Babylon Bee.

A new wave of controversy erupted as 12 women came forward alleging they had been sexually assaulted by whoever Trump’s vice presidential pick would end up being.

The Economist.

Financial crime is as old as money. Hucksters were dreaming up Ponzi schemes centuries before Charles Ponzi gave his name to the ruse. Where there has been tax, there has been evasion. The looting of national coffers is as time-honoured as politics itself. But the late 20th and early 21st centuries saw an explosion in the scale, scope and level of sophistication of financial shenanigans, as globalisation fuelled the growth of offshore finance, and particularly the use of anonymous shell companies and trusts to shroud nefarious activity. This, in turn, has sparked a crackdown, albeit a fitful one, by governments—as well as leaks like the Panama Papers. However, as recent scandals from 1mdb to Wirecard attest, the battle to end financial secrecy and the dodginess it engenders is far from won. Here are five books to help you understand why.

Steve Sailer.

Over the last year, I was doing a lot of driving and thus a lot of listening to the radio. My impression of the three songs most often played on English language Los Angeles radio in 2023-24 are The Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Boston’s “More Than A Feeling,” and Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams,” all of which came out when I was a freshman in college in 1976-77.

These days’ radio stations seem to play each band’s most popular song vastly more often than even it’s second most popular song. I must have heard “Hotel California” ten times as often as “Take It Easy.” (Granted, “Take It Easy” is probably played more often in Winslow, Arizona than on Sunset Boulevard.) In the old days, disk jockeys would get bored and play other songs, but I’m sure now MBAs have moneyballed playlists.

Also, there seems to be a sharp dividing line determining which oldies are too old, at least during drive time, set at about 52 years ago. I’m guessing that radio stations figure people first imprint on new music at age 13 and retire from daily commuting at age 65. The first month I was driving, the oldest song I could remember hearing on a commercial radio station was Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer.” I heard very little Beatles or Stones. “Take It Easy” came out in 1972 so it’s right about the point the point at which commuters are retiring to take it easy, so it’s not played that much anymore.

When I was in college, the idea that popular music stations would play music from fifty years ago would have been laughed to scorn.

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If you look at the paws of a cat, a dog or even a kangaroo, you’ll notice they have something in common with our hands. Even if some might be shrunken or differently positioned, all of these mammals have five digits, or fingers. Why do we share this pattern with our furry friends, even though we evolved under different conditions?

Just lucky, I guess.

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Every four years we hear Alec Baldwin, Babs Streisand, Michael Moore and other flaky leftists say they will leave the country if a Republican wins the presidency, and one of these days they may actually mean it, though I doubt it. I recall my mentor Stan Evans joking that “I voted for George W. Bush because Alec Baldwin said he’d leave the country. Which just goes to show that pragmatism doesn’t work.”

There is a YouTube channel that will help: Nomad Capitalist

ZMan is not afraid to ask the hard questions.

There is a famous line from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov in which one of the characters asserts that if God does not exist, then everything is permitted. This has been resaid many ways and attributed to many people, but the original is from Dostoevsky, the great Russian novelist. For most of human history, the answer to the question, “Who says?” has been God, maybe the gods or perhaps a holy man who everyone agrees has some connection to the gods.

When someone said you should not do something, that question, “Who says?” was baked into the statement, along with its answer. You should not speak ill of the gids because the gods will exact revenge on you or maybe the authorities, fearing the wrath of the gods, will punish you. The answer to the question of who says you should or should not do something was always the same. it was some concept of the supernatural or its manifestation in the natural world.

In modern times, we do not appeal to the gods. You should not drive your car recklessly in a school zone because the government says you should not do that, and they have men with guns to arrest you if you do it. The answer to the question, “Who says I cannot speed in a school zone?” is the government. Every prohibition in our lives comes with an assumed answer to the question, “Who says?” That answer is almost always the government or its agents.

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Le Monde reports Belgium’s ports drowning under glut of Chinese electric cars: ‘Some are parked here for a year, sometimes more’.

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Continued fighting in Ukraine and Middle East, plus the worldwide persistence of Islamic terrorism and urban violence, has revived interest in William Fairbairn, the developer of close combat methods used by police and the military, especially special operations or commando type troops.

Fairbairn died in 1960, having developed close combat fighting methods and taught them to soldiers and police personnel starting in the 1920s, continuing through World War II and for over a decade after the war. Fairbairn specialized in what he called gutter fighting, a ruthless, no holds barred form of combat referred to as The Fairbairn Method, which were developed in Shanghai, China, during the 1930’s when Fairbairn was an officer of its Chinese police force.

Fairbairn also developed various forms of hand-to-hand combat as well as innovations like the Kill House and bullet-proof transparent shields for police, the commando knife, and pop-up targets. Fairbairn trained allied commandos during World War II and these special operations were so feared by the Germans that Hitler ordered that any who were captured were to be immediately executed. The Germans believed, with some justification, that these commandos could be dangerous even when handcuffed or otherwise restrained. Authors of espionage and special operations publications found, and still find Fairbairn’s books excellent sources of material and details of close combat.

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Dora Moutot is a committed feminist. She was deputy editor-in-chief of Konbini, a website aimed at young people. She has a degree in arts and fashion.

“The hard thing to do and the right thing to do are almost always the same thing.” — James Sexton

Watch his interview with Chris Williamson

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DEI statements are affirmations made when you’re applying for college admission, university jobs, or even science-society grants, recounting to the authorities your philosophy of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” your history of DEI activities, and how you will implement DEI initiatives if you get the admission/job/grant. I have posted quite a bit about them (see collection here), and object to them because they are not only compelled speech and are often completely irrelevant to what you’re applying for, but also ignore the fact that there are many ways to make contributions to society beyond enacting DEI. (For example, what about a college applicant who has taught illiterate adults to read?) And I think many institutions are eliminating them. For one thing, some of them may violate the recent Supreme Court decision on race-based admission. Now MIT has joined the statement-eliminators.

Gabe Bult.

Austin Williams.

The military has a technical term for people who call attention to themselves.

They’re called ‘targets’.

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Like many commentators who have struggled to understand the reasons for the inveterate hatred of Donald Trump among the swank people who actually run the country, I have generally come up with two answers.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

For as long as anyone can recall, the offer from the American political system to the typical white person was a choice between a party that wants to harm you and your interests or a party that will work to prevent it. It was never explicitly stated this way, but it was always the subtext to Republican Party marketing. Vote Republican or risk being subjected to the tender mercies of the Democrats.

Note that the Democratic Party did not market itself this way. They did make wild claims about the Republicans wanting to do things like bring back slavery or roll back women’s rights, but they were always couched in the assertion that the Democrats were going to advance the goals of their supporters. The choice was between progress and regress, never stasis as with the Republican messaging.

Puck.

A secret billionaire dinner party in Hollywood, convened by Elon Musk and David Sacks, presages a major political realignment as Silicon Valley money turns against Biden and begins flowing to Donald Trump.

Associated Press.

Across the U.S., the Catholic Church is undergoing an immense shift. Generations of Catholics who embraced the modernizing tide sparked in the 1960s by Vatican II are increasingly giving way to religious conservatives who believe the church has been twisted by change, with the promise of eternal salvation replaced by guitar Masses, parish food pantries and casual indifference to church doctrine.

The shift, molded by plummeting church attendance, increasingly traditional priests and growing numbers of young Catholics searching for more orthodoxy, has reshaped parishes across the country, leaving them sometimes at odds with Pope Francis and much of the Catholic world.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Wikipedia.

The theory of constraints (TOC) is a management paradigm that views any manageable system as being limited in achieving more of its goals by a very small number of constraints. There is always at least one constraint, and TOC uses a focusing process to identify the constraint and restructure the rest of the organization around it. TOC adopts the common idiom “a chain is no stronger than its weakest link”. That means that organizations and processes are vulnerable because the weakest person or part can always damage or break them, or at least adversely affect the outcome.

ZMan discusses some inconvenient truth.

control of the economics of society. Whether the society is ruled by a king or a committee of girl bosses, the people who have the final say on all matters are those who control the wealth of society. The golden rule of human organization is “the man with the gold makes the rules.” Without much fanfare, we may have seen this rule work its magic in the big neocon funding bill.

The first thing to note about the money for Project Ukraine is most of the money will never turn up in Ukraine, at least not in the form of weapons. If you read the text of the bill most of the money is for slush funds the White House can use to replenish weapons taken off the shelf and sent to Ukraine over the last year. It appears the White House has been shipping weapons to Ukraine that were not paid for by Congress, so this created a debt to the Pentagon budget that is now repaid.

The number of actual weapons going to Ukraine as a result of this bill is a fraction of the sixty billion allocated. Ukraine needs advanced air defense systems, artillery tubes and artillery shells, but none of this is coming from Washington. The main reason for this is none of these things exist, at least not in surplus quantities. You cannot send what does not exist, even with billions to spend. Instead, Ukraine is getting what is available which is wheeled vehicles and surplus arms.

The Foundry.

For most of our lifetimes, classically liberal economics so dominated the Right that nobody wondered if conservatives were abandoning free markets. In recent years, though, a new generation of conservative thinkers—more traditionalist, populist, or nationalist than libertarian—has challenged the utility and even the morality of laissez faire economic policy.

We welcome their questions and critiques, as they have compelled American conservatives to have a long overdue conversation about the market, the family, and the state. But the blunt truth is the movement cannot abandon free markets. The moral and practical case for free enterprise is as necessary today as it was when Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher used it to rescue their nations’ economies and win the Cold War.

Our aim—today as much as it was in 1980—is not economic efficiency for its own sake, but as a powerful means to further human flourishing, what Aristotle called eudaimonia and the Founders called “the pursuit of happiness.” Conservatism seeks the good, the beautiful, and the true—not just the efficient.

OffGuardian.

With the coordinated global release of the Covid-19 narrative in late 2019 and the subsequent illogical demands of governments — allied with transnational organisations and pharmaceutical giants — many people around the world began questioning the hasty, unprecedented, and sweeping technological and technocratic changes being made to societies in the name of a highly marketed “medical emergency”.

Despite new policies emanating from authorities to isolate, to mask, to restrict all social contact, to accept without question unique experimental gene- and nanoparticle-based injections, and to abide by novel and absurd social norms, many people pushed back against the apparent tyranny. The more enthusiastic that governments were in deleting civil rights, suppressing freedom of speech and due process, the more that people sought to expose the story behind the mainstream Covid-19 narrative.

The modern dating scene.

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A personal library differs from a impersonal library in the fact that a personal library is an interpretation of a source material. These interpretations include: photographs from different photographers at the same event, or favorite scenes from a movie, or favorite passages from books, parts of songs that bring you to tears, etc. Importantly, these interpretations create unique sets that go on to create unique problems which require unique, idiosyncratic solutions. Sound familiar?

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If anybody remembers the opening segment from the Will Smith zombie apocalypse flick I Am Legend, it starts with a comically ironic scene wherein a precocious female scientist, endearingly played by Emma Thompson proudly announces a “cure for cancer” that involves reprogramming the measles virus to act more beneficially toward its human host – thereby eradicating cancer cells, and thus, the disease itself.

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A worldwide conflict between communism and capitalism defined the latter half of the twentieth century. The United States’ ideological battle was the central drama of my childhood, and it was with a combination of glee, pride, and “told you so!” that my fellow Americans watched the wall fall in Berlin, and the USSR dissolve shortly thereafter. I expect few would deny that the US is the standard bearer for capitalism.

Yet, there’s a flaw at the heart of this claim. While the United States operates as a free market economy, the key agent within modern capitalism – the corporation – works more like an authoritarian state. Given how much of our world is built around corporations, this truth and its impacts are critical.

The confusion between ‘capitalism’ and ‘free market economy’ is endemic in the modern world. ‘Capitalism’ is the accumulation of resources for use in production, which is the hallmark of modern industrialism–indeed, if you were to substitute ‘industrialism’ for ‘capitalism’ wherever it is used in modern literature you would clarify things tremendously–and ‘capitalism’ is just as much present in ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ economies as in free market systems.

Cat Rotator’s Quarterly.

The Poles call them “little stone cheeses.” The Germans prefer one long word that translates “small stone balls with a groove carved in them.” The come in many sizes, although most are smaller than large, and can be made from any of a list of kinds of stone. Archaeologists have found them from northern Italy to the Baltic, from Gaul to the western steppes in what is now Beylarus and Ukraine. They are all Late Bronze Age, thus far, and no one knew quite what they were for.

Then someone said, “What if they were weights fo some kind. Not loom weights, but measuring weights?” And someone else, four someones else actually, did a lot of careful tedious work weighing, measuring, and recording the little stone cheeses and running the data through computers. Lo and behold, they probably were weights. Prehistoric metrology for the win!

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After years of leftist activists disrupting the speech of groups and individuals they disagree with and threatening people with “cancellation” for having the “wrong” opinions, it’s hard to find sympathy for them when they finally get a taste of their own medicine. Woke protesters have recently sought to bring back the old Seattle CHAZ model of taking over public property and declaring it their own territory; in this case the territory is college campuses around the US.

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Cassidy and colleagues used the ancient man’s molars to reconstruct the first ancient genome for S. mutans. The new data, analyzed in conjunction with modern genomes, allowed them to build a picture of the evolution of the bacteria across millennia for the first time. Previous work with modern oral microbiome genomes suggested that S. mutans populations increased following the adoption of cereal agriculture 12,000 years ago. But the new findings indicate they really skyrocketed around 250 to 750 years ago, when sugar and processed carbs, such as rice and bread, became a big component of human diets. S. mutans particularly loves sucrose, Cassidy says. “It helps it create the sort of sticky film that this bacteria uses to colonize the tooth surface so it can consume all different sugars.”

The Spectator.

Taylor Swift has released another album spilling the beans on her private life. “I’d written so much tortured poetry in the past two years and wanted to share it all with you,” she says. Her fans are lapping up The Tortured Poets Department, but her critics say dishing the dirt on her ex-boyfriends isn’t fair.

Swift is famous for two things; being so massively successful that a musical visit by her can boost a country’s GDP, and for writing snarky songs about her exes. There is something very appealing about the extremes at play here; the former so grown-up and the second so teenage.

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Cats love sitting on any square object, as if drawn by some primordial instinct. A new study shows that the square can even be an optical illusion.

Strategy Page.

One of the transportation difficulties between Ukraine and the NATO countries is the different gauge railroads used in Europe and Ukraine. Europe uses what is known as Standard Gauge. Gauge means the distance between the two rails. Standard gauge rails are 1,455mm apart. The Russian gauge is wider with the rails 1,524mm apart. In other words, Standard gauge tracks are four feet 8.5 inches wide while Russian Gauge tracks are five feet wide. Since Ukraine was until 1991 part of the Soviet Union, all the Ukrainian railroads are Russian gauge. To deal with this problem, Ukraine is building a transshipment point in the west Ukraine town of Uzhhorod which is on the border with Slovakia and near the Hungarian border. Here there are cranes that will quickly lift standard cargo containers from Russian gauge flatcars and load the containers onto European Standard Gauge flatcars. Passenger trains have a similar arrangement where passengers can disembark and walk a short distance to trains with a different gauge.

This greatly hampered the Germans during WWII.

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The roots of cancer run deep. Indeed, they’re usually assumed to run all the way to the blighted bits of DNA we call oncogenic mutations. But what if they don’t have to run quite that deep? What if they needn’t emerge from the genome, but from the epigenome? After all, genomically identical cells that differ epigenomically can mature toward different cell fates. Perhaps some of these fates are cancerous. The possibility seems all the more likely if we consider that many aspects of cancer susceptibility and tumorigenesis have been associated with substantial epigenomic alterations.

This possibility was explored by scientists based at the Institute of Human Genetics, CNRS, University of Montpellier. Using the familiar Drosophila model, the scientists uncovered evidence that tumors can emerge through epigenetic dysregulation leading to inheritance of altered cell fates.

It used to be the Conventional Wisdom that natural selection depended upon random mutations, and since such mutations were few and far between, therefore evolution needed long periods in which to be come apparent. Now, however, we know that environmental factors can cause epigenetic changes, and epigenetic changes can be inherited, so evolution happens faster than most people think–and humans are evolving at a quicker pace than a lot of folks are comfortable with.

Just wait until you see him with a soy latté.

“I like owning stuff.” — Steve Graham

LifeHacker.

It’s been a few years since Lifehacker looked at the slang of Generation Z—long enough that Generation Alpha has had time to develop and spread some of its own special buzzwords and jargon. Below is an alphabetized collection of slang taken from both Gen Z and Gen A, in case someone younger than you says something you don’t understand. As with all slang, if you need an online list to know what a word means, you are too old to say it aloud.

One notable omission is ‘Tyrone’, which refers to a Chad of the Negro persuasion.

Another notable omission is ‘304’ (a.k.a. ‘common garden tool’), derived from entering that number into a handheld calculator and turning it upside down to read the result. (Try it.)

The American Mind.

In early 2022, Capital Research Center alerted Fox News to the existence of a secret 501(c)(3) “charity” called Governing for Impact. The research organization and its sister (c)(4) “dark money” group, the Governing for Impact Action Fund, exist to research, write, promote, and defend new federal regulations for the Biden Administration to issue. These two groups, sponsored by Arabella’s New Venture Fund and Sixteen Thirty Fund, respectively, received a combined $17.4 million in funding from Soros grant-makers from 2019 to 2021. Most surprisingly, the group intentionally operated far under the radar from its launch in 2019 (long before the 2020 presidential election) because its website was carefully set to be invisible to Google and other search engines. That’s right; it was hidden from the public, who couldn’t find it even by accident. But friends, including in the Biden Administration, could reach it if they were told the site’s URL, GoverningForImpact.org, and typed that into their computers. (After news reports based on our research “outed” the site, it became visible to search engines.)