Read it.

France’s new Interior Minister Bruno Retailleau, of Les Républicains, is considering ending the controversial AME (Aide Médicale d’Etat), which provides free medical assistance to migrants—including illegal ones. The Left sees this stance as a clear sign of the new team’s benevolence towards the ‘far Right,’ and some ministers have openly expressed their discontent.

Invited to appear on the TF1 television news on Monday, September 23rd, Retailleau asserted that he wanted to “take all possible means to reduce immigration in France.” Among these is the reform, or even abolition, of State Medical Aid (AME). This scheme, which entitles foreigners who have been present on French soil for at least three months to free medical care, is costing the state several billion every year.

When European government-provided health care systems were set up in the wake of WWII, little thought was given to the prospect of immigrants from the Middle East and Africa flooding in and swamping the system. Looks as if people are starting to wake up to the fact that Unintended Consequences can be a bitch.

ZMan points the way.

Yesterday the state of Missouri executed convicted murderer Marcellus Williams after a quarter century of legal wrangling. The case gained some attention because the defense managed to muddy the waters on the DNA evidence and therefore drag out the process long enough to get some of the principles to change their opinions on whether Williams did the crime. Of course, the real reason it gained attention was that the killer was black, and his victim was white.

The subtext to crime in current year America is that on the one hand, blacks commit crime due to living in a white supremacist society. On the other hand, when blacks commit crimes against whites, the whites must deserve it for perpetuating the white supremacist society that causes black crime. This is what makes up the social vengeance subculture at the heart of the social justice movement. In the end, it is all about getting revenge on white people.

The result of this or maybe the cause, it is not easy to know at this point, is that whites often appear to worship black people or at least want the world to think they hold blacks up as gods among men. The three dumbest members of the Supreme Court made sure the media knew they were opposed to the execution. As part of what we call the left in America, they need to let the rest of the hive know where they stand on every issue that involves race, especially when a black is involved.

Virtue Signaling is our national religion.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

Another example would be AlGore.

Read it.

Silicon Valley has the reputation of being the birthplace of our hyper-connected Internet age, the hub of companies such as Apple, Google and Facebook. However, a pioneering company here in central Ohio is responsible for developing and popularizing many of the technologies we take for granted today.

A listener submitted a question to WOSU’s Curious Cbus series wanting to know more about the legacy of CompuServe and what it meant to go online before the Internet.

That legacy was recently commemorated by the Ohio History Connection when they installed a historical marker in Upper Arlington — near the corner of Arlington Center and Henderson roads — where the company located its computer center and corporate building in 1973.

On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog–not that there’s anything wrong with that….

John C. Wright: “The path to paradise is paved with skulls.”

Watch it.

I’ve always thought that the best intro to the ‘Ten Commandments’ would be ‘Don’t do stupid shit, including but not limited to the following examples’.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

Read it.

The term “middle class” is thrown around all the time—especially during an election year—but what does it really mean? And more importantly, are you part of it? While definitions can vary, being middle class is closely tied to the idea of the “American dream,” the notion that with hard work and sound financial management, you should be able to afford a home, raise a family, and eventually enjoy a comfortable retirement. Emphasis on the “dream.”

If that identity is important to you (and I can’t see why it would), we have the technology.

Read it.

The plan was born in 1997 when Princeton researchers Daniel Janzen and Winnie Hallwachs approached Costa Rican orange juice manufacturer Del Oro with a unique opportunity.

If Del Oro agreed to donate part of its land bordering the Guanacaste Conservation Area to the national park, the company would be allowed to dump its discarded orange peel at no cost on degraded land in the park.

The juice company agreed to the deal, and some 12,000 tonnes of waste orange peel carried by a convoy of 1,000 truckloads was unceremoniously dumped on virtually lifeless soils at the site.

The deluge of nutrient-rich organic waste had an almost instantaneous effect on the fertility of the land.

“[W]ithin about six months the orange peels had been converted from orange peels into this thick black loamy soil,” Treuer told Scientific American.

Win-win, right? Well, not exactly.

Despite this promising start, the conservation experiment wasn’t to last, after a rival juice manufacturer called TicoFruit sued Del Oro, alleging that its competitor had “defiled a national park”.

Costa Rica’s Supreme Court sided with TicoFruit, and the ambitious experiment was forced to end, which saw the site largely forgotten about for the next 15 years.

Reminding us, once again, that government screws up everything it touches.

Read it.

In the latest expression of China’s rapidly growing and modernizing naval power, the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) recently, and for the first time, put three aircraft carriers to sea simultaneously. Of the three carriers involved in these activities, the Liaoning and the Shandong are by now well established with the Chinese fleet, while the Fujian, the country’s first domestically produced carrier, is still preparing for operational service. Ultimately, it’s expected to lead to more Chinese-made flattops as the PLAN continues to expand its naval aviation capabilities.

Publicly available data, collated below by journalist Ian Ellis, indicates that, as of last week, the Liaoning and its carrier group were operating in the Philippine Sea, with the Shandong and its carrier group just off Hainan Island. Meanwhile, the Fujian had already left Jiangnan shipyard in Shanghai for another round of sea trials, with satellite imagery confirming that the three carriers were all sailing as of September 18. The carrier groups for the first two flattops each include at least four destroyers as well as a combat support vessel or frigate, very likely also accompanied by a hunter-killer submarine.

No indication of a flag bridge or a Primary Flight Control area on the one in the picture.

The late great Holly Lisle:

None of us is ever as good as we can get. We can always learn more; we can always do better.

Read it.

As tensions between Israel and Hezbollah have shot up to new highs, Israeli soldiers anticipating being deployed to the north are increasingly turning for help to the civilian donation efforts that have kept them stocked in Gaza.

Adi Vaxman, who heads the U.S.-based donation effort called Operation Israel, fields requests from individual soldiers and says demand has spiked in tandem with security developments involving Hezbollah.

“With the situation up north, the demand has tripled in the last few days,” Vaxman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency last week. She said the total requests by soldiers in September are on pace to reach double the roughly 15,000 requests from August.

Nothing illustrates the essential inferiority of dependence on the government than efforts such as these. There used to be a site, the link for which I long ago lost, where you could go online and pay for a pizza to be delivered to Israeli soldiers.

Read it.

I’ll bet there’s a hell of a story behind that.

Read it.

In sum, the real driver here is political and ideological alignment, not individual behaviors influencing policy support. The authors, caught in their academic bubble, overlook the obvious: people who buy into the climate crisis narrative will support all the policies and behaviors at once—not as a result of any behavioral spillover, but because they see it all as part of the same belief system.

No wonder the population growth rate is less than replacement.

Read it.

We’ll show you how archivists package (or “house”) the most common types of physical documents for long-term storage. That is, we’ll talk boxes and files. And we’ll benefit from the experience of special contributors from the United Kingdom to compare how archivists in Canada and the UK commonly do their packaging.

Much of what we know about times past is because some people saved stuff that most of us would have thrown out. Just sayin’.

(No, I didn’t know that Archivist Barbie was a thing. Ya larn suthin new everday.)

CNN. 

Death is God’s way of telling you, ‘No, that was a bad idea.’

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Several years ago, I was involved in a case that illuminates the difficult position many doctors today find themselves in. The patient was pregnant, close to delivery, and experiencing dangerous declines in her baby’s heart rate. She had been on a blood thinner, which kept me, the anesthesiologist, from placing an epidural in her back. She also had strange airway anatomy, which would make it a struggle to put her to sleep quickly if an emergency cesarean section became necessary. I advised the obstetrician to perform an elective cesarean section now, in advance, while we had good working conditions, and not to wait for an emergency, where time is of the essence, and where the delay needed to induce general anesthesia might seriously injure the baby.

The obstetrician grew quiet. She seemed to descend within herself, in that lonely region of stress and strife where people feel themselves to be in an untenable position. Several things worried her, she confessed. First, hospital management had already warned her that her high cesarean section rate made her an outlier among her colleagues, which put her job at risk. Second, the baby’s heart rate did not quite meet the criteria for when to perform a cesarean section. True, the current situation was unfamiliar and unforeseen; then again, she wondered, would hospital management, let alone the malpractice lawyers, accept that excuse? Third, she wondered how to persuade the patient to have an operation that her own rules seemed to advise against.

The changing work environment in which many doctors practice medicine leads to such moments of uncertainty—and all but guarantees that they will occur more frequently. As more doctors work for large companies, they have bosses they must answer to. Rules for how to practice medicine have multiplied exponentially, and their bureaucratic enforcement makes doctors afraid to violate them. With science forming the bulk of their medical and post-graduate education, doctors also feel bewildered when faced with questions that touch on the moral, the political, and the philosophical.

I hear ya.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it becomes true.

ZMan: “The world kind of sucks right now….”

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it comes true.

New York Post.

Something caught my attention this week that revealed a deep, dark, shameful secret about single women.

Many of us — okay, let me clarify, not me (for once) — seem to be like a bull to a red rag when it comes to married men.

It appears that a wedding ring is seen as a challenge by many. Shame, shame, shameful behavior.

Don’t believe me? I have proof.

You see, it all started during my weekly Instagram Saucy Secrets confessional that I host every Monday night. A guy wrote in and said: “I’ve been married for 2.5 years and I have never had so many women approach me. When I was single I barely got noticed. I don’t like this attention, but is it normal?”

Yes, it is. In evolutionary biology, the term for this is ‘pre-selection’, and (to be clear) the single woman doesn’t want to ‘date a married man’, she wants him to get rid of his current wife (or, these days, girlfriend) and take up with her instead. Women want men than other women want, because the intersexual evaluation process is more work for a woman than for a man (“Is she hot? Is she available?) and so married men are like having a pre-approved mortgage loan when looking to buy a house–the hard work has already been mostly done for them.

This is explained in great detail in Dr. Orion Taraban’s recent book The Value of Others, which I highly recommend.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it comes true.

ZMan surveys the inner space.

A change that has happened in the culture of the West that has gone largely unnoticed is the concern for psychological states. A generation ago, what mattered in most cases was the material state of things. Governments cared about the economy in terms of measurables like inflation and GDP. Now they care about how “marginalized groups” are feeling about their social status. Large employers now worry about employee wellness, rather than financial benefits.

This is a shift from the objective to the subjective. Inflation is a thing you can measure, even if there are disputes about how the measures are done. Prices are either rising, falling, or remaining the same. The impact of inflation on the psychological state of consumer is another matter. There is no way to objectively describe such a thing, much less produce a metric for it. The only thing to go on are the opinions of people who claim to be experts in these sorts of soft areas.

You see the same shift in the workplace. In the prior century, managers focused on objective measures like productivity and the cost of labor. The manager in charge of benefits focused on driving down the costs of those benefits, while increasing the value to the employee. Now the point of a benefits plan is to increase employee wellness, which cannot be measured, only assessed. More importantly, there is no way to connect employer behavior to the result.

Read it.

At last month’s Democratic National Convention, men lined up to have themselves sterilized outside the conference center. You probably heard. So-called “reproductive rights” were one of the key issues of the Convention, which also had a giant inflatable IUD stationed close to the entrance, just in case attendees were in any doubt.

I fully support any movement to encourage Democrat men to get vasectomies and will gladly contribute monetarily to any such program.

Furthermore, I will equally strongly support a similar program to persuade Democrat women to get their tubes tied.

Think of it as evolution in action.

Read it.

Apparently the Demcorat Party is no longer the party of the working class.

Read it.

In science fiction movies like Frankenstein and Re-Animator, human bodies are revived, existing in a strange state between life and death. While this may seem like pure fantasy, a recent study suggests that a “third state” of existence might actually be present in modern biology.

According to the researchers, this third state occurs when the cells of a dead organism continue to function after its death, sometimes gaining new capabilities they never had while the organism was alive.

Read it.

Best to lean Greek and read it in the original, but hey, whatever works.

[Insert plug for the value of memorizing poetry here.]

The Illiad and the Odyssey were to Greek culture what the Bible is to ours–everybody used (and recognized) a lot of phrases from them and used those phrases in daily life.

How small of all that human hearts endure
The part that laws or kings can cause or cure;
Still to ourselves in every place consign’d,
Our own felicity we make or find.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quickly before it becomes true.

ZMan looks at war tech.

It has been said that a good sniper team can defeat a battalion, which is an exaggeration, but there is some truth to it. Snipers have been a highly effective way to slow down an opposing force. This is especially true for an army facing a much larger opponent, as was the case for the Finns in the Winter War. Finnish snipers harassed the Red Army to the point where they could not advance, despite having an enormous advantage in men and material.

The drone is something like the high-tech sniper. A competent drone team can harass an opponent from a distance, forcing the opponent to find cover. Unlike the sniper, the drone operator can target equipment. An armored unit advancing toward an enemy position can be knocked out by a drone unit, without taking fire. They attack the column to stall it, pass on the geolocation to their artillery units, then move to a new spot in order to repeat the process until the column is destroyed.

Read it.

In 2002, the FDA approved Suboxone, a new medication to treat opioid use disorder. Suboxone is a compound of two drugs that decreases one’s cravings for opioids while blocking their effects. It is safer and less cumbersome than methadone, which requires daily or weekly visits to a clinic, and more effective than any abstinence-based treatment, which requires people to withstand cravings and suppress physical discomfort. In clinical trials, Suboxone was shown to help opioid users avoid jail time and to decrease their mortality by over 50 percent. “You’d think that anything that can help save a heroin addict’s life would be seen as a good thing,” the writer and academic Michael Clune wrote in 2014, a year that marked an inflection point in an epidemic of fentanyl-related deaths. “So why, then, when I touted Suboxone at an Narcotics Anonymous meeting with a bunch of regulars did they look at me as if I’d gone insane?”

Clune has a history of heroin addiction (he wrote, to my mind, one of the great heroin-addiction memoirs) but successfully wrestled his demons into submission through a stay in rehab, diligent attendance at Narcotics Anonymous, exercise, and an enigmatic, epiphanic experience of grace. He knows how lucky he is to have overcome his addiction through struggle and also knows how rarely his strategy works for others. But when he proposed to friends in the recovery community that Suboxone is a worthy tool, they were upset; they were skeptical of a fix so expedient, so simple, so biological. “That’s like telling someone that smoking crack will get their mind off booze,” one NA longtimer argued. “Your recovery is based on a spiritual awakening,” another explained to Clune angrily. To this friend, Suboxone — a magic pill that changes the brain — would foreclose a person’s chance of personal transformation.

ZMan has some fun.

The most popular and probably the most effective argument from faith used in favor of open borders is that all men are created in God’s image. Since we are all God’s children, we have the same duty to cat-eating Haitians as we do to the Irish guy who drives the UPS truck and helps coach the local football team. Since immigration is an issue because it is the movement of nonwhites into white areas, it is a racial issue, and the Christian is prohibited from seeing race.

The obvious counter to this is that Jesus was fine with slavery, so he surely would not oppose the deportation of illegal aliens. This never registers with the Bible-quoting immigration enthusiast because much of what makes up modern Christianity in the West is cherry picking verses from Scripture that just so happen to support the secular morality of this age. For the most part, what passes for Christianity in the West is just a loyal servant at the foot of neo-liberalism.

That still leaves the question as to whether Jesus would be on the side of the people important pet-eating Haitians into your town or on the side of the people making AI-generated memes of Trump defending the house cats. The logic of Christianity says that Jesus would be pumping out those cat memes. He would not be making overtly racial claims about Haitians, most likely, but what we understand about Christian faith tells us he would be opposed to mass migration.

UnHerd.

It’s difficult to imagine this quiet bucolic corner of London being the point of origin of the defining dystopia of modern times. Yet, according to literary folklore, it was here in a Canonbury beer garden, in the shadow of a vast horse chestnut, that George Orwell first conceived the idea for 1984. The location would even make it chillingly into the novel: “Under the spreading chestnut tree, I sold you and you sold me…” Of course, this was a very different London, of ration books and bomb sites, and a recently widowed Orwell was already coughing up blood from the tuberculosis that would kill him. The future was, understandably, to be afraid of. Yet the seeds of 1984 originated decades earlier and over a thousand miles away, blowing in across the seas from what had been St Petersburg.

Yeah, I’m interested in almost anything having to do with Orwell. Feel free to skip it if you aren’t.

Read it.

Nine chapters into his book The Unaccountability Machine, Dan Davies makes a little self-deprecatory joke. He had intended to write a detective mystery about cybernetics, he says, but has spent eight chapters describing the construction of the murder weapon.

The question that Davies starts out with is about how it is that the modern organisation has become structured in structured in such a way that when bad things happen, to customers, or users, or suppliers, no one can be found to be accountable for these poor outcomes.

Read it.

Taylor Swift’s post-debate endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, appears to have completely backfired. A new post-debate poll from YouGov released Saturday found that while 8% of voters said Swift’s endorsement made them “somewhat” or “much more likely” to support the Democratic ticket, a significant 20% said they are “somewhat” or “much less likely” to vote for former President Donald Trump’s opponent after Swift spoke out.

The majority of respondents, however – 66% – said Swift’s high-profile endorsement made no difference in how they will vote in the upcoming November election, according to the NY Post.

ZMan:

It has been fascinating to watch the Haitian cat devouring meme go viral as it was both hilarious and illustrative of the problem facing the managerial regime. Largely due to Musk owning Twitter, now stupidly called X, there was little the regime could do to stop the spread of AI generated images of Trump defending house pets from Kamala and her animalistic Haitians. Regime toadies online were left to snootily do the “but actually” meme in response to it.

It reminded people of 2016 when clever people created MAGA art as well as anti-Clinton meme campaigns that were often far cleverer than what came from Trump. This is why they moved heaven and earth to shut this stuff down for the 2020 election. There is no way we get the Haitian cat devouring story if the cranks were still running Twitter. Of course, this assumes that workarounds had not been found to get around the censorship.