Freeberg discusses how the Children of the Sixties are showing their age.

I very often use the term “this stuff we today call ‘liberalism’,” along with “liberalism as we know it today.” These are simply embellishments to phrasing, to make the meaning more precise when it seems like I have the luxury of doing so; the rest of the time I just call it “liberalism,” which is a betrayal against proper definition. After all, the luxury of precision may be gone for awhile, but one’s obligations as a writer remain. Now & then, to avoid flouting the far weightier obligation of not-boring-the-reader, one must use shorthand; one must hope the reader will “get it.” Liberalism is supposed to mean power to the people. It has classically meant free market capitalism, and civil liberties under rule of law. Hopefully, where I’ve failed some writing duties, I’ve succeeded in others, for here in the first paragraph even the casual reader can spot the problem. Liberalism, as we know it today, is most certainly not about these things.

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Using a new technique which takes adult cells back to their embryonic form, US researchers at the Salk Institute in California, showed it was possible to reverse ageing in mice, allowing the animals to not only look younger, but live for 30 per cent longer.

The technique involves stimulating four genes which are particularly active during development in the womb. It was also found to work to turn the clock back on human skin cells in the lab, making them look and behave younger.

Scientists hope to eventually create a drug which can mimic the effect of the found genes which could be taken to slow down, and even reverse the ageing process. They say it will take around 10 years to get to human trials.

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What? Not Barack Obama? That’s raaaaaaacist!

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By the phrasing of the headline you can tell that these are actually Koreans who are U.S. citizens only by an odd quirk of fate. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course.

What person of normal intelligence would go to North Korea? These are people from he shallow end of the gene pool, of whom we are well rid.

Think of it as evolution in action.

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Democrats are people who believe that all your Stuff belongs to the government, of which on a good day when they are feeling mellow they will allow you to keep a portion.

The corollary of this is that occasionally they come to take some more of your Stuff (and you to jail if you object to it).

This is an introduction to what you might be able to do under those circumstances.

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Really, if you were a monkey in the 17th century, what would you do?

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It’s not just for spec ops any more.

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Ask me whether I give a shit.

‘Popular Science’ has decided to bag the Science and go all-in on the Popular.

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Well, once adults riding bicycles became a thing, I suppose this was inevitable.

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It is if you’re hungry.

Most people have been perpetually reminded since childhood that breakfast is a must. But in recent years, nutritionists and scientists have called this crucial eating time into question. And despite a plethora of research, the scientific community still hasn’t come to a solid conclusion as to when the best time to eat your first meal of the day really is.

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AlGore must have held another fund-raiser.

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According to Hodjat, the system grabs unused computer power from “millions” of computer processors inside data centers, Internet cafes, and computer gaming centers operated by various companies in Asia and elsewhere. Its software engine, meanwhile, is based on evolutionary computation—the same genetics-inspired technique that plays into Aidyia’s system.

In the simplest terms, this means it creates a large and random collection of digital stock traders and tests their performance on historical stock data. After picking the best performers, it then uses their “genes” to create a new set of superior traders. And the process repeats. Eventually, the system homes in on a digital trader that can successfully operate on its own. “Over thousands of generations, trillions and trillions of ‘beings’ compete and thrive or die,” Blondeau says, “and eventually, you get a population of smart traders you can actually deploy.”

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When it comes to political speeches, great ones are few and far between. But ordinary political speeches, those given in U.S. congressional floor debates, for example, are numerous.

They are also remarkably similar. These speeches tend to follow a standard format, repeat similar arguments, and even use the same phrases to indicate a particular political affiliation or opinion. It’s almost as if there is some kind of algorithm that determines their content.

That raises an interesting question. Is it possible for a machine to write these kinds of political speeches automatically?

Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Valentin Kassarnig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, who has created an artificial intelligence machine that has learned how to write political speeches that are remarkably similar to real speeches.

I always suspected that Rachel Madow was a robot.

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They call themselves Righteous Noahides: non-Jews who believe in Orthodox Judaism. According to Jewish theology, there are laws that Jews must obey, the 613 mitzvot, but then there are seven laws for children of Noah—everyone else in the world. They are: Do not deny God; do not blaspheme; do not murder; do not engage in incest, adultery, pederasty, or bestiality; do not steal; do not eat of a live animal; and establish courts.

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Noahidism now encompasses communities around the world, especially in Great Britain, the Philippines, Latin America, Nigeria, Russia, and the United States. According to Rabbi Michael Schulman, who runs Noahide website AskNoah.org, the Philippines may have the most developed community, with well over 1,000 adults and their children living in a collection of agricultural towns. They run Hebrew schools, community meetings, and even a national summit.

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Hint: Fences.

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Back to Michoacan for you, Manuel.

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That Trump — what a failure. He ought to just go home and let Hillary take over the Obama legacy of destroying the economy and making everybody but the Crust poorer and poorer.

Megan McArdle isn’t buying it.

My quarrel is not with the politics of “The Handmaid’s Tale,” nor with its realism. Expecting plausibility from dystopian fiction is like expecting haute cuisine from a highway service area. Of the dystopian fiction I’ve read, only “1984” comes even remotely close to feeling real, and that’s because Orwell was working from two vivid contemporaneous examples, from which he lifted freely.

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America hasn’t had a unified theocratic tradition since the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the descendants of those Puritans are now pouring their fervent moralism into buying Priuses and complaining about Trump. The closest modern equivalent, the statewide hegemony of the Latter-day Saints in Utah, doesn’t look very much like The Handmaid’s Tale, and hasn’t the faintest prayer of co-opting the rest of the nation’s fractured religious traditionalists, many of whom do not even consider the Mormons to be Christian. And even if some movement did, somehow, gather a Mormon-like critical mass, Trump is hardly likely to be its avatar; our most religious red state was also the one where Trump had the greatest trouble.

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There is nothing wrong with enjoying implausibilities on a screen or page. But there is something very wrong with hysterically declaring that those things are reality. That risks confusion so we will not notice the real dystopia rising — or the rest of the world will be too tired of our cries to hear any warnings we shout.

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Algorithms, we are told, “rule our world.” They are ubiquitous. They lurk in the shadows, shaping our lives without our consent. They may revoke your driver’s license, determine whether you get your next job, or cause the stock market to crash. More worrisome still, they can also be the arbiters of lethal violence. No wonder one scholar has dubbed 2015 “the year we get creeped out by algorithms.” While some worry about the power of algorithms, other think we are in danger of overstating their significance or misunderstanding their nature. Some have even complained that we are treating algorithms like gods whose fickle, inscrutable wills control our destinies.

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The company behind a private fusion reactor in Great Britain announced Friday it will become partially operational next year.

The new reactor, dubbed Tokamak ST40, is being built in Oxfordshire by the a private company Tokamak Energy. The company plans to start generating the plasma necessary for fusion power sometime this fall and will reach operating temperatures early next year.

You can believe as much or as little of that as you care to.

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The top response may or may not come as a surprise to you – people not keeping their trolleys with them in supermarkets:

“Leave their cart in the middle of the damn grocery aisle while they look at stuff on the shelves. MOVE, PEOPLE,” one angry person wrote.

Amen to that.

Many agreed, and it wasn’t just in the aisles that neglected trolleys cause annoyance: “Leave their cart in the middle of an empty parking spot because they can’t be bothered to bring it back,” one person added.

Preach it, brother.

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, vents about media treatment of the proposed ‘tax reform’.

In recent days I have – likely like you have – heard and read several media reports on Trump’s tax plan (or what we know of it so far).  Nearly all of these reports are juvenile: changes in tax rates are evaluated by the media according to changes in the legal tax liabilities of various groups of people.  For example, Trump’s proposal to cut the top federal personal income-tax rate from 39.6% to 35% is assessed only by its effect on high-income earners.  Specifically, of course, it’s portrayed as a ‘gift’ to high-income earners.  Eliminating the estate tax, as well as the alternative minimum tax, are likewise portrayed as benefits for the rich.

My purpose here isn’t to praise or to pillory Trump’s tax plan; I’ve yet to examine it in any detail.  My purpose, instead, is to lament this popular approach to evaluating taxation.  This approach, as Deirdre McCloskey might say, is that of a lawyer and not that of an economist.  The lawyer focuses on legal liabilities; the economist focuses on systemic consequences, both immediate and ‘seen’ as well as distant and ‘unseen.’

Actually, most of the j-school grads who are bloviating about it on TV aren’t even lawyers — but they have access to lawyers who (a) are mostly Democrats and (b) apparently slept through a lot of law school.

It’s true that if Smith’s last (say) $10,000 of annual income is currently taxed at a rate higher than a proposed new lower rate, Smith is made better off if this proposed lower marginal tax rate becomes reality.  (As an aside, I refuse to go along with the common-in-many-circles description of such a tax cut as a “gift” or a “giveaway” to Smith and other high-income earners.  Smith is the person who earned the income.  It is his property.  This income belongs to Smith.  The government takes it away from him.  For the government to reduce the amount of money that it takes away from Smith is not properly called a giveaway to Smith.  But let’s here say no more about this particular linguistic battering of reality.)

There’s a lot of that going around these days; the presumption that all your income belongs to the government except for whatever they graciously deign to let you keep infects a lot of people beyond the Usual Suspects who want your earnings confiscated because it’s more than they think you deserve.

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A new research letter published today in the journal Nature makes a startling claim that, if correct, will rewrite everything we know about how North America was populated.

But in the the words of its own author, Steven Holen, the evidence he and his colleagues discovered “went against everything I’ve ever taught in my career about early humans in North America.”

So clearly it’s reasonable to be skeptical. That’s why we’re breaking down the evidence in this special edition of CSI: Mastodon.

UPDATE: More here.

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A useful reference for those of us who often find ourselves throwing books against the wall.

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I want you to consider the possibility that your parents did not shape you as a person. Despite how it feels, your mother and father (or whoever raised you) likely imprinted almost nothing on your personality that has persisted into adulthood. Pause for a minute and let that heresy wash across your synapses. It flies in the face of common sense, does it not? In fact, it’s the type of claim that is unwise to make unless you have some compelling evidence to back it up. Even then it will elicit the ire of many. Psychologists especially get touchy about this subject. I do have evidence, though, and by the time we’ve strolled through the menagerie of reasons to doubt parenting effects, I think another point will also become evident: the problems with parenting research are just a symptom of a larger malady plaguing the social and health sciences. A malady that needs to be dealt with.

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The study found evidence of the comet engraved on a pillar in the world’s oldest temple at G?bekli Tepe in Southern Turkey. The engraving indicates the comet killed thousands, wiping out many large animal species, and triggering a miniature ice age lasting 1,000 years.

Oddly enough, all life on earth was not destroyed. So I wouldn’t sweat the ‘global warming’ scare.

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Another lefty myth debunked.

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Some people just can’t shake loose from playing with blocks.

Joe Bob Briggs investigates ancestry.

I’m loving all these Ancestry.com commercials where dim-witted actors say, “I thought I was a Tahitian Eskimo Mexican until I sent in my DNA test kit, and boy was I flummoxed when the results came back! I’m really Croatian with a mix of sub-Saharan! I guess I’ll be turning in my furry hat!”

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Given its iconic hold on the American imagination, the idea that more Americans are leaving California than coming breaches our own sense of uniqueness and promise. Yet, even as the economy has recovered, notably in the Bay Area and in pockets along the coast, the latest U.S. Census Bureau estimates show that domestic migrants continue to leave the state more rapidly than they enter it.

The Middle East isn’t the only place that’s producing lots of refugees.

The movement away from expensive core regions reflects the basic preference among people for affordable, less dense housing. The new Census estimates have confirmed this national trend. Migration to both suburbs and smaller cities — and away from dense core counties — is now at the highest rate in a decade.

Population growth in big urban core cities, including New York, is now about half of what it was back in 2010. Last year, all 10 of the top gainers in domestic migration were sprawling, more affordable Sun Belt metropolitan areas in states like Texas, North Carolina, Florida and Tennessee.

These dispersive trends are clear in Southern California, where net migration out of Los Angeles County runs about four times the rate of neighboring, more suburban Orange County, as migration to places like Riverside County mounts. Despite all the national hype surrounding L.A.’s drive for densification, it’s not a model that most people, and particularly families, seem to be embracing.

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Comedian Bill Nye accused CNN of doing a “disservice” to its viewers for inviting a well-respected physicist on Earth Day to argue about the legitimacy of man-made global warming.

Nye, who is well known for hosting a children’s TV show in the 1990s, scolded CNN’s “New Day Saturday” panel Saturday for pitting his environmentalist pedigree against the climate skepticism of physicist William Happer.

He also suggested the 24-news channel should instead drown out people like Happer with 98 scientists who believe in man-made global warming.

For the left, one needn’t be a Real Scientist; merely playing on on TV is sufficient.

Come to think of it, that explains AlGore pretty much.

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I am personally amazed by the number of recruiters who have sent us “vetted” professional coders who can’t actually code. This is such a serious problem that if a recruiter sends us three candidates who cannot pass our coding test, we fire the recruiter. We can’t afford to waste the time.

Tech recruiters charge 18 to 25 percent of the first year’s salary, but even the best recruiters we’ve worked with cannot truly vet the types of engineers we need. As far as I can tell, recruiters are not under pressure to learn, because high-end tech talent is so rare, hiring managers will take practically anyone who can fog a mirror. We won’t. And you shouldn’t.

In practice, we could train these workers, but not at market prices with added recruiter vigorish. We just can’t get enough value out of B-team players while they are in training, and by the time we help them become A-team players, their GitHub accounts and contributions will reflect their learning. At that point, they will be firmly on the radar of top-tier tech. And we would have played the role of pre-school for Facebook, Google, or Apple. Great for Zuck, Larry, or Tim, but not so great for us.

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In short, I don’t think even Reagan could have defeated Obama-Hillary and the transgendered, victim-mongering, sexual-schizophrenic Democrat loonies. Little did anyone, least of all me, know that there was a strange orange-haired being in the universe that had the odd characteristic of killing the fungus that was growing all over Washington DC. His very presence seemed to damage the up until then unstoppable fungal growth. Jonah, rather than continue to wildly rip the strange orange creature that neither you nor I fully understand, we should give thanks to a beneficent G-d who has heard our prayers and delivered us from the scourge of Obama-Hillary. Some things as just beyond our ability to predict or control.

Let Trump be Trump and let the fungus among us continue to die.

This ongoing discussion between James Gawron and Jonah Goldberg has an interesting take on the comparison and contrast between Reagan and Trump. I found it very thought-provoking.

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Because the Cloud People and the Dirt People are clean different things.

It turns out that many members of the Senate, while opposing private school choice policies that would benefit others, practice school choice themselves.

Since 2000, The Heritage Foundation has surveyed members of Congress to determine whether they had exercised private school choice by ever sending a child to private school.

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Hey, she was biodegradable; friends of the earth and all that.

Apparently the only species that isn’t endangered is humanity.

Popular Mechanics pursues its modern Leftist political agenda.

But of course it matters. Because if we can’t decide when a species becomes a species, it means we don’t have a very useful definition of “species.” And if we don’t have a good definition of “species,” then we can’t address issues like preserving biodiversity or saving endangered creatures. Much of the legislation that protects certain plants and animals depends on defining which species are endangered in the first place. And some creatures are already in danger.

In August 2016, a group called the Pacific Legal Association petitioned to take the coastal California Gnatcatcher bird off the protected list under the Endangered Species Act. They said that the coastal variety wasn’t a distinct species, so it shouldn’t be specifically protected. They did the same thing for the Southwest Willow Flycatcher, another Pacific coast bird with rapidly disappearing habitat. The coastal California Gnatcatcher retained its protections because a panel of experts determined that the coastal variety was different enough that it qualified as its own group, but the Flycatchers are still up for debate. It all hinges on how we define a species.

By that reasoning, black people aren’t a different species so #BlackLivesMatter is nonsense.

Funny how the same people who think that ‘race’ is a ‘social construct’ spend most of their time worrying about (wait for it) race.

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When not pushing their left-wing agenda, Popular Science sometimes talks about science.

The largest diamonds ever mined on earth aren’t just set apart by their large size and luster, but by a unique origin story as well. They were born of metal, growing from patches of liquid iron and gas deep inside the Earth.

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“Diamonds like [the Cullinan] have characteristics that aren’t quite the same as other kinds of diamonds. For years, geologists have wondered if maybe they formed in a slightly different way or if they came from a different part of the mantle. It’s been a lingering question that’s been really hard to tackle,” Smith says.

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

In years past, hunters would begin their sporting careers in pursuit of small game. The tricks and tactics they learned were then put to use on bigger game such as deer and turkeys.

These days, however, the trend has been reversed. Most new hunters head straight for the deer stand or turkey blind and never learn the basic skills and strategies gained by long hours spent cruising the hardwoods in search of sharp-eyed bushytails.

The slackers.

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Do you know the real reason Dr. Dao was so brutally tackled and thrown off that United flight? It was all about white supremacy. I mean, what isn’t these days? That idea is from the New Republic. Yes, the cops “seemed” to be African-American, as the author concedes, so the white-versus-minority paradigm is a little off. Yes, this has happened before to many people with no discernible racial or gender pattern. Yes, there is an obvious alternative explanation: The seats from which passengers were forcibly removed were randomly assigned. New York published a similar piece, which argued that the incident was just another example of Trump’s border-and-immigration-enforcement policies toward suspected illegal immigrants of color. That no federal cops were involved and there is no actual evidence at all of police harassment of Asian-Americans is irrelevant — it’s all racism, all the time, everywhere in everything.

It’s easy to mock this reductionism, I know, but it reflects something a little deeper. Asian-Americans, like Jews, are indeed a problem for the “social-justice” brigade. I mean, how on earth have both ethnic groups done so well in such a profoundly racist society? How have bigoted white people allowed these minorities to do so well — even to the point of earning more, on average, than whites? Asian-Americans, for example, have been subject to some of the most brutal oppression, racial hatred, and open discrimination over the years. In the late 19th century, as most worked in hard labor, they were subject to lynchings and violence across the American West and laws that prohibited their employment. They were banned from immigrating to the U.S. in 1924. Japanese-American citizens were forced into internment camps during the Second World War, and subjected to hideous, racist propaganda after Pearl Harbor. Yet, today, Asian-Americans are among the most prosperous, well-educated, and successful ethnic groups in America. What gives? It couldn’t possibly be that they maintained solid two-parent family structures, had social networks that looked after one another, placed enormous emphasis on education and hard work, and thereby turned false, negative stereotypes into true, positive ones, could it? It couldn’t be that all whites are not racists or that the American dream still lives?

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Too many.

Sadly, a lot of companies need to require a college degree because that’s the only way they can be confident that the applicant has what used to be a standard high school education.

Also, requiring a college degree is one of the few ways around the Politically Correct discrimination laws.

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Consider also that California’s approximately 39 million population equals the total combined population of the nation’s 22 smallest states. I can regale you with geographic trivia, but the closer you look, the harder it is to fathom why talks of breaking up California are not taken more seriously. California is too large in size and population to be governed fairly.

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In late March, two leaders of the Brexit movement—the successful, underdog referendum to extricate the United Kingdom from the European Union—were in Huntington Beach to receive an award from the American Association of Political Consultants. While there, they touted the latest plan to chop up California into two or more independent states. This is Version 2.0 of Silicon Valley entrepreneur Tim Draper’s previous plan to create “Six Californias.”