The Carl Gustaf Recoilless Rife Confiscated By TSA Was All Legal

Ukraine Situation Report: Germany And US Play Chicken Over Tanks For Kyiv

Russia is planning a major offensive. Here’s what that might look like (The Hill)

Putin could be ready to announce a second mobilization drive (CNBC)

How the war in Ukraine could end sooner than expected (The Hill)

Russia’s war in Ukraine reaches a critical moment (CNN)

Putin: Victory In Ukraine Is “Unavoidable” & Invasion Was Effort To “Stop This War” In Donbas

Serbia’s Vucic: We Won’t Back Putin’s War

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy Urges West to Send Tank Supplies Faster

Germany Says US Must Lead Way On Tanks For Ukraine, As GOP Also Piles On Pressure

Visualizing The World’s Top 25 Fleets Of Combat Tanks

Dozens Of WikiLeaks Cables Show US Knew NATO Expansion Was Russia’s Bright Red Line

SUPPORT: NATO Training Support

PARAMILITARY: No Substitute For Military Mammals

DARPA’s New X-Plane Aims To Maneuver With Nothing But Bursts Of Air

Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan

Ukraine-Russia War Lessons – Cyber

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California Governor Gavin Newsom refuses to address the hydrocarbon elephant in the room, namely that The End of Oil Would be the End of Civilization as the products manufactured from crude oil played a major role in building the world from one billion to eight billion people in the past 200 years.

With his narrow focus on the useless transition to so-called renewables, no matter what, Newsom is apparently unable to understand that renewables of wind turbines and solar panels cannot manufacture anything.

Today’s dangerous emphasis on wind and solar power for intermittent electricity is creating a lack of products in the future. It is also causing a shortage of fuels for planes, ships, militaries, and space programs, all of which are manufactured from the substance Newsom seems to hate most — oil, that is, black gold, Texas Tea, or petroleum. But Newsom stubbornly refuses to talk about the “products crisis” his energy policies are creating.

The Guardian.

You can never have enough butter.

Priorities….

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With the enormous advances in machine learning over the last few years, it feels like we are now not only on the cusp of big things, but that the world is already a genuinely different place than it was just a little while ago. I mean, how does even just assigning homework work in a world of LLMs?

There’s one product I haven’t seen discussed yet that I’m really looking forward to. I call it the Next button. It’s an app one might install on their computer that can access the keyboard and mouse and which puts just a single button in the system tray. When you click it, the model does whatever it thinks is most useful to do next, conditioned on things like the contents of one’s email accounts, calendar, files on my computer and cloud storage, text messages — ideally, any digital content associated with me.

In the Good Old Days, some computers had a button labelled DWIM, which stood for ‘Do What I Mean’. It didn’t work all that well. But the technology has advanced since then.

BBC.

While the technology shows much promise, the costs in both money and energy are still high. This means leafy salads, smaller vegetables and fruits such as tomatoes and strawberries – high value crops which grow quickly – are about the limit of what is currently available commercially from vertical farms.

But where exactly is the limit of what we can actually grow in a vertical farm? And if we did find a way to overcome the problems of cost and energy use, what would a world where all our food is grown in such farms look like? Could we ever move to completely soil-free farming?

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What do they know that you don’t know?

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Seeing this desperate attempt by Tyler Cowen to cover for crypto scams (his list of “falls in status” includes silly items such as “Mrs. Jellyby,” bizarre items such as “Being unmarried (and male) above the age of 30,” and “Venture capital,” but, oddly enough, not “Crypto” itself) made me think that smart people are overrated. Let me put it this way: if you’re a smart astrologer, you’re still not gonna be able to do “real” astrology, which doesn’t exist. To say it slightly differently: it’s easy to promise things, especially if you have a good rep; you have to be careful not to promise things you can’t deliver. It doesn’t matter how smart James Watson’s friend was; he didn’t have that promised cancer cure in two years.

As the saying goes: Saying it don’t make it so. I could go around telling the world I had a solution to all the problems of MRP, and some people might believe me for awhile—but I don’t have such a solution.

I can see how Cowen in his above-linked post doesn’t want to believe that crypto is fundamentally flawed—and maybe he’s right that it’s a great thing, it’s not like I’m an expert—but it’s funny that he doesn’t even consider that it might be a problem, given the scandal he was writing about.

All this got me thinking: in what fields of endeavor does it matter that you’re just B.S.-ing, and in what fields can you get away with it?

Aside from politics, of course, where B.S.-ing is all there is.

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Welcome to my world.

Washington Post.

Research shows food prescriptions by medical professionals can improve well-being. But food isn’t a pill and knowing what to prescribe is complicated.

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Common sense. How can you possibly be against it? Americans of a certain generation used to talk about “Mom and apple pie” as examples of things that you cannot help but love, and it looks like common sense should get the same thumbs-up. But what is common sense?

If we are going to be persnickety then we have to go back to Plato and Aristotle. The ancient Greek word equivalent to “common sense” was doxa, which actually turns philologically into “dogma.” Latin-speaking translators of Aristotle (Boethius being the most famous, before he went to jail) used “sensus communis,” but this is more to do with our actual physical senses, as you would expect from the empirical Aristotle. It means that we all experience the world in much the same way. But common sense now has a more modern meaning, essentially translating from the classical world as “Don’t be a dumbass.”

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“Vegetable oils” in this context refer to oils extracted from seeds, grains, and legumes, and include soybean oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil, peanut oil, rice bran oil, grape seed oil, and cottonseed oil.

You will note the one ‘vegetable oil’ not mentioned: Olive oil.

Vegetable oils, while nearly nonexistent a hundred years ago, now account for 20% of Americans’ calories and have made their way into nearly every packaged food and restaurant meal we eat, from oat milk, tortilla chips, margarine, and mayonnaise to Subway’s breads, Domino’s pizza crust, and Chipotle’s rice

So: Don’t eat any of these, and you’re good.

Consuming vegetable oil increases your risk of death more than physical inactivity and heavy drinking, and for all the attention that red meat and sodium get, eating vegetable oil is 12 to 20 times more deadly.

Moral: Eat meat. Not too much. Mostly cow.

NOTE: This article demonstrates the rotten core of modern medicine–all of these studies are statistical correlations that are then assumed to indicate actual medical causation. One of the most basic principles of modern science (actual science, not what Dr Fauci peddles) is that CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. Now, certainly there is no causation without correlation; but the opposite is not true. Any study that depends on statistical correlations IS NOT SCIENCE. It is opinion, nothing more, nothing less. Unless a doctor can describe to you the actually physical, chemical process whereby Y results from X, it is just an opinion; it is NOT SCIENCE. Actual science works every time–not 67% of the time , not 85% of the time, not 98% of the time–it works 100% of the time. That’s what makes it SCIENCE. Just because numbers are involved (and statistics can provide you with some very persuasive numbers) doesn’t make it science. You have to be able to follow the actual physical process, and that process has to lead to the same result every time it’s tried.

Don’t get fooled by ‘studies’. Insist on Actual Science.

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Education policy became a top issue in 2021’s gubernatorial race in Virginia. Parents were fired up about the breakdown of public schools, from extended school closures during the pandemic to contentious left-wing doctrine being inserted into official curricula. Republican Glenn Youngkin rode this wave to the governor’s mansion. Once there, he quickly racked up several victories for the movement for greater parental rights in education, including banning Critical Race Theory, issuing new guidance on how schools should accommodate transgender students and rescinding mask mandates in schools.

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It’s very common for me to see a question – sometimes rhetorical and sometimes otherwise – that can be answered rather easily with a simple search. Most of the time I don’t mind doing that search, but I wonder why people don’t do it themselves more often. After all, one of the good aspects of the internet is that it gives us the ability to look things up quickly without hauling ourselves to the library and spending a ton of time locating the proper source. It’s all here at our fingertips – literally.

Sometimes the searching isn’t so simple, of course. But it often is. For example, I sometime read something like, “No GOP politician has ever spoken out against [fill in the blank] or supported [fill in the blank].” And yet all I have to do is take 30 seconds of searching to find quotes from GOP politicians doing just that.

So, what gives? Do we often think if we haven’t heard something it means it didn’t happen? There’s a cacophony of noise out there and only some of it filters through.

The New Neo is an excellent site, and I recommend it highly.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I am not as averse to the current general scene as many commentators. In fact I think there is something useful and healthy to disrupting business as usual in Congress—sort of like the effect Trump had. As I put it on Twitter, not having a functioning House of Representatives is almost as good as a government shutdown.

The American Mind.

To understand how to view Trump, I think it’s important to appreciate why the showdown he kicked off is not yet finished.

I’ve explained elsewhere that even when we set aside any claims about outright voter fraud, it’s clear the federal government is no longer accountable to the will of the people. Thus, our electoral system over the last 50 years most nearly resembles the Las Vegas gambling cartel. The casinos have the same relationship to their customers that the permanent government in DC has to the Republican base. The game is designed to maintain the illusion of fairness by consistently permitting a significant number of winners (but never too many). Some lucky folks periodically hit a jackpot—perfectly calculated to impress the gullible. In fact, the casino might even show a quarterly loss now and then. Yet the final outcome, in aggregate, is never in doubt. Over the long term, the house always wins. Sound familiar?

ZMan is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

National conservatism, a movement created by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony, has gained some degree of respectability over the last decade. People associated with the movement have been given space on mainstream platforms. His conferences get a large crowd of academic types, most of whom get a speaking role. The event is one part academic conference, one part networking event. Of course, it is all made possible by billionaire Peter Theil who underwrites it.

Therein lies the first puzzle. Look at the collection of people associated with the movement and it is hard to find common ground. Peter Theil calls himself a libertarian, but he supported Trump. Granted, the space between Trump’s 1980’s civic nationalism and libertarianism is not that great, but most libertarians threw their dresses over their heads and went squealing into the night when Trump arrived. They joined their friends on the Left in calling him a fascist.

It gets fuzzier when you see paleos like Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, along with varieties of the “new right” like Michael Anton and Josh Hammer. The only thing these people have in common is support for Trump. Otherwise, they do not have much in common with one another, at least on the surface. Then you have people like Rod Dreher and David Goldman speaking at these events. Hazony’s events are the bar in Star Wars for dispossessed right-wing intellectuals.

Women appear to be pretty hard to please.

Joel Kotkin.

In recent decades, progressive politics has been underwritten by the ascendant economic titans of capital, technology, and communication. Big Tech and financial firms have long financed Democratic causes, led by those such as George Soros and the now-disgraced crypto-master Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released last month on a $250 million bail deal.

Yet for all its claims to represent the future, this ephemeral economy is starting to unravel, as the world begins to wake up to the fundamental realities underlying daily life. It turns out that, while they may seem old-fashioned in today’s digital world, material goods actually matter when they are hard to procure. Over the past year, traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and energy have thrived, while media companies have lost $500 billion in value and tech firms have suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion. Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon and Google.

Count me in.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Peggy “High” Noonan devotes her weekly Wall Street Journal column to the case of Rep.-elect George Santos. Noonan might have gone into a trance and produced it via automatic writing. On second thought, she probably didn’t need to go into a trance to produce it, but I’ll stick with the automatic writing part. She gives us the predictable screed in “Why George Santos’s lies matter.” She advises the GOP: “They can’t afford to keep him. He is a bridge too far. He is an embarrassment.” The Journal turns over a lot of editorial page real estate to Noonan on a weekly basis for this kind of wisdom.

Francis Menton takes a slightly different angle at his aptly named Manhattan Contrarian site. Beginning where Noonan begins, Menton moves on to consider “a bunch [of political liars] I think are worse. The funny thing about these, though, is that not a single Democrat seems to care about them. All involve current officeholders, who are not subject to any widespread demands that they resign. Let’s consider.”

Peggy Noonan has been an apparatchik of the Uniparty since Bush left office.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I have tried to maintain cordial relations with my old Weekly Standard friends who have gone on to their successor media outlets, especially The Bulwark. I’ve even placed an article or two there. I have acknowledged the reasonable case at the core of The Bulwark’s outlook that Donald Trump and the broader populist current he galvanized have exerted some negative forces in the Republican Party, though my own balance sheet concludes that Trump was much more sinned-against than sinning, and think the populist turn among conservatives is long overdue and largely healthy. (By the way, someone who thought this a long time ago was . . . Irving Kristol. See below.*)

But it became clear a while ago now that the “Never Trump” disposition has become fanatical to the point that Bulwarkers and others in the same camp have gone nuts, throwing every conservative principle over the side simply because Trump embraced them. But Last—tempting to call him “the Last Man”—really scraped bottom with his clubfooted treatment of Scruton. Much of Last’s article consists of classic “ventriloquist journalism,” citing in a faux-questioning way an article by Alan Elrod (I’ve never heard of him either) in Arc Digital, most of which doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.

The Kristol Krew at The Bulwark have fully descended into Junior Wokerati Liz-Cheney-Land and are fully-paid-up members of the Narrative Media.

BuzzFeed.

On Sunday, Reddit user u/dramaticatlady asked, “What’s a profession that will cease to exist in the near future?” People gave examples of careers/jobs that will probably be obsolete in the near future due to technology, apps, and other advancements.

Newsweek.

Who’s going to clean up their poop, that’s what I want to know.

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Skiers in Colorado have had their iPhone 14 or Apple Watch automatically call 911 using a new feature, putting a strain on emergency resources.

ZMan does a deep dive.

In modern usage, the terms sophism and sophistry are used interchangeably with “inaccurate” or “deliberately misleading.” A sophist is someone who relies upon fallacious arguments or reasoning to win a debate. Someone can be accused of sophistry because they are too stupid to see the flaws in their reasoning. Other times they are accused of deliberately misleading arguments. The motivation is malice rather than stupidity or carelessness.

This negative view of sophistry was not always so. We get the word from the Greeks who used the word to mean teacher. A sophist hired himself out to rich families to instruct their sons in philosophy, math, rhetoric and music. The ability to debate in public was an important skill for an ambitious Athenian, so educating your children to be convincing orators was a primary goal of rich parents. A good sophist was one who was good at making convincing arguments.

Our negative view of this also comes from the Greeks. The reason we know about Socrates is we have the writings of Plato, who tells us Socrates was opposed to sophistry in his day. He thought arguments had to be logically sound and factually accurate, rather than just convincing. Of course, Socrates was forced to drink poison by the Athenians, because he was condemned for undermining public virtue. It turns out that the truth does not always set you free.

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Cities are loosening rules on building parking spots with new buildings: ‘It’s about the climate, it’s about walkability’

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Maybe this happens to you sometimes, too:

You go to bed with some morning obligation on your mind, maybe a flight to catch or an important meeting. The next morning, you wake up on your own and discover you’ve beat your alarm clock by just a minute or two.

What’s going on here? Is it pure luck? Or perhaps you possess some uncanny ability to wake up precisely on time without help?