American Sociological Review.

How do elites signal their superior social position via the consumption of culture? We address this question by drawing on 120 years of “recreations” data (N = 71,393) contained within Who’s Who, a unique catalogue of the British elite. Our results reveal three historical phases of elite cultural distinction: first, a mode of aristocratic practice forged around the leisure possibilities afforded by landed estates, which waned significantly in the late-nineteenth century; second, a highbrow mode dominated by the fine arts, which increased sharply in the early-twentieth century before gently receding in the most recent birth cohorts; and, third, a contemporary mode characterized by the blending of highbrow pursuits with everyday forms of cultural participation, such as spending time with family, friends, and pets. These shifts reveal changes not only in the contents of elite culture but also in the nature of elite distinction, in particular, (1) how the applicability of emulation and (mis)recognition theories has changed over time, and (2) the emergence of a contemporary mode that publicly emphasizes everyday cultural practice (to accentuate ordinariness, authenticity, and cultural connection) while retaining many tastes that continue to be (mis)recognized as legitimate.

Financial Times.

Americans have been wagering on presidential elections since George Washington and doing so in organised markets since at least Abraham Lincoln. More than a century ago, in the hotels and billiard halls of old New York and on the streets outside its stock exchanges, citizens swarmed to place bets on their next political leaders. Glorified bookies offered prices shifting with demand and kept healthy cuts for themselves.

In an era before scientific polling, these markets served a unique purpose — forecasting. Major newspapers would report their prices daily during the campaigns, as a barometer of the electorate. Modern scholarship finds that these early markets were remarkably accurate, with more predictive power than any other readily available source.

Prediction markets show that markets work. As Hayek loved to show, markets encapsulate everything that there is to be known about a comparative relationship, expressed as a price. This is a fundamental building block of economics, one of the first thing that students of economics are taught (however much their socialist professors later walk it back with handwaving about ‘market failures’).

But economics is always downstream from politics. No society has ever dared to allow fully free markets to operate, because the result would always put some politician’s panties in a wad (along with those of his constituency). So they have to Make Shit Up about how markets can be manipulated, how markets are inherently evil, etc. etc., which is bullshit–markets are neither good nor evil, any more than gravity is good or evil. Markets exist because they are the result of humans trading, which humans will find a way to do no matter what devices their ruling class use to eradicate them. (The term ‘black market’ is just a recognition of this fact, a smear that the ruling class uses to cast shade on a normal human activity.)

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Surgeons at the University of California, San Diego have been testing the Apple Vision Pro for surgeries, and have performed more than 20 minimally invasive operations while wearing the headsets. Surgeon and director of the Center for Future Surgery at UCSD, Santiago Horgan, recently spoke with Time to provide some commentary on the Vision Pro’s performance.

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A series of recently published opinions and letters in JAMA Internal Medicine present varying perspectives on the current state of US dental care all emphasize the need for evidence-based practices and changes in economic models.

The conversation kicked off in the July issue when Paulo Nadanovsky, DDS, Ph.D. and colleagues presented “Too Much Dentistry,” arguing that dental diseases and procedures are highly prevalent, costly, and often exceed spending on other major health conditions such as diabetes and hypertension.

They suggest that dental care in the U.S. is driven more by economic pressures and patient trust than clinical evidence, leading to excessive diagnoses and interventions.

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Apple Vision Pro is being praised by surgeons for its high resolution images and its ergonomics, which may even save them injuries that now lead to early retirement.

Since its launch in February 2024, the Apple Vision Pro has already been used by surgeons in the US, and across the globe. Now the first surgeon to ever perform a robotically assisted gastric-bypass operation, is now a proponent of the Apple Vision Pro both for patients and surgeons.

Santiago Horgan heads the Center for the Future of Surgery at UC San Diego, and told Time magazine that the Apple Vision Pro is more significant than the robot tool he used in 2000. “This is the same level of revolution, but will impact more lives because of the access to it,” he says.

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Tesla’s bulky and sharp-cornered Cybertruck is a disaster waiting to happen, the safety organizations claim.

Why are the safety orgs so worried about Tesla’s truck? I guess it’s because it seems so obviously dangerous. “The Cybertruck fails to meet a range of basic European road safety norms that apply to passenger cars (M1),” the letter notes. “As outlined below, these range from the Cybertruck’s inadequate, or non-existent, crumple zones for crash absorption to its sharp edges.”

One of the relevant concerns regarding the Cybertruck are its sharp, angular corners, which look like they were built to shiv cyclists. Wired writes that the same driver who imported the Tesla truck to the Czech Republic has attempted to get around local regulations regarding angular car design by affixing slim rubber bumpers to the vehicle’s four corners, thus allowing them to technically skate through regulatory vetting. The groups warn that this particular rubber modification could lead to the “mass import of Cybertrucks into Europe” and that the Czech Republic “risks becoming a back-door channel to trans-ship such dangerous vehicles to other Member States.”

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Cutting calories and habitually holding off on meals just might be a winning strategy for stretching out your years, though terms and conditions may apply.

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Every day brings another laboured press furore, over the latest bastion of British heritage to fall to the “woke” axe. This time it’s an iconic outlaw: news that the Nottingham Building Society has updated its brand, to remove the Robin Hood imagery it’s used since 1980. The press release boasts that the new abstract design celebrates something called “financial diversity”; Nottingham residents, meanwhile, expressed bewilderment at what, precisely, is so “outdated” about the folklore hero.

Was the Nottingham Building Society right to bin Robin Hood? Actually, yes. The sentimentally patriotic Robin of the Victorian era really is a museum piece today. But once we dig past this layer, to the vigorous, amoral spirit that animated earlier folklore tales of England’s most famous outlaw, what we learn is altogether bleaker. The rise and fall of Robin Hood tracks that of England’s backbone, in our historic “yeomanry”. And today it’s not so much that England has ditched Robin Hood, as that he’s ditched England.

Robin is much older than Victorian nationalist myth-making. His earliest written appearance is in the 14th-century poem Piers Plowman; but the context makes clear that by then he was already a well-known figure in songs and ballads. His folklore emerges in tandem with a new social class, and as a representative of that class: he’s always depicted not as a knight or bondsman, but a “yeoman”.

Popular mythology to the contrary notwithstanding, he did not ‘take from the rich and give to the poor’; he took oppressive taxes and fees back from government officials and gave them to the common people from whom they had been squeezed.

It’s easy to see why a progressive Labor government wants to erase him from public consciousness.

Edmund Burke: “The effect of liberty to individuals is that they may do what they please; we ought to see what it will please them to do; before we risk congratulations.”

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A new image circulating on Chinese social media and subsequently on “X” (formerly Twitter) revealed more details on the new Type 09IIIB nuclear-powered attack submarine (SSN) produced at Chinese shipyard Bohai in Huludao for the Chinese Navy (PLAN). The image shows the new submarine underway, presumably taken from a boat or coastal location nearby. It is only the second ground-based photo of the new generation SSN, with previous imagery being exclusively satellite-sourced.

The new photo shows a very streamlined design, notably improved from earlier Type 09III-variants. Armament including the much speculated upon VLS remains obscured by inherent nature of perspective, submarine design and low fidelity of the image.

UPDATE: China’s Great Submarine Sinking: What We Know and Why It Matters

UPDATE: Submerged nuclear submarine of China: Testimony of its another failure (IANS Analysis)

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In 2021, the Orthodox Union declined to put its kosher certification on Impossible Pork, even though similarly vegan “Impossible” foods — its burger, its chicken nuggets — carried the OU seal of approval.

“The Impossible Pork, we didn’t give an ‘OU’ to it, not because it wasn’t kosher per se,” said Rabbi Menachem Genack, the CEO of the Orthodox Union’s kosher division, told JTA at the time. “It may indeed be completely [kosher] in terms of its ingredients: If it’s completely plant-derived, it’s kosher. Just in terms of sensitivities to the consumer … it didn’t get it.”

It’s a delicate phrase, “sensitivities to the consumer,” that hints at a long and fraught history explored in Jordan D. Rosenblum’s new book, “Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig.” The “consumer” of course is the Jew, and those “sensitivities” are the result of a history that turned the pig not just into the ne plus ultra of the taboo, or treyf, in Judaism, but, as the symbol of what Jews do and don’t do, an inadvertent marker of Judaism itself.

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According to Lieu, the gravity needed to hold some galaxies or clusters together might come from “shell-like topological defects.”

Topological defects are unique compact structures in space that have a high density of matter.

Such defects likely first occurred in the early universe during phase transition — an event during which matter throughout the universe goes through a major physical change.

This stuff makes my brain hurt, but I’m glad somebody is doing it.

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Being a black lesbian is all the achievement you need.

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Feds Find Million In Cash While Investigating Staffing Firm Supplying Haitians To Charleroi, PA Food Factory
A mysterious staffing firm operating a complex van transportation network supplying low-cost Haitian labor to a Charleroi, PA-based company that operates multiple food packing plants in the area has been at the center of a federal investigation.

On Friday, local media outlet Action News revealed that federal investigators had been investigating staffing firm Prosperity Services, which supplies cheap migrant labor to Fourth Street Foods in Charleroi.

Hey, we all keep a million or so around, just in case of emergencies.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

I doubt that anybody would mistake Tim Walz for a hunter.

Read it.

Most of what happens among countries concerns something far simpler and more direct: business. International business executives and their attendant lawyers, accountants, and fixers handle the complexities of cross-border trade and investment, but such complex deals still chase a simple goal: making money.

There’s no mystique in that ambition, which may explain why it’s written about far less often than the deals of politicians and diplomats. Yet it is the Donald Kendalls, not the Henry Kissingers, who steer much of international relations. The constant pressure business executives exert as they dig for profit can wear away at even the supposedly rock-solid foundations of national policy. If the quest for profit proves compatible with official objectives, so much the better; if not, then executives will try to manufacture opportunities to pursue their narrow interests.

These pressures manifest in unexpected ways.

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Wearables operate with photoplethysmography, or PPG, a technology that shines a light into the skin and produces a reflection of the blood moving just below the finger or wrist to record heart rate. In a hospital, an electrocardiography — ECG or EKG — machine measures the heart’s electrical activity through electrodes placed on the body.

“You’re looking at two things, one is blood flow and the other is the electrical signal of the heart,” Tenan said.

Clinicians and medical scientists are interested in heart rate variability because it’s a biomarker for a patient’s general system health. Tenan said even if people don’t pay particular attention to the measure on their wearable, it still plays a part in their overall wellness picture indicated on the device.

“A lot of these devices will give something called a readiness score or a sleep score and one of the primary components of these is the heart rate variability measure,” he explained. “People look at these scores to see how they’re doing overall, whether their fitness has improved, that sort of thing. But, if a composite is full of a measure that’s biased, how accurate is it going to be?”

BBC.

Vegetarians are congenital hand-wringers. That’s my guess.

The term “ultra-processed” is poorly understood and inconsistently used, even sometimes by scientists. While in some circles it has become a catch-all term for foods with little nutritional benefit, a wide variety of foods fall under this umbrella.

Ultra-processed foods are popular with consumers for their convenience (frozen pizza), taste (wrapped cookies), and durability (sandwich bread). These elements, plus the relatively low cost of ingredients, make them profitable for manufacturers.

But recently another motivation for ultra-processed foods has emerged: to replace meat or dairy among those attempting to eat a more plant-based diet. With this new category has come anxiety about the health effects of these products, leading to headlines such as “The unhealthiest fake meats you can buy (and why it’s better to go to McDonald’s)”. These concerns were exacerbated by recent research, which found that those who consume 10% more ultra-processed foods derived from plants have a 12% higher risk of death related to diet. However, things are not quite as they seem. Are plant-based diets really so rich in ultra-processed foods, and are they any worse for you?

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Scientists have uncovered new insights into the diet of the infamous Tsavo man-eating lions after analyzing clumps of hair found in the predators’ teeth.

In 1898, a pair of male lions (Panthera leo) killed and devoured dozens of workers constructing a railway bridge over the Tsavo River in Kenya — killing at least 35 people. They stalked and terrorized the workers for nine months before being shot later that year. Since then, their bodies have been kept at the Field museum of Natural History in Chicago.

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In the last part we looked at how the Dutch took the dirty, solar-evaporated salt of France, Portugal and Spain, known as “bay salt” or black salt, and refined it to a white salt fit for butter, cheese, and preserving herring, which they made by burning their plentiful supplies of peat — the economic underpinning for the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age. Soon, however, Dutch peat was to face a new competitor: British coal.

Now, you might think you’re about to hear a very straightforward story. A given cart- or boat-load of even a nice, dry peat yields only about a sixth the heat of the same volume of coal,1 and only about half the heat by weight.2 With that kind of difference in energy density, coal seems like the obvious eventual winner as a source of heat for any industry, not just for refining salt.

But the story turns out to be lot more interesting than that, though we’ll first need to take a very long detour to fully appreciate why. Before we follow the history of salt-making even a single step further, we first need to delve — deeply — into the history of both wood and coal.

Cedar Sanderson: “On vacation, there is no diet.”

Watch it.

Maybe it’s true, maybe it ain’t. But it’s entertaining.

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Obesity medication has something of a troubled past. Fen-phen, a weight-loss drug combination popular in the 1990s, was pulled after it was found to cause heart valve problems. Sibutramine, sold under the brand name Meridia, was prescribed until it was discovered to lead to adverse cardiovascular events including strokes in 2010.

But the market for an effective weight-loss drug is too big and the potential profits too high for pharmaceutical companies to give up. More than one in eight people around the world live with obesity. In the United States, it’s more than two in five. Though many clinical trials of weight-loss drugs over the past decade ended in failure, it was only a matter of time until a successful drug emerged.

GLP-1 medications 1 like Ozempic appear to be that drug. Estimates suggest GLP-1s can reduce body weight by at least 15% when taken regularly?—?and perhaps even more as newer drugs come to market. And though evidence is still being gathered, they may have benefits beyond weight loss: potentially curbing drinking, treating sleep apnea, and reducing risk of stroke. They’ve been called, in many places, a miracle drug, and as such, the category is poised for massive growth. Gallup estimated that 15.5 million Americans have tried them, and half as many are currently using them.

Obesity is the premier First World medical problem of our age. Doctors profit thereby, and the incentives are all for them to restrict access (FDA approval process, requiring a prescription) to any safe and effective weight-loss drug.

Will Big Pharma win over Big Medicine? Stand by.

BBC.

Relatively few people are lefties, and it’s a puzzle why. Still, the science of handedness is revealing fascinating insights about you – from how it could change the way you think, to the fact that you might be ‘left-eared’.

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Sen. Jacky Rosen (D., Nev.) pulls no punches when speaking publicly about the 2017 Trump tax cuts, calling the package a “monstrosity” that is “just a giveaway” to the wealthy while urging Congress to focus its efforts on making the wealthy pay their fair share of taxes.

But behind the scenes, Rosen, who is running for reelection against Republican challenger Army veteran Sam Brown, appears to have structured her own vast financial holdings to take advantage of certain provisions in the Trump tax cuts to reduce her family’s tax liability. Rosen is worth up to $18.2 million, according to her latest financial disclosures, with upwards of $7.3 million housed in her family’s limited partnership, the Rosen Family Limited Partnership. Limited partnerships are a common vehicle utilized by wealthy Americans to give tax-free gifts to their children and shield their offspring from estate taxes.

But the Trump tax cuts appear to have rendered moot the need for the Rosen family limited partnership. The law doubled the estate tax exemption from $11 million in 2017 for a married couple to more than $22 million in 2018. Put simply, the estate tax provision enabled Rosen to transfer her entire net worth to her child tax-free without the use of any sophisticated tax strategies.

I happen to agree with former Senator Phil Gramm, who once said about a particular government program that he didn’t think it was legitimate and intended to speak against it — and vote against it — every chance he got, but so long as the program existed, he was going to take advantage of it for himself and his constituents because it would be stupid not to. This is why I take advantage of any government giveaway I can, regarding it as a partial refund of the onerous taxes that I am perennially forced to pay.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

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A strange scene unfolds on I-26 to Asheville. Heading south, away from the city, the highway is bumper-to-bumper traffic. Lawnmowers and grills are lashed to trailers, with other household supplies packed tightly in the backseat, pressed against the windows.

Heading north, towards the city, are far fewer cars. As the road twists through idyllic mountains, the type of the vehicles changes. With every exit, the population of sedans and SUVs thins out until the traffic is a silent march of F-150s and Ram 1500s, somberly heading towards areas hit hard by Hurricane Helene. Their beds are packed to the brim with supplies, while others haul equipment on trailers.

There are no police or FEMA to be seen, and National Guard Humvees are absent. From the highway alone, one might not notice that there had been a crippling disaster a week ago. Downtown Asheville appears almost untouched, due to its higher elevation. Except for a few signs for food aid, it’s business as usual. But just five minutes downhill is a different story. The Biltmore Village neighborhood looks like a warzone: buildings leveled, semi-trucks flipped, mangled power lines. A thick mud carpets the streets, drying in some places. Passing cars kick it up to a haze.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read quickly before it comes true.

ZMan:

A core tenant of radicalism is escalatory dominance. The radical seeks to establish the principle that no matter what you do to him in response to his radicalism, he will do far worse to you in his response. The point of this is to force the other side to deal on terms favorable to the radical. This is not in an effort to gain a compromise to which the radical will abide, but to gnaw away at the other side until they are gone.

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Typewriters are incredibly complex and precise piece of machinery. At their peak in the decades around World War II, we built them so well that, today, we don’t need to build any typewriters anymore. We simply have enough of them on earth. You may object that it’s because nobody uses them anymore. It’s not true. Lots of writers keep using them, they became trendy in the 2010s and, to escape surveillance, some secret services started to use them back. It’s a very niche but existing market.

Let’s that idea sink in: we basically built enough typewriters for the world in less than a century. If we want more typewriters, the solution is not to build more but to find them in attics and restore them. For most typewriters, restoration is only a matter of taking the time to do it. There’s no complex skills or tools involved. Even the most difficult operations could be learned alone, by simple trial and error. The whole theory needed to understand a typewriter is the typewriter itself.

One of the first things I bought when I got to college in 1974 was an IBM Selectric typewriter. It cost me $1000 (approximately 7% of the cost of a year at Yale) and it was worth every penny.

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The English linguistic purism movement dates back to the 16th century, and concerned the use of ‘inkhorn terms’, foreign loanwords that repeat existing usage. One of the earliest proponents was Thomas Wilson, who criticised those who ‘seeke so far for outlandish English, that they forget altogether their mothers language’.

One of the most notable campaigners was Victorian poet William Barnes, who wished to replace foreign loan words with Germanic Anglo-Saxon terms he’d made up: genealogy becomes kin-lore, grammar speech-craft and, perhaps less attractive, forceps become nipperlings. He also suggested wortlore for botany, welkinfire for meteor, and sunprint for photograph.

What made Barnes interesting was that he was a noted scholar of foreign languages. Paul Kingsnorth, who takes a keen interest in Old English, described him as ‘a rural boy from Dorset who became a literary figure befriended by Alfred, Lord Tennyson and Thomas Hardy. He was a polymath, speaking seven languages and teaching himself mathematics, music and wood engraving. All of this was done from the Dorset village he lived in; his walks in to Dorchester to set his watch by the town clock were the closest he came to metropolitan life.’

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

Babylon Bee.

Satire — read it quickly before it comes true.

Watch it.

Well said.

Tyler Cowen.

The final labor market trend we uncovered was a very rapid decline in retail sales jobs, show in the figure below. Retail sales hovered at around 7.5 percent of employment from 2003 to 2013 but has since fallen to only 5.7 percent of employment, a decline about 25 percent in just a decade. Put another way – the U.S. economy added 19 million total jobs between 2013 and 2023 but lost 850 thousand retail sales jobs. The decline started well before the pandemic.

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“These people live very insulated lives. They’re coming from academia, they’re coming from the corporate world, they’re coming from very left-wing spaces. And they probably aren’t around normal people — certainly not around conservatives, like, ever — which means, number one, to them it’s unthinkable that they’d every be in a room with someone who would challenge them, or would try to expose them in any way, because they never are in rooms with those sorts of people; and, number two, probably a lot of them didn’t know who I was, because if all you pay attention to is left-wing media, and you’re in your kind of ivory-tower bubble … yeah, I probably go under the radar.”

Robin DiAngelo has a new book out, Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm, demonstrating that it doesn’t matter who you actually are or what you actually believe, if you’re white you’re the enemy of all mankind.

UPDATE: Robin DiAngelo in HIDING?! w/ Matt Walsh

UPDATE: what Matt Walsh Discovered will Destroy this Industry (Am I Racist review)

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And, of course,  as we all know, no ‘doctor’ is ever wrong about anything. (Hey, Fauci, how ya doin’?)

Asimov Press.

The womb is a remarkable organ — a muscular, pear-shaped chamber that supports the transformation of a tiny cluster of dividing cells into an entirely new person. All humans begin their lives in this sturdy chamber.

At least for now.

Several research groups are busily developing artificial wombs to replicate the basic life-support functions of the uterine environment for extremely premature infants — that is, babies born at or before 28 weeks of the typical 37-42 week pregnancy.1

At least one group is working on something altogether more radical: a system to grow a fetus from embryo to birth entirely outside the womb, a concept known as ectogenesis. And while currently being developed under the guise of helping to rescue extinct or critically endangered species, such technology could have profound implications for the future of human reproduction.

This is probably inevitable sooner or later. As with the atomic bomb, anything science can show can be done eventually will be done, by somebody; there is no cramming everything back into Pandora’s box.