The Foundry.

The Democratic Socialists of America believes that if society were to eliminate “the nuclear family,” which it describes as a “structure built to preserve capitalism,” the United States would enjoy more “women’s, queer, and Indigenous liberation.”

I’m here to debunk that myth. This is nothing more than another DSA fairy tale.

When I was a child, attempting to flee Venezuela after the communist uprising of 1998, my parents, who were of age and not Venezuelan nationals, were allowed to leave the country. I wasn’t, simply because I was a kid. I was considered “property of the state.”

Divine intervention is what granted my family and me a life here in the United States, a country we now call home.

Now, this move by the Venezuelan regime was not intended to liberate women, as I’m not one, or to advance the cause of Indigenous self-determination, as I’m not Indigenous either. The Indigenous population of Venezuela was and remains a minority of the country’s population.

I wonder whether he’s taking new patients.

Read it.

What, you didn’t know that Sinapore had a government-run dating service?

Coming soon to a fringe Democrat platform near you….

Rain is God telling you to take the day off.

The Register.

Mechanical calculators are precise, fascinating gadgets that you wouldn’t think would take well to being 3D printed, but a YouTuber has proved that a pocket-sized unit can be made purely from plastic filament.

YouTuber 3D all Workshop detailed his working, but limited, build in a recent video. If you’re familiar with the holy grail of palm-sized mechanical calculators, the Curta, also known as the “pepper mill,” you already have a working understanding of how this 3D-printed calculator works.

As detailed in the video, Workshop’s 3D-printed mechanical calculator, like the Curta, relies on a more than 200-year-old component known as the Leibniz stepped drum, named for its inventor, German philosopher and mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. The core concept of the calculator’s central mechanism, like that of many other mechanical calculators, is the Leibniz drum’s teeth of different lengths. There are nine teeth per drum, representing values one through nine, while a zero setting engages none of them.

Be sure to watch the video.

Read it.

•There is a widespread belief that elevated cholesterol is the “cause” of cardiovascular disease. However, a large body of evidence shows that there is no association between the two and that lower cholesterol significantly increases one’s risk of death.

•An alternative model (which the medical industry buried) proposes that the blood clots the body uses to heal arterial damage, once healed, create the characteristic atherosclerotic lesions associated with heart disease. The evidence for this model, in turn, is much stronger than the cholesterol hypothesis and provides many important insights for treating heart disease.

•The primary approach to treating heart disease is to prescribe cholesterol lowering statin drugs (to the point, over a trillion dollars have now been spent on them). Unfortunately, the benefits of these highly toxic drugs are minuscule (e.g., at best taking them for years extends your life by a few days) and the harms are vast (statins are one of the most common pharmaceuticals that severely injure patients).

•In this article we will explore the specific injuries caused by statin drugs, the forgotten causes of cardiovascular disease, and our preferred treatments for heart and vascular diseases.

Read THE CLOT THICKENS by Dr. Malcolm Kendrick, which caused me to quit taking statins five years ago.

Freeberg nails it.

I remember from my school assignments, or those intelligence tests, somewhere in those years there were sections of “Too much information.” This wasn’t a reference to things like “We were so happy my husband and I had sex for the first time in months.” Or, “I have trouble buying pants because my left nut hangs lower than my right one.” Not like that at all. They’d ask questions like: Roberto has twelve marbles. He lost five. The marbles are blue. How many marbles does he have left? You’d have to pick out which bit of information was irrelevant to answering the question.

I thought at the time the point was to assess reading comprehension. But in more recent years I realize there are people who can keep drama separated from their logical thinking, and then there are people who can’t. “Too much information” is a situation that doesn’t exist, for the latter, because everything has to have an effect on the outcome.

You don’t see it with marbles and math.

But you do see it with…”Lindsay Clancy was framed. Her husband Patrick is actually the one who murdered the children. His timeline doesn’t add up. And Lindsay didn’t get the help she needed because the system failed her.”

And…”Christa Pike has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The execution failed tonight. She is in agony.”

Twelve minus five is seven. It doesn’t matter what color the marbles are.

The War Zone.

For aerospace aficionados, it’s like we have entered into an alternate dream reality. The idea that we are seriously talking about the possibility of bringing back the SR-71 Blackbird to flight status is hard to comprehend, but amazingly this is where we are at. The biggest question I am getting about all this is why? We touched on the likely primary answer to that in our original reporting — high-speed is back in tactical vogue, and the Blackbird can sustain it in a realm of great interest, between Mach 3 and 4, and do it over and over again. It can also carry very large things and even launch them off its back at those extreme speeds. But those are not the only potential reasons for taking on such a gargantuan, high-profile, and costly technical challenge. Learning from the journey itself could be just as valuable as the actual flight test data a revived SR-71 produces.

The Blackbird was as close to alien tech as it gets over 60 years ago, and even today, we have nothing like it in known operation. Yet it has been dormant for nearly three decades. Much of the expertise that built, supported, and operated it is sadly gone. But the exercises of reverse engineering and leveraging breakthroughs in additive manufacturing and rapid prototyping, as well as injecting new material sciences, avionics, propulsion and other technologies where applicable, and above all else, building the digital toolkit to make it all happen as fast and efficiently as it can be done, are all of extreme learning value.

I would not be surprised if a ‘digital twin’ is being created right now of the SR-71 using NASA’s SR-71 tail number 844 — the jet in question that has mysteriously disappeared from its display pad. Once such a model exists, breakthroughs in digital engineering can be brought to bear to see how fast the program can be accelerated, both in terms of development and flight testing. This could include not only getting the SR-71 back in the air, but improving its performance and reliability, possibly substantially, using all the new technologies we have today. It’s even possible a clone of sorts leveraging all these advances could be built using digital engineering tools.

Read it.

To examine lawfare, we must consider the current context, which is this: we are at war, a cold civil war, against a domestic regime which wants to overthrow America. It is correct to call it a “war,” and not just an unusually wide divide, because the contest is between two moral orders. From a given moral order there flows a given set of laws, values, customs, and other aspects of culture. Obviously, a society can have only one of each. The moral order of the enemy regime rests on group outcome equality. The moral order of our regime, on the other hand, rests on individual merit. These two moral orders – individual merit versus group quotas – are utterly irreconcilable. You can’t admit people to college (or anything else) based on both merit and group quotas. It’s one or the other. This is why today the two political parties can agree on almost nothing. The Left knows that because it knows that it is at war. Thus, it plays by wartime rules. The Right, on the other hand, does not know it and so continues to play by peacetime rules, which include trying to reach across the aisle, a sucker’s game in a war.

One of the most powerful weapons in the Left’s arsenal is Lawfare. But we on the Right don’t understand this; we don’t understand either the nature or power of the Left’s Lawfare.

It’s time we learn.

Low-information voters keep forgetting one eternal truth: Any Republican will be better than any Democrat.

Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

They’d be fools not to. It’s almost impossible to find a foolish Jew outside of the Democrat party.

Sari Watson was too afraid to attend Yom Kippur services. Concerned by rising levels of antisemitism in Canada, she was safely at home 25 minutes away when a gunman charged at her childhood synagogue.

“My internal alarm has been going off, and you begin to think about escape routes or backup plans,” said Watson, 39, who lives in Quinte West, Ontario, about 15 miles west of Belleville, where the attack during Kol Nidre on Sept. 20 culminated in a shootout that left the gunman dead and one policeman hospitalized. “The only reason I wasn’t at synagogue was because I have been terrified of this exact situation, or worse, happening.”

Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and President Donald Trump himself, all Republicans, have alluded to the idea of extending refugee status to Canadian Jews who fear the spike in antisemitism in their country.

“’It’s so amazing to know that the Republicans understand the level of antisemitism we’re dealing with here,” she said. “President Trump gets the climate and the danger.”

Freeberg nails it.

Observation: Throughout the summer and fall of a midterm year, if the President of the United States happens to be a Republican and male, we marinate in a stew of high profile “news” stories that emotionally divide males and females. And the opinions expressed about these stories would seem to weigh in on an imagined controversy about which of the two sexes should be…something.

No one actually says “Get rid of all the men” or “Get the women back in the kitchen where they belong.” But, the observations I see people making would be pretty useless, and I think even according to them, if the issue under consideration is anything other than “Get rid of this or that sex once and for all.” It’s really a sad thing. We can’t do without the one or the other, we need both. And I think anyone with a working brain understands this.

“Working brain” excludes most proglodytes.

Are women oppressed, really? Weighed down by a “patriarchy”? Suffering from some ingrained bias that’s loud about female misdeeds like murdering your own kids, but silent in other situations where males are the transgressors? Hmmm. It’s hard to see any group of people as oppressed, when some among them seek to win arguments simply by scolding, clearly accustomed to their class instantly winning arguments merely by expressing disapproval. Is that what oppressed people do?

We should all be so ‘oppressed’.

Welcome anytime. Just leave your California attitudes behind.

Read it.

Economic debates about inequality usually begin with a familiar question: Who has how much income?

It is an important question. But perhaps it is not the only one we should be asking.

Good luck changing that.

A society can change who becomes rich without substantially changing how unequal the society is. Regulation can weaken one economic elite while creating opportunities for another. Entrepreneurs and investors may lose relative influence while lawyers, compliance specialists, lobbyists, consultants and regulatory experts gain it.

…

Income distribution and income-source distribution are not the same thing.

Regulation does more than redistribute income. It changes the relative returns to different kinds of knowledge and human capital. And when those returns change, talented people respond.

The Telegraph (UK).

An executive games engineer for The New York Times was shot dead by his 77-year-old in-laws in a California car park, police said.

Jonathan McKinsey, 40, the newspaper’s head of engineering for games player experience, was found with gunshot wounds in the Bay Area suburb of Dublin and pronounced dead at the scene.

Shouyong Zhang, his father-in-law, and Shili Chen, his mother-in-law, were arrested soon afterwards and are being held in jail.

Chinese family values…?

ATQUE: Trans NYT exec threatened to kill wife, scared their kids with chilling book before his in-laws shot him dead: docs (New York Post)

UPDATE: Tim Pool has something to say about it.

The War Zone.

On Sunday, NBC News reported that Marines were injured during an Iranian cruise missile attack while transiting the Strait of Hormuz on Sept. 14. The network’s sources said the Marines were not on a U.S. Navy ship, but they did not identify which vessel they were on. However, a former Royal Mail vessel that at one point was being converted into a floating armory stands out as a strong possibility.

While much remains unclear about the Sept. 14 incident, there was only one vessel known to have been struck that day, according to the United Kingdom Maritime Trade Operations (UKMTO) and a maritime security official we spoke with. The ship was eventually identified by several maritime media outlets as the M/V St. Helena. Again, the St. Helena’s involvement remains unconfirmed, but the ship’s interesting background is of particular note.

Watch it.

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

New York Post.

How appropriate.

My world—and welcome to it.

Watch it.

I bet you didn’t know that.

Saturday Evening Post, a relic of a better time.

Today, vending machines are an ordinary sight in offices, hospitals, subway stations, and other high-traffic locations, offering everything from snacks and drinks to fresh meals with the tap of a card. But the idea of purchasing a product without interacting with a seller is far from modern.

The first known automated dispensing device was designed in Roman Egypt — an imperial province that served as an economic powerhouse for the Roman Empire from 30 BCE to 642 CE — by a Greek engineer and mathematician named Hero of Alexandria. The automated device served as a tool to ration goods and prevent theft without requiring regulation by a temple attendant.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Not the Bee.

My, what a surprise.

‘Trans’ people are demonstrably mentally ill. ‘Parthers’ of ‘trans’ people are arguabley even more mentally ill.

And yet their vote is as good as yours…. (Depending on the state, sometimes even better.)

Read it.

Refrigerators are probably the last thing anyone would consider a national security vulnerability, which is precisely why the unusual refrigeration failures at U.S. military commissaries deserve more attention than they are getting.

There is no public evidence that the incidents were caused by a cyberattack or a foreign adversary, and they may ultimately prove to be nothing more than equipment, software, or maintenance failures. But when refrigeration systems at multiple military installations experience problems within a relatively short period and at Fort Huachuca all of the commissary’s freezers reportedly went into defrost mode overnight, leaders at the Pentagon should be asking a larger question: If a sophisticated adversary wanted to test its ability to disrupt the infrastructure supporting America’s military without firing a shot, is this what it might look like?

Watch it.

Tim Pool looks at the chances of war with Cuba.

This is why therapy is a pseudo-science.

Read it.

I really doubt that he’s all that useful.

Harper’s.

On August 5, 2013, a man and a woman ate a burger. Not just any burger: a world-historical burger, made from cattle cells grown in a lab by Mark Post, a professor of vascular physiology at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The burger had taken two years to produce and cost $330,000, money furnished by the Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Now it was being tasted in public for the first time at Riverside Studios in London, at an event attended by two hundred members of the press and livestreamed to thousands.

Happy anniversary, sweetie.

Watch it.

Chris Williamson of MODERN WISDOM does a deep dive.

William Costello is a psychology researcher and Ph.D. student specialising in evolutionary psychology.

Full disclosure: William Costello is a very distant (12th century) cousin of mine.

New York Post.

To be clear, they’re American citizens, not American kids. They’ll be Chinese, not American, except in the artificial legal sense.

Wealthy Chinese couples are implanting their embryos into American women so their children can be born as US citizens, The Post has learned.

The service is provided by a surrogacy agency, Patriot Conceptions, which operates between China and the US and has been accused of hiding details of who the biological parents are from surrogates.

Women who carry babies for the agency are recruited informally through social media and collect between $60,000 and $120,000 dollars for their services.

That’s a lot of money to pay to guarantee that your children will be liable for U.S. taxes on their incomes no matter where they might actually live. Of course, that depends on the U.S. government being conscientious about collecting those taxes, and a good case could be made that “U.S. government” and “conscientious” don’t belong in the same sentence.

John Derbyshire was fond of saying that there wasn’t anything wrong with New York City that about a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix, and, looking at the Chinese in Hong Kong and Singapore, I can’t say he’s wrong. I must say that, since we don’t appear to have any choice in the matter, I’d rather have rich Chinese kids as American citizens than poor Mexican or African kids.

Read it.

When Codie Sanchez looks back on her earliest social media content, she does what many of us do when examining our internet past: She cringes.

“Some of the first videos we made, I’m like, My God. There’s money floating around in the air behind me, it makes me want to die,” Sanchez says. “But like any new business owner, you get talked into things that aren’t you.”

Despite those questionable early choices, Sanchez has since become an internet force. She’s collected a combined 15 million social media followers and authored the best-selling book Main Street Millionaire, largely by promoting the same message: You, too, can become an entrepreneur — and the path to success goes through small business ownership. It’s an insight drawn from her own background, which her fans know well: Sanchez began her career in finance, then started buying what she calls “boring businesses” like laundromats, car washes, and roofing companies. She realized that these are overlooked assets, because they already have established consumer bases, are straightforward to operate, and are surprisingly easy to acquire, because their owners are often aging out and have nobody else to sell the business to.

Cody Sanchez is a national treasure. Unfortunately, being an entrepreneur requires a certain attitude toward risk and hard work that very few people possess.

Read it.

Note the ear-ring and tattoos.

Funny how celebrity kids wind up as head-cases when they survive at all. Wonder why that is.

Perhaps we ought to consider it evolution in action. Natural selection can be a stone cold bitch.

Read it.

Some money is better than others. This is foundational to how money and banking works. I explore this idea and its many consequences, without any prerequisites or jargon.

All money is debt. Money starts as a store of value, and trading that store of value makes it a medium of exchange (‘currency’).

Modern education in a nutshell.

Read it.

Of the world’s “holidays,” Talk Like a Pirate Day (or, to use its full name, International Talk Like a Pirate Day) is probably not high on most people’s list. It was promulgated in 1995 by two guys in Oregon named John Baur and Mark Summers who were playing racquetball. One injured himself and said, “Aaarrr!” Given the associations of this phrase with stereotypical piratical conversation, the two decided that a day (September 19 was chosen) should be established in which all talked like pirates. What they mean, the scholars say, is to talk in the dialect of the West Country, meaning South West England.

Yet, whether it is widely celebrated is less interesting than its premise that we all know—or think we do—what pirates sound like. We also all think we know what pirates look like. Where did our images come from? They came from that genius of American art, illustration, and children’s fiction, Howard Pyle.

Read it.

Always and everywhere, political institutions are controlled by elites. It doesn’t matter if the regime type is democratic or monarchical. It doesn’t matter if there is a written constitution or not. All political institutions – and certainly every sovereign state – are run by a group of elites who control the means of coercion.The myth of “rule by the people” is precisely that: a myth.

Yeah, but try getting the average dimwit socialist to realize that….

But this leaves a big question open: who are the elites? Wilfredo Pareto, that pioneer of Italian elite theory, convincingly suggests that elites are simply those people who are most skilled in their respective fields. Being skilled does not suggest any sort of virtue or beauty, of course, and we cannot assume that any member of the elite will be more moral or refined than any, say, middle-class mechanic.

In the case of political elites, to be “elite” simply means to be the most effective at organizing and commanding political action. This can be done toward both virtuous ends or evil ends. The political elites excel at the gaining and wielding of political power. Nothing more. In hereditary monarchies, for example, the monarch is a monarch because his ancestors were more effective at using violence – and at stealing and killing – than were their competitors. Their descendants are able to remain in the elite through effective political scheming to maintain their positions. In democracies, those who gain and maintain power are effective at deceiving the voting public and at currying favor with the ruling coalitions of various interest groups. They’re not “the elite” because they are especially virtuous or well educated. They simply excel at cultivating the knowledge necessary to wield the power of the state against their enemies and against potential rivals.

How many of them are done by women? Hmm?

Read it.

First, I should state my credentials to give opinions regarding AI. My teenage self was a big fan of Colossus: The Forbin Project.

It is surreal to hear AI companies say “Please stop us from ending life on earth.” The people running AI corporations are blessed with free will. If they think their activity endangers mankind, they are free to stop. The existence of a law that says thou shall not endanger mankind seems, one, a tad ambiguous, and two, sufficiently self-evident so as to be unnecessary.

Much like all of the Chattering Class emphasis on billionaires calling for an increase in their taxes. If they wanted to pay more in taxes, they could just write a check. No, what they want is to increase everybody’s taxes, for a system in which they would have a comparative advantage.

The Foundry.

Both the Founders and the progressives recognized the political and civilizational stakes of education. They agreed that certain kinds of schooling prepare students to be citizens of a republic, while others incline them to be members of a centralized state ruled by expert administrators; they disagreed on which goal was desirable and, thus, which educational scheme should be preferred.

The local, classical education that characterized early America, that formed most of the American Founders, and that many Founders prescribed for the new nation reinforced the principles of a free federal republic.

Classical colleges taught Americans that human nature was fixed and purposive; that human beings perfect their nature in and owe profound obligations to their familial, political, and religious societies; that the masterworks of classical Greece and Rome, the teachings of the Christian religion, and the heritage of European civilization are part of our birthright and are indispensable aids in cultivating the moral, intellectual, and theological virtues as well as securing the safety and happiness of our nation.

Some times the old ways are best.