class warfare rhetoric that the Democrats indulge in habitually is coming back to bite them on their well-upholstered butts now that the Democrats have turned into the Party of the Rich. (They keep talking as if the Republicans are the party of the rich, but the truth is out there.)

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And promptly get stolen.

The Narrative media tend to forget that not everybody in New Yawk is a Woke Hipster.

Some bosses never make it past this simple threshold.

Read it.

Former defense secretary Robert Gates once wrote that President Joe Biden has been ‘wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades’. To which John Kerry might reply, what am I, chopped liver? After all, when it comes to disastrous track records, America’s haughtiest envoy should not be overlooked.

John Kerry has been failing upward since Vietnam.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

Every once in a while, you cannot help but notice that the people who rule over us are operating like primitives from another age. A great example is this video in which Susan Wojcicki, the head of YouTube, gives herself an award. The award in this case is for her support of free speech. While accepting the award, she brags about the efforts of YouTube to stifle the speech of anyone with whom she disagrees. You see, slavery is freedom, war is peace, and she is a hero of free speech.

The amazing bit is where she mentions that her family was chased out of Poland because they kept saying and doing things the Poles did not like. She says this experience that she did not actually experience, is what drives her now to drive people off the internet who say and do things she does not like. You see, back then it was bad, but now it is good because she is doing it. More important, she is justified in doing it because Hitler, which makes everything right.

Zman preaches to the choir.

Back when the Covid-19 panic started, a clever fellow pointed out that one possible way out of it would be a vaccine that did not work, but with enough effort could convince people it did work. The rulers could claim it is 80% effective at preventing infection and there would be no way to know it was a lie based on medical statistics. The vaccinated who got Covid would just be those for whom the vaccine did not work. If the producer could keep the secret, no one would be the wiser.

The reason for this is simple math. The claims about the infectiousness of this virus were always nonsense. A year of aggressive testing has resulted in about 10% of the public having tested positive. We know that the false positives are very high, but we also know many infected people never get tested. Either they have no idea they have been infected or their symptoms are so mild they ignore it. Like the flu, Covid can be expected to infect around 20% of the public in a year.

If your vaccine is 80% effective, then that 20% is miraculously accurate. A clever ruler could roll out a fake vaccine and claim it is doing as it claims. The gullible media and research community would fall for it completely. Unless someone in on the scam spilled the beans, no one would know. In the age where the media is just the marketing department for the corporate state, whistleblowers are ignored. Given the money involved, a fake vaccine program is not a bad bet.

Read it.

Disembodied female-sounding voices echo out across cities and transitory spaces as an integral means of controlling movement. Often found in stations, shopping centres, supermarket checkouts, elevators, automated phone lines, GPS systems and the more interactive virtual assistants such as Siri, Cortana, or Alexa—an almost ubiquitous voice appears. It is a seemingly familiar, comfortable accent that speaks softly, guiding in the right direction, calling for attention and reminding us to be careful. The pitches fluctuate with some more human-sounding and others more robotic. Phonemes pieced together to sound out the right words but most commonly retaining a ‘she’ pronoun and clichéd ‘feminine’ qualities.

She is there to take care of us, to direct and gently usher us in the right direction. Her ‘well-spoken’, reassuring tone is embedded with a history of service workers and disembodied voices used in public and private spheres. It is intended to take on a specific gendered role; to politely and submissively assist.

Read it.

Moving to Texas from Taxachusetts is a no-brainer.

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An excellent, in-depth analysis of how we got so deep in the … muck.

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Left-wing magazine Slate took the stunning and brave step Saturday of publishing an article outlining the case for no longer wearing masks outside.

‘As we’ve come to know more about the virus, as vaccinations are ramping up, and as we’re trying to figure out how to live with some level of COVID in a sustainable way, masking up outside when you’re at most briefly crossing paths with people is starting to feel barely understandable,’ the author reasoned.

Mask enthusiasts melted down in response, insisting that Slate‘s article was ‘irresponsible‘, ‘going to get people killed‘ and ‘misleading‘. Others celebrated the article as ‘a good sign of progress‘. A Harvard infectious disease specialist asserted, ‘I am generally a hawk about maintaining rules with a clear benefit. Outdoor masking has notable costs and really no evidence of benefits.’

Johnathan Turley

Below is my column in the Hill on two issues that arose on the final day of the trial of Derek Chauvin that could now feature prominently in any appeal. There will likely be an array of conventional appellate issues from the elements of the murder counts to the sufficiency of the evidence. Obviously, any appeal will wait until after sentencing, which will take many weeks. However, two issues were highlighted on the final day which could play a role in the appeal.

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And always has been.

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Today, the Democratic Party seems more united, still glowing in the aftermath of the defeat of Trump. But that is just an illusion: Joe Biden’s first hundred days in office are almost up — and the internal conflicts of his party are bound to surface soon.

These divisions are not petty, or merely personal, but based on demands from a number of incompatible constituencies and ideologies. Take the Democrats’s newest supporters: America’s tech oligarchs, Wall Street financiers and urban real estate speculators. They may act “woke” on issues surrounding gender, race and the environment. But such “virtue signalling” is no substitute for the drastic policies pushed by the party’s Left: the confiscation of vast wealth, the break-up of monopolies and the introduction of ever-higher taxes. Big business, after all, is the clear winner in the status quo that the Left, with good reason, despises.

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Hammer tech.

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Tal Kopan, Washington correspondent of the San Francisco Chronicle, popped up on Twitter to say: ‘This is fascinating — Biden goes to church every week and is known to be a devout Catholic.’ The word ‘devout’ is the sticking point here. It has always clung to the word ‘Catholic’ in media parlance; as ‘staunch’ does ‘Protestant’.

Since Biden took office, however, ‘devout Catholic’ has become a political shibboleth. For liberal media commentators, it’s a vocal genuflection to the President. But for many Republicans and traditional Catholics — and the overlap between the two is huge — it’s accompanied by eye-rolling or a snicker. Devout Joe Biden? Give me a break.

“Devout Catholic” is (apparently) a Good Thing when Joe Biden does it but a Bad Thing when a Republican Supreme Court nominee (such as Amy Barrett) does it.

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Hear, hear.

Modern America.

ZMan is not afraid to speak of the virus that dare not say its name.

One of the interesting side bars to the Covid panic is the extreme lack of interest in the origin of the virus. The story a year ago was that it sprung from so-called “wet markets” where provincials trade exotic meats. One version said it was from bats and another claimed it was the pangolin. Then the story shifted to the lab in Wuhan where the outbreak started. That was dropped as the Chinese Communist Party instructed the American media to stop talking about the lab in Wuhan.

Conventional wisdom says the wet market stuff was always just a way to divert attention from the fact that the Chinese have a bioweapons operation. The Biological Weapons Convention not only prohibits the use of biological agents, but it also prohibits the development of them as well. In light of the worldwide panic over the Covid virus, it is not hard to see why everyone is trying to shift the focus from the lab to exotic meat markets. This public health emergency could easily become a political crisis.

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If that’s the mood he’s in, I could give him a list.

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As I walk toward Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s office, I notice a large flag and sign opposing one another across the hall. Greene’s neighbor, Democratic Rep. Marie Newman, has recently planted a transgender pride flag to protest Greene’s opinion that biological men should not be playing women’s sports. Greene responded by posting a sign that says, ‘There are TWO genders: MALE & FEMALE. “Trust The Science.”’

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I’d rather he be set on fire than see him run for office again, too.

I’ll even provide the matches.

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Ever wonder where the Ruling Class’s SJWs come from? Look no farther.