LifeHacker

The thought of someone secretly living in your house and silently waiting in the closet for you to go to work so they can eat your food and pet your cat is terrifying, but it apparently happens often enough to have a name. It’s called “phrogging” and it differs from home invasion and robbery mainly in intent.

The phrog isn’t trying to steal your jewelry like a common burglar; they want to secretly live in your place for a few days before hopping off to someone else’s pad. It’s a risk-heavy but rent-free lifestyle, perfect for amoral thrill-seekers.

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Elon Musk’s revolutionary satellite internet service, Starlink, is spreading across Africa, flying in the face of repressive and corrupt regimes that are trying to block it.

Young Democrats.

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France will consider reintroducing uniforms in state schools following a worrying rise in harassment and violence, and the growing number of controversies surrounding the wearing of the Islamic abaya. The measure has received strong support from the French public, as well as from some teachers. A number of schools are to carry out experiments before the scheme is extended.

There are many well-known arguments in favour of the return of uniforms: an end to competition between children over clothing, and the associated bullying; the disappearance of social differences; making life easier for parents; and an end to demands from different religious communities.

The subject of wearing uniforms regularly crops up in French politics, but until now, no education minister has taken the plunge and put it into practice. The return of the uniform was, for example, part of Éric Zemmour’s programme, but he believes that it should be “imposed” rather than “experimented with.” Les Républicains party chairman Éric Ciotti was also in favour. In January, the Rassemblement National put forward a bill to reintroduce uniforms, arguing that they would solve two problems: “Brand competition and pressure from Islamists on children attending school.” The bill was rejected because it was proposed by Marine Le Pen’s party. The President’s wife, Brigitte Macron, explained that she was in favour too. Today, it is someone close to Emmanuel Macron who has decided to break the taboo and support the wearing of uniforms.

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For decades, statins have been heralded as the reliable heroes in the battle against heart disease, the leading cause of death in the United States and globally. However, this seemingly flawless reputation has been called into question.

A new expert review suggests that long-term use of statins may be inadvertently aiding the enemy by accelerating coronary artery calcification instead of providing protection.

As is common in modern medicine, the commonly-accepted treatment merely makes things worse. Read The Clot Thickens: The Enduring Mystery of Heart Disease.

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LGBT groups were quick to rejoice in Strasbourg Thursday as an overwhelming majority of MEPs backed a hotly contested law establishing a new “ European Parenthood Certificate” and enforcing liberal surrogacy laws and gay adoption across the bloc.

While the legislation still requires the consent of individual member states at an EU Council level, the legislation would require states to grant recognition to families “irrespective of how a child was conceived, born or the type of family they have.”

Ostensibly meant to close legal loopholes in family law caused by the Ukrainian refugee crisis, the legislation has been lambasted by Catholic groups in particular as a direct legislative assault on the traditional family at the same time as opening the door to liberal surrogacy laws.

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There may be around a 1 in 10 chance that Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccines will not generate spike proteins but something else, a new Cambridge study finds, raising concerns about autoimmune response among experts.

The study authors found that 8 percent of the time, Pfizer mRNA COVID-19 vaccines are mistranslated, leading to the formation of unintended proteins.

“Our work presents both a concern and a solution for this new type of medicine,” said leading author Anne Willis in the study’s press release.

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San Francisco Democrat Mayor London Breed cut the funding for the city’s first-ever Office of Reparations due to a massive budget deficit, the San Francisco Examiner reported.

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Another COP, another call to have meat removed from our diet. The further we depart from what we evolved to do, as individuals and as a society, the less efficient we become. We didn’t evolve to be vegetarian. Quite the contrary, humans are one of the most carnivorous animals on the planet, surprisingly so.

Eating meat is more efficient. Carnivores spend less time feeding than similar-sized herbivores. For example, one of our primate relatives, baboons (Papio cynocephalus), devote almost all their daylight hours to feeding while adult males of hunter-gatherer Ache (eastern Paraguay) and Hadza (northern Tanzania) tribes spend only a third of the day in food acquisition, preparation and feeding. Acquiring and consuming medium-size animals, at a return rate in the range of tens of thousands of calories per hour, is an order of magnitude more time-efficient than plant-gathering.  In nature, for humans, plant-sourced calories cost ten times the price of meat if it is available.

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After run­ning out of socks one day, I re­flected on how or­di­nary tasks get ne­glected. Anec­do­tally and in 3 on­line sur­veys, peo­ple re­port often not hav­ing enough socks, a prob­lem which cor­re­lates with rar­ity of sock pur­chases and de­mo­graphic vari­ables, con­sis­tent with a ne­glect/pro­cras­ti­na­tion in­ter­pre­ta­tion: be­cause there is no spe­cific time or trig­ger­ing fac­tor to re­plen­ish a shrink­ing sock stock­pile, it is easy to run out.

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role in the early history of the English Church, was black, despite the fact that there is no record of him being black at all.

The Telegraph reports “The Dark Age abbot St Hadrian of Canterbury has been referred to as a ‘black scholar’ in primary school teaching material, despite the holy man being of north African origin and not black.”

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If conservatives wish to live lives that have meaning and purpose, bound to family life and a local community, and situated within a religious and ethical apprehension of the world, to whom should they turn? Where can one turn for a humane conservatism? To these questions, it seems obvious to me that Russell Kirk and Sir Roger Scruton are two giants from whom we can seek answers.

Zman does a deep dive.

Belief is probably why democracy ends in disaster. The point of democracy is to have policies that reflect the general will of the people. In theory this means figuring out what most people will accept. You cannot make everyone happy, even in a small group ordering in lunch, but you can make most people happy and those outliers happy enough so they do not revolt. In theory, democracy is ordering pizza for lunch because no one hates it and most people like it.

In reality, democracy quickly turns into a game of convincing the majority to go along with whatever benefits the few. If you and your conspirators can get fifty percent plus one to agree to your scheme, it will be very good for you. Of course, others have their schemes so that democracy quickly moves from understanding the will of the people to persuading the majority. In reality, democracy is ordering Chinese after having convinced the majority that it is the right choice.

That phrase “right choice” is critical. It is never about facts and reason, but about the morally correct choice. Democracy rests on the assertion that the morally correct choice is that which satisfies the needs and demands of most people. Therefore, the way to persuade someone is to convince them that the majority already believes whatever it is you are pitching. In practice, democracy is telling each person that everyone really wants Chinese, except those troublemakers in the pizza party.

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Inquiring minds want to know.

The truth about Mexican food.

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I find it delicately amusing how many “white collar” people are incapable of admitting that they are bureaucrats. Call it being a clerk, a functionary or a bureaucrat; if you have a job which says “management” and involves people reporting to you, and you reporting what they tell you to other people, you are a bureaucratic brick in a pyramid. Most “software engineers” dealing in protocols, technical debt, the JVM, operations …. are also bureaucrats. Such people are not engineers in any normal definition of the word; they’re dealing with plumbing and protocol and social problems which come about from large groups of people. The fact that such people have to do their work with a programming language simply indicates that they are a low level bureaucrat. This is analogous to working as a policeman; a policeman is a sort of low level bureaucrat within the legal system who might get his hands dirty. Low level bureaucrats have to deal with real problems, but just as a policeman is not a peace engineer or social scientist, but more of a low level bureaucrat craftsman of applied psychology, the low level bureaucrat software developer is a low level bureaucrat craftsman dealing with programming uncertainty.

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It turns out that the “smart homes of the future” cannot run on Wi-Fi alone thanks to the materials we’ve been using to construct our homes cheaply and quickly for decades. Over the last several years, more engineering and architecture firms have started including ethernet wiring in their building plans, but that’s as far as the digital infrastructure of a home usually goes. What’s forgotten is not only where the pre-built internet hub is placed inside the building but also what materials are used for construction.

IRS gonna be on his ass.

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Some of us remember.

Eighty-two years ago today Pearl Harbor was attacked.

That’s long enough ago that only a vanishing few remember the day and its aftermath with any clarity. Many generations—including my own tiresome one, the baby boomers—have come up since then, and the world has indeed changed.

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This father has been using spaced repetition (Anki) to teach his children how to read several years earlier than average.

Michael Nielsen and Gwern1 tweeted about the interesting case of a reddit user, u/caffeine314 (henceforth dubbed “CoffeePie”), who has been using spaced repetition with his daughter from a very young age.

I’ll bet you didn’t know that.

A fate worse than death.

ZMan wanders abroad.

The subtext to the improbable election of Javier Milei revolves around a question that has haunted Argentina for generations. Why is this country such a mess? For as long as anyone can recall, Argentina has been synonymous with South American disfunction, to the point where the name of the country is often used as an epithet to criticize first world countries. There was even a Broadway play based on the life of a famous Argentine lunatic named Eva Perón.

The first place to start is the ruling elite. If you do an image search of “Argentine leaders” you get a collection of images that would answers the same question if you replaced Argentina with Italy or Spain. Like most South American countries, the ruling elite looks like the colonial elite that founded these countries. In some of these countries, they have been ruled by a small set of families since the 16th century when their ancestors arrived from Spain.

In other words, you do not see the Venezuela problem. In some of the more dysfunctional countries in the region, you have indigenous leaders rising up to claim some power, which always ends in disaster. They tend to be Marxists, but the illiterate sort that just understand the theft and violence parts. Venezuela is a rich country in terms of natural resources and location, but the smart fraction was chased off long ago by indigenous lunatics, so it is a basket case.

The universe has been ghosting me for about forty years now….

ZMan cuts to the chase.

The first question for every human organization is “Who are we?” This is the most basic and if not the most important question. The answer could be something mundane and temporary like a sporting event, but this is an answer that assumes the gathering of people is intended to be for the mundane and temporary. A more lasting answer is one that provides the members with a reason to continue working together. A fraternal organization, for example, has an answer that is timeless.

That answer will then be linked to the second question, “To what end?” The people at a ball game come together to see the game and to cheer on the team. Since the founding answer is expected to be short-lived, the second answer is as well. The group that assembles near the old railway station with the password “sic semper tyrannis” for the purpose of organizing a rebellion has a longer-term point of their organizations, so the answers to these two big questions have a longer view.

The final and most important question that all human organizations must answer is the one of authority, “Who says?” The answer to this question is usually assumed, but rarely considered in the open. The people at the ball game do not talk about who says it is a good idea for them to come together and cheer for the team. Similarly, when the civil authority banned public gatherings during Covid, everyone just accepted that they had the authority to do so. The state is usually the answer here.

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Alphabetization is dying, I suspect. AI searches obviate the need for human skill in alphabets, and designers seem not to want it. Another way of saying I have been unable to sustain it in etymonline; the app technology keeps undercutting it.

AI expects you to seek one thing, and it is eager to hand you that one thing in under .0005 seconds. Yet I need to see the site alphabetically in order to edit it. Or to understand English.

You miss a little when you can’t see the forest. Maybe everything. Now, on your devices, you have a nice stack of dispensable planks; it’s convenient as all. But you lost the forest.

Who hasn’t wanted to have a catnip gazelle available every now and again?

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In years past, whenever I have put out the call for questions, there would be questions about specific people in politics and questions about a particular question. This time there were no such questions. The former questions have gone away along with the drama, which was a defining feature of outsider politics. The days of various e-celebs warring with one another seem to have passed.

The other question has also changed. You see it with the reaction to the Israel – Gaza cheerleading from conservatives. Ten years ago, the only negative responses to Shapiro or Pollack would have been the old school JQ stuff. These days it is much more nuanced and matter of fact. A large swath of people seem to have internalized many of these arguments into a casual acceptance of ethnic reality.

I did not get a single Ukraine question. A good question is how the general public will respond when the inevitable happens in Ukraine in 2024. The war is not on anyone’s list of concerns at the moment, not even for those on this side of the divide. Will that change when things fall apart next year? Team Biden never recovered from the Afghanistan debacle, even though it had been off the radar for years.

Fox Business.

Jeff Bezos is the latest billionaire name added to the roster of those who call Miami home in the post-pandemic era: Citadel’s Ken Griffin, venture-capitalist Peter Thiel, Goldman Sachs’ Douglas Sacks, Tiger Global Management co-founder Scott Shleifer and Third Point founder and CEO Dan Loeb are also neighbors.

“I actually wasn’t too surprised. I feel like he’s coming back home, right?” fellow billionaire and OneWorld Properties CEO Peggy Olin told FOX News Digital. “He has a place of Miami in his heart. He went to Palmetto High, his parents are in Miami. I think for him, it’s a natural move.”

“I wasn’t shocked. I guess my reaction was, of course, why not?” Ytech CMO Andrew Kraynak also told Digital. “What’s interesting about Amazon, it is a very decentralized business. And we’ve seen what they’ve been going through in terms of creating an East Coast, kind of second headquarters. And right now, it’s a very interesting organization. What that means for Amazon in South Florida, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. I’m sure there’s probably a play there.”

Not having to pay Washington state taxes probably had something to do with it.

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Cass Sunstein has a lovely New York Times essay that tries to give us back the word “Liberal.” I hope it works.

“Liberal” from “Libertas” means, at bottom, freedom. In the 19th century, “liberals” were devoted to personal, economic, and increasing social freedom from government restraint. “Conservatives” wanted to maintain aristocratic privileges, and government interventions in the traditional way of doing things. The debate was not so obvious. Conservatives defended their view of aristocratic power in a noblesse-oblige concern for little people that the unfettered free market might leave behind, in a way quite reminiscent of today’s elites who think they should run the government in the name of the downtrodden (or “nudge” them, if I can poke a little fun at Sunstein’s earlier work).

But by the 1970s, the labels had flipped. “Liberals” were advocates of big-state interventionism, in a big tent that included communists and marxists. It became a synonym of “left.” “Conservatives” became a strange alliance of free market economics and social conservatism. The word “classical liberal” or “libertarian” started to be used to refer to heirs of the enlightenment “liberal” tradition, broadly emphasizing individual liberty and limited rule of law government in both economic and social spheres.

But broadly, “liberal” came to mean more government intervention and Democrat, while “conservative” came to mean less state intervention and Republican, at least in rhetoric.

Babylon Bee.

Nailed it.

FreeThink.

Not a high bar, I’m thinking.

Freeberg nails it.

I’m seeing this pattern…

There is a tagline for committed “conspiracy theorists” and “nutcases.” In the case of January 6, it would be something along the lines of “We have a ‘Deep State‘ and they arranged this spectacle.” For the 2020 election, it was “democrat activists coordinated within & across state lines to fraudulently bump up Joe Biden’s vote count in the key battleground states.” For COVID, it’s “The virus is a bioweapon that was grown in a Chinese lab.” And in general for all things related to Donald Trump, it’s “Hollywood is opposed to him because they’re full of perverts, pedophiles and pederasts who belong in jail and they don’t want him putting them there.”

For a year or two, everybody is watching, and everybody’s watching everybody else watching. Passing judgment on who’s a nutcase and who isn’t. And you gutterball yourself if you say anything approaching even a watered-down version of the tagline…

“Fact checkers” emerge to “debunk” the tagline. Once and for all! But also, repeatedly, like a lab rat hooked on amphetamine.

And then after a little bit of time, when 90% or so have stopped watching…the tagline that clearly called out the most obvious nutcases…migrates. It becomes not quite so nutty. Then it becomes more probable. Then it becomes a likelihood. And then, one by one, all the alternative explanations are logically ruled out and this one is the only one left standing.

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Just in case you were thinking of giving it a try, be warned: Nobody will be able to write a competent history of 20th-century American politics without absorbing the themes and revelations in the new book by Luke Nichter, The Year that Broke Politics: Collusion and Chaos in the Presidential Election of 1968. A history professor at Chapman University and the biographer of Henry Cabot Lodge, among others, Nichter is widely understood and rightly admired as a tireless researcher—though “tireless” doesn’t quite cover it: In his quest to transcribe most of the hopelessly garbled and obscure audio tapes left behind by Richard Nixon after his presidency, Nichter eventually lost most of his hearing in one ear. It’s not often that we history buffs get our own martyr.

I remember 1968. It was not a good year.

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Russell is used to getting woken up for a late-night delivery. But this foal was special. It was a clone of a rare Przewalski’s horse, a now-endangered species that once roamed the grasslands of central Asia. Crouched in the corner of the barn stall, Russell waited for its birth with anticipation. “When I saw toes and nose, I thought, ‘Whew, this is going as planned,’” he recalls.

You might be surprised that cloned animals exist—they do, but the procedure is mostly used for domesticated animals. Russell’s company, ViaGen Pets, clones around 100 horses a year, as well as cats and dogs.

Yet the technology has rarely been used for endangered animals. Up until that moment, cloning had only successfully produced a single animal of any such species. The new Przewalski’s horse, born in February and still unnamed, is the second of his kind. He’s a genetic copy of the world’s first cloned Przewalski’s horse, Kurt, who was born in August 2020. Both were made from cells frozen more than 40 years ago at the San Diego Zoo. The scientists behind the effort say this second birth is evidence that cloning could be a viable strategy for saving endangered species.

Astral Codex Ten.

A hyperstition is a belief which becomes true if people believe it’s true. For example, “Dogecoin is a great short-term investment and you need to buy it right now!” is true if everyone believes it is true; lots of people will buy Dogecoin and it will go way up. “The bank is collapsing and you need to get your money out right away” is likewise true; if everyone believes it, there will be a run on the bank.

What else is a hyperstition? “Bernie can’t possibly win” – if everyone believes this, donors won’t bother giving money to Bernie (why bother? it’s futile!), volunteers won’t canvas for him, and party honchos won’t put their careers on the line to support him. But also, “Bernie’s on fire and can’t be stopped!” – donors looking to curry favor with a future winner will support him, his base will be fired up, opponents might even drop out of the race.

Slurs are like this too. Fifty years ago, “Negro” was the respectable, scholarly term for black people, used by everyone from white academics to Malcolm X to Martin Luther King. In 1966, Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael said that white people had invented the term “Negro” as a descriptor, so people of African descent needed a new term they could be proud of, and he was choosing “black” because it sounded scary. All the pro-civil-rights white people loved this and used the new word to signal their support for civil rights, soon using “Negro” actively became a sign that you didn’t support civil rights, and now it’s a slur and society demands that politicians resign if they use it. Carmichael said – in a completely made up way that nobody had been thinking of before him – that “Negro” was a slur – and because people believed him it became true.