Bipartisan Group Of US Senators Warns CCP Over Quelling Of Protests

Putin Cronies Resort to Begging on Live TV Over War Failures (Daily Beast)

EU Is Erecting Russian War Crimes Tribunal: “Russia Must Pay”  Good luck with that.

PROCUREMENT: Unique Russian Production Delays

ARTILLERY: Frankenmissile For Ukraine

The G7 Cap On Russian Oil Is A Subsidy To China

Russia Will Not Go Along With Oil Price Cap, Kremlin Confirms  My, what a surprise.

House GOP Drafting Bill Banning TikTok for Federal Employees

Airbases Deep Inside Russia Rocked By Explosions; New Wave Of Airstrikes Pummel Ukraine

Putin Unleashes Missiles Across Ukraine; Drones Hit Bases Deep Inside Russia

Read it.

Okay, just to prove I can be serious. I agree, there are a whole ton of things Republicans in office should be doing that they aren’t doing. But I’m sticking with the party because of what they don’t do.

Ukraine Situation Report: Kremlin Says Putin Will ‘Eventually’ Visit Donbas

Ukraine war: Zelensky calls West’s Russian oil cap ‘weak’ (BBC)

FBI director raises national security concerns about TikTok (Associated Press)

Estonia to buy US rocket artillery system in $200M deal (Associated Press)

Hungary Says It Will Veto EU-Ukraine 18 Billion Euro Aid Package

European Commission Recommends Freezing Funds for Hungary

Armor: Why BTGs Died In Ukraine

US Intel Chief Thinking ‘Optimistically’ for Ukraine Forces

OPEC+ Oil Producers Face Uncertainty Over Russian Sanctions

Iran Rejects UN Mission

Hypersonic Weapons

NATO Exists To Solve The Problems Created By NATO’s Existence

Zelensky Seeks To Ban Russian Orthodox Church In Ukraine

China Operating Illegal Police Stations Worldwide

We’re America’s most loyal ally in Syria. Don’t forget us. (Washington Post)

Ukraine Wheat Harvest Crushed Expectations: Satellite Analysis

Read it.

If you’re really using your computer, your desktop should almost never be visible. Your screen should be covered with information, with whatever data you’re working on. I can’t imagine why you’d willingly stare at a static background image– or even a background image covered with a sea of icons. Unless you consider your computer a really expensive digital picture frame, I suppose.

The desktop background, as I see it, is completely superfluous. My desktop “background” right now is plain black. And that doesn’t bother me in the least, because none of it is visible. I have browser windows and programs– the things I’m actually doing — covering all three monitors. When I’m using a computer, I make it my goal to never see the desktop background. Every time the desktop background is visible, that means I’m making poor use of my monitor pixels. Whenever the desktop background peeks through, I treat it like a reprimand.

A distinction too often ignored in real life.

Read it.

But amidst all the liberal revelry lies an uncomfortable, little-reported fact: Democrats lost the House popular vote by three points.

Remember the popular vote? The popular vote!

My goodness, Hillary Clinton still probably mutters about winning the popular vote in her sleep. The left has been in love with the popular vote since 2016, and it’s easy to see why: 2022 was the first time the Democrats lost the House popular vote since Hillary’s 2016 loss, when the GOP prevailed by one point. The Democrats won the House popular vote by three points in 2020 and by nearly nine points in 2018.

Welcome to Texas.

Read it.

The chief appeal of cashier-less tech is that one no longer needs to hire and pay cashiers.

Thank you, minimum wage!

Thank you, Union label!

Thank you, OSHA! (Thank you, Richard Nixon!)

Read it.

nitially, I started with the idea that climate was an attractive industry for “doomer” types, and I painted their motivations monolithically. I was searching for the one weird reason that was causing hordes of people to drop what they were doing and march, hypnotically, towards the same problem space.

What I found instead is that while the media still portrays climate as a simple question of beliefs, the climate field has long moved on to diversified solutions. Whether one believes in climate change is no longer the interesting question; now it’s “What do you think is the right approach?”

Pass through the asteroid belt of climate doomerism, and the universe expands into a rich panoply of different climate tribes. People who work in and around climate don’t all believe the same things. Instead, they inhabit a parallel, mirror world that looks a lot like the non-climate world. Just like in the regular world, there are factions, politics, and competing belief systems.

Read it.

I worked in ‘open offices’ a lot in tech, and hated every minute of it. In an ‘open office’, you are in involuntary participant in everybody else’s conversation. If you are doing intellectual work (like, say, programming or data modeling), concentration is impossible. Productivity falls through the floor. The money management saves is obvious; the loss of productivity is not; and so we all wind up living in a Dilbert cartoon.

China poses increasing threat in military space race, top U.S. general says

U.S. weighs sending 100-mile strike weapon to Ukraine (Reuters)

Size Of British Army To Hit 200-Year Low, Only Sufficient To “Stay At Home & Tootle Around” Warns SecDef

PROCUREMENT: Belarus And The Russian War Effort

North Korean ICBM launch detected using GPS

US bans Chinese telecoms imports – won’t even consider authorizing them  Finally waking up.

China Poses Increasing Threat in Military Space Race, US General Warns

20 NATO States “Pretty Tapped Out” After Weapons Transfers To Ukraine

Read it.

Since around 2013, wealthy Chinese nationals have shifted away from traditional birth tourism, whereby a pregnant Chinese woman comes to the United States with the intention of having her baby born here. Instead, they have increasingly relied on American surrogates to bear their children.

Hire an American breeder to cook your kid. Bada-boom bada-bing, your Chinese kid is an American citizen. Such a deal.

Producing a child in the United States has many perks. At birth, children gain and maintain full U.S. citizenship, birth certificates and social security numbers, access to education, and a path for their biological parents to receive a green card when the child turns 21. Some agencies promote themselves as a “cheaper alternative than an EB-5 visa,” which costs $500,000 plus scads of time and paperwork.

With birth tourism, a pregnant woman must obtain a visa, travel to the U.S. to give birth, and find an agency to house and help secure the necessary paperwork before returning to China. The process can take months.

Now, however, a Chinese couple or individual can simply work with a U.S. based agency to send their reproductive material (sperm, egg, or embryo) to an IVF lab and implant it in a hired surrogate to produce a viable pregnancy. All without ever leaving China.

And if you hire a black woman, it can probably claim BIPOC Privilege as well. (‘Here’s a picture of my mom and a certificate from the hospital where I was born.’) Is this a great country or what?

ZMan discusses some inconvenient truth.

Given the current trajectory, it is reasonable to think that in the not too distant future some alien race will be digging through the rubble of humanity trying to figure out what happened to this strange species. Just as modern archeologists dig through ruins of ancient societies, trying to figure out what happened, those aliens will be doing the same with earth. They will dig through whatever is left, things like buildings, tools and cemeteries, piecing together the story of man.

The thing they will not find among the decaying buildings, rusting vehicles and collapsed bridges will be piles of human rights. They will not open a door of some oddly preserved building and find a bunch of skeletons who had found shelter along with their sacred human rights. In fact, they will probably find no trace of human rights or any discussion of the concept. Given that most of our knowledge is now digital, these sorts of things will be impossible to detect.

The main reason for this is human rights do not exist. They are a thing that humans invented late in the history of mankind. People say that human rights are real and point to various authorities to support the claim, but rights are not real things. They exist only as a figment of our imagination, like the concept of lust. No other species has this concept so it is possible the aliens will not understand it either. It will be as alien to them as our entirely made up concept of human rights.

Read it.

Good luck with that.

European officials say US profiting from Ukraine war, call Inflation Reduction Act ‘very worrying’ (Fox) Well, it certainly worries me.

Where will Kherson’s freedom fighters go next?

LOGISTICS: Iranian Problems Supplying Yemen

Artillery Is Breaking in Ukraine. It’s Becoming a Problem for the Pentagon. (N.Y. Times)

U.S. and NATO Scramble to Arm Ukraine and Refill Their Own Arsenals

Pockets of Shelling Across Ukraine as Wintry Warfare Looms

The West is struggling to set an oil price cap that hurts Russia (CNN)

Ukraine’s four nuclear power plants reconnected to grid – IAEA (Reuters)

These economies are booming as Putin’s war drives migrants and money out of Russia

Putin Branded a Narcissist in Leaked FSB Letters (Newsweek) So obviously he won’t be allowed at the Cool Kids’ Table–they don’t appreciate competition.

Vladimir Putin Wanted To ‘Attack’ Japan, Before He Chose To Invade Ukraine – Claims Alleged FSB Whistleblower (EurAsian Times) And there’s a rumor that he doesn’t wash his hands after he goes to the bathroom, too.

Turkey’s Invasion of Syria Could Lead to Release of Thousands of ISIS Terrorists  Remind me why Turkey is in NATO.

As Negotiations Fracture, EU Postpones Talks On Russian Oil Price Cap To Monday

Western sanctions catch up with Russia’s wartime economy (Washington Post)

Gas Price Cap Could Cause Irreversible Harm To Energy Markets

It Was Never About Ukraine

sThe Ridiculous Reality Of The “Russian Oil Price Cap” Debate In One Picture

Russia Has Issued Over 80K Passports In Annexed Ukrainian Territories

Putin Ally: Russia Will Send Ukraine ‘Back to 18th Century’

AFGHANISTAN: A Work in Progress

Ukraine to Receive 186 Million Euros in Aid from Hungary

Europe accuses US of profiting from war

FCC Bans Equipment Sales, Imports from ZTE, Huawei; National Security Risk

Nah, just kidding. Open Threads are for blogs that are interested in conversation. That ain’t this.

This blog is not intended to spark ‘conversations’ among readers. (If it were, I’d have one of those snazzy plug-ins that actually threaded reader responses, rather than just tipping them into a pile.) It exists to be a dumping ground for stuff with which I would otherwise pester my friends. (Note to self: Do rant on ending sentences with a preposition. Also one on using ‘if’ where you ought to use ‘ought’.)(Maybe one on what preposition to use after ‘different’.)

This blog is intended to publicize things that I find interesting, and in passing document some of the more absurd things that the Evil Party are doing to this country. (If you can’t remember the latest thing that a Stupid Democrat Or Worse did, come here and search. You might find it.) You will note a certain imbalance. That is because Stupid People do more Stupid Things than Interesting People do Interesting Things. (Not My Fault.) Or you could just read the Babylon Bee.

Think of it as a political Ted Talk, without the Wokeness and on-stage preening.

You want to make a snarky comment, feel free. You want to call me names, get banned.

Those are the only rules we have. Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

Read it.

I am a big fan of slow cooking.  That and sous vide….

Ukraine war: How Germany ended reliance on Russian gas (BBC)

Finland and Sweden step up military aid to Ukraine ahead of winter (EuroNews)

Senators alarmed over potential Chinese drone spy threat (Politico)

Russia’s Gazprom threatens to cut last remaining supply of natural gas to Europe (Fortune)

Iran starts enriching uranium to 60% purity at Fordow plant (Reuters)

Power Outages Reported Across Ukraine After New Wave of Strikes (N.Y. Times)

SPACE: Shooting Blanks Over Ukraine

Britain Provides Helicopters To Ukraine For First Time In War

European Parliament Declares Russia State Sponsor of Terrorism

Iranian advisers killed aiding Russians in Crimea, says Kyiv (The Guardian)

Ukraine Battles to Reconnect Millions in Cold, Dark

Read it.

Our elections are an embarrassing third-world mess.

On top of that, there’s no mechanism to test or improve the accuracy of elections. Nobody’s even talking about improving them. And every change that gets implemented makes the system more susceptible to fraud. (Like that wasn’t the whole point.)

Read it.

The Empire State Building and the World Trade Center make for an interesting comparison. In many ways, they’re similar. They’re both iconic Manhattan skyscrapers (they were built just 3 miles apart) that sit right next to each other in the sequence of “world’s tallest building”. Both started out as projects aimed at creating (among other things) a large amount of commercial office space, and were later nudged by their owners into becoming the world’s tallest building. Both were completed in the midst of a severe economic downturn (the Great Depression and the 1973 Oil Shock, respectively), and took many years to be fully occupied. The Empire State Building would be only partially occupied through the 1930s (making money largely from visitors to the observation deck), and the owners were only saved from bankruptcy because the lender (MetLife) didn’t want the building. It wouldn’t start to turn a profit until after WWII. Similarly, the World Trade Center didn’t reach full occupancy in 1980. In both cases the building owners had to coerce government agencies to use much of the available space.

Ann Coulter.

For more than 50 years, our country has been engaged in systemic discrimination against the nation’s most despised racial group, whites. Recently, the Supreme Court heard cases challenging legal race discrimination in a pair of lawsuits brought against Harvard and the University of North Carolina for their “affirmative action” policies.

Despite the oft-repeated claim that affirmative action “hurts black people the most,” for the past half-century, it’s whites who’ve been bringing lawsuit after lawsuit for being rejected — solely because of their race — from universities (not to mention jobs, promotions, government contracts, scholarships, executive suites, homecoming queens, etc.).

In response, the Supreme Court announced this fundamental principal of constitutional law: Could you guys try hiding what you’re doing a little better?

The Guardian.

What’s this ‘we’?

Steve Sailer is not afraid to ask the inconvenient questions.

If there’s a strong statistical pattern in the numbers, you should be able to come up with vivid real-life examples of it. And if you can think of several examples suggesting a pattern, you might well be able to find large-scale data for it.

My main one weird trick for coming up with enough insights to make a living as an unfashionable pundit for 22 years has been to assume that private life facts and public life facts are one and the same. Most pundits assume public controversies, such as BLM, are of a higher realm than daily life, so that what they notice about “safe neighborhoods” and “good schools” when they are making real estate decisions for themselves couldn’t possibly have any relevance to the great issues of the day they discuss in the media.

In truth, you don’t need gnostic dogmas like “systemic racism” to explain why, say, blacks on average are relatively better at playing cornerback in the NFL than center. Biological and cultural differences explain these and countless other patterns.

Read it.

Today we are in a new era of conservative discontent. The national conservatives are at the ramparts against the new status quo of woke progressivism in government, the military, business, education, culture and media. Many of them are also dismissive of the conservatism of Buckley & Co. and Ronald Reagan and their legacy of journals, think tanks and policy doctrines that became a settled Washington establishment by the 2000s and 2010s.

In their view, that establishment was complicit in progressivism’s political ascent. American conservatism became unduly attached to libertarian individualism, unfettered markets and free trade as ends in themselves—which helped set the stage for anything-goes cultural corruption, the decline of community, family and religion, and the rise of global corporations and institutions that decimated the American heartland.

Whose turn is it to be the New ‘New Right’?

Read it.

In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession. Traumatized by uncertainty and unemployment, people decided to stop having kids during that period. But even as we climbed out of the recession, the birth rate kept dropping, and we are now starting to see the consequences on campuses everywhere. Classes will shrink, year after year, for most of the next two decades. People in the higher education industry call it “the enrollment cliff.”

Couldn’t happen soon enough, in my opinion.

Read it.

Over the last decade Scott Alexander, America’s best psychiatrist blogger, a hero of the rationalist movement, has examined the claims made for psychedelic therapy and repeatedly pointed out that it’s very unlikely to be any sort of panacea. Between 10 percent and 50 percent of Americans have tried psychedelics, he said — if they did anything miraculous we would know about it. More to the point, says Alexander, what use is the feeling of revelation anyway? “In my model of psychedelics, they artificially stimulate your insight system the same way heroin artificially stimulates your happiness system. This leads to all those stories where people feel like they discovered the secret of the universe, but when they recover their faculties, they find it was only some inane triviality.”

Retired colonel ‘very concerned’ about US weapon shortages for Ukraine (CNN)

How Russia is weaponizing the Ukrainian winter (NPR)

Russia’s war in Ukraine (CNN)

Ukraine war: Germany looks to renewables after Russian invasion (BBC)

Heavy Shelling At Ukraine’s Largest Nuclear Plant: “You Are Playing With Fire!”

Energy Crisis: German Minister President Suggests Heating One Room in Winter Is Enough

MURPHY’S LAW: Russian UAV Failures

Carrier Dry Docks – Ours and Theirs

Ukraine’s Kherson Win Shifts Dynamics Across Whole Front With Russia (WSJ)

Ukraine Urges Civilians to Leave Liberated Areas for Winter

Angry families say Russian conscripts thrown to front line unprepared (Washington Post)

Secretary of Defense Austin: US Supporting Ukraine ‘as Long as it Takes’  Or until a Republican President is elected, whichever comes first.

Read it.

We are sorry to inform you that you are in a cult. This must come as a bit of a shock. Your first instinct will no doubt be to recoil in denial. “Me? In a cult? Absolutely not!” We must unfortunately insist. It’s okay though, you had no choice. You were born to parents who started your indoctrination from day one. And, perhaps even more insidious, the cult has been watered-down from its original form, in order to retain members. Thus, the signs and scars created by your cult are subtler than those one might otherwise expect.

There are very few entrepreneurial projects more profitable than starting a cult. Ask L. Ron Hubbard.

Read it.

Downtown Dallas continues to creep away from the original Central Business District on Main Street and towards our residential anchor neighborhoods. This is not because the occupancy has outgrown the Central Business District. In fact, many buildings are empty or are being repurposed.

The real reason for this movement of the Central Business District away from the original heart of downtown Dallas lies in human preferences.

People like the vibrancy of big cities. But they are not particularly attracted to cold, canyonlike streets of tall buildings with few traces of humanity. People love the combination of nature alongside stores, restaurants and lower-density inner-city neighborhoods. There have been many more popular bars and restaurants in uptown residential neighborhoods than downtown Dallas.

Ukraine Situation Report: Possible Drone Boat Attack On Russian Port

Is Russia Now Firing Denuclearized Cruise Missiles At Ukraine?

It’s Costing Peanuts for the US to Defeat Russia (Center for European Policy Analysis)

Celebrating War as Climate Win Makes Red True Color of “Greens”

Sweden Says Nord Stream Pipeline Explosion Confirmed as Sabotage

Fearing Ukrainian Forces, Russians Abandoning Crimea

Russia Secretly Moves 100 Missiles From Belarus

Insider.

I’m afraid we’d get more like Hunter Biden or Chelsea Clinton. But hey–not my circus, not my monkeys.

Read it.

I have my doubts. (It is, after all, NPR.) But the only way to find out is to try it, and if actual companies want to do so, good on them.

I really don’t give a @*#@. Ask anybody.

Joel Kotkin.

In earlier times, even with a soaring population, Americans knew how to accommodate housing demand. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries we built cities from scratch along the frontier. The existing major urban centers—Boston, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia—all expanded rapidly, both by density and expansion into land on the periphery.

After the Second World War, mass suburbia and its expansion in homeownership ushered in a period of sustained prosperity that lasted until the 1970s. After 1940, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. homeownership rates grew rapidly, from 44 percent to 63 percent over the next three decades.

But now, in many places, it is exceedingly difficult, even impossible, to build the kind of family-friendly housing long sought by most Americans. Instead we are being left with two negative trends: increasingly low housing affordability for many, and the forced march of a whole new generation into the kind of small, crowded spaces they generally eschew, particularly after they enter their thirties.

Read it.

Because he is the sole political figure in living memory who kept each and every campaign promise made previously, and moreso, it may be wise to list the specific campaign promises made in his stump speech, and, if he wins, note if and when and how they are kept. Some are vague and aspirational, others specific.

This also will serve to silence those who mock him for having no plans or no vision, or for dwelling on past deeds and misdeeds.

ZMan.

In the before times, Bill Buckley would claim that he could know everything about a man’s politics based on his opinion of Israel and abortion. These were clarifying issues that did not easily allow for nuance or ambivalence. If you had any politics at all, you had an opinion on these issues. To some degree it is still true, but the clarifying issue of this age is Donald Trump. You cannot engage in politics at any level without having a position on the most famous pitch man in history.

Whenever somebody asks me ‘What do you think of so-and-so?’ I always say ‘He’ll never be the quarterback that Unitas was.’ That usually ends the conversation.