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The Maldives’ remarkable investments in infrastructure and the scientific evidence of island geomorphology suggest that the only thing sinking is the fearmongering stories of nations disappearing because of climate change.

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Most of the sins of Big Government arise from a conviction on the part of the Cloud People that the Great Unwashed have to be protected from themselves by means of stringent regulation and requirements for permission to do even the most petty daily activities.

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Through a sequence of random events (seeing a note about an Alto emulator, listening to a truly atrocious podcast-retelling of the NeXT computer company) I found myself reading about the PERQ computer this evening.

Reader: the modern Mac is not “a copy of an Alto”. I mean it kinda is. But more recently than that, it’s really a copy of a PERQ.

The PERQ is an early, commercial, and technical-user-focused version of an Alto. Except not quite. It had the same fast CPU, large local memory and bitmapped display with fast microcoded rasterops (a so-called “3M machine” — 1 MIPS CPU, 1 megabyte RAM, 1 megapixel display, “and 1 megapenny of price”, about $10,000). It had the same GUI with overlapping windows. It also had Pascal, Fortran, C and Lisp. It also demoed and started taking orders in 1979 and shipped in 1980, before the competition, including before Xerox. The Xerox Star (Xerox did finally commercialize the Alto) and Apollo/Domain each shipped a year later, in 1981.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Alma Boykin.

My car was getting worked on, and another person in the waiting area was listening to a podcast about the End Times and how they were Nigh. They also needed to have their hearing checked, because if I can hear your ear-buds from ten feet away, you need to turn the sound down. Anyway, I mostly tuned the discussion out because 1) I’ve heard most of it before and 2) it wasn’t loud-loud.

Many cultures and belief systems have an idea of an earlier time, when things were much better than they are today. A Golden Age, the time of the Legendary Emperors, the world before the Fall, before the coming of private property when all were Noble Savages, the Dream Time when the gods walked among men and animals spoke, when the living was easy, or easier. When all people were equal (“When Adam delved and Eva span, then there was no noble man”), and a just ruler oversaw a time of peace (Numa Pompillius, Quetzalcoatl, what have you).

Some, not all, also have an end time idea. This may vary, and sometimes shows up in faiths that don’t usually focus on eschatology, like Buddhists or American Indians, or the modern Environmental movement’s more radical offshoots. Judaism has had end times movements, and Christianity is well known for people who think that the End is Nigh and can be predicted. Some people even want to bring about that end time, thus calls of “Don’t immenatize my eschaton.” The government of Iran is the best known at the moment, although I’ve heard that there are Jewish and Christian groups who seek to bring about the Second Coming or just the arrival of the Messiah by— Several things. Extinction Rebellion and some even more radical environmentalists want to trigger the return of wilderness* to the world and restore Nature to its pre-lapsarian state. Which lapse varies from group to group, and which state is often left vague, although “pristine Nature without the corruption of mankind/the free market/the patriarchy/Western Civilization/pick three” seems to be common.

Alma Boykin has many very readable fiction books on Amazon. Highly recommended.

ds

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The president’s desk bears a remarkable pedigree. Its story ties together several disparate historical threads, including a ghost ship, polar exploration, and relations between the United States and the UK. The tale begins with a certain British Admiral, Sir Edward Belch.

Tom Kratman.

In the first place, there are two things we mean by “the election was stolen.” They’re mutually reinforcing, yes, but they’re not the same. The first of these is via the influence of media and social media. It was not illegal for them to have been Biden’s campaign, but they _were_ Biden’s campaign. What that means, in practice, is that they used their privileges under the first amendment to violate the intent of the first amendment. I say “privileges,” by the way, rather than “rights” because by their conduct they have undermined the first amendment to the point we can calmly consider killing it, as regards the media, as so many lefties want it to be killed for the common citizenry. It no longer serves its purpose.

The second factor is our belief that actual spurious ballots were introduced into the system by both mailing in and other means. And the numbers were not even that large; Trump “lost” by about twelve thousand in Georgia, eighty thousand in Pennsylvania, and under twenty-one thousand in Wisconsin. Let’s not pretend that those were particularly difficult numbers to have illegally come up with.

…

In short, election fraud is so completely a part of the Democratic Party and the left, more generally, and has been for so long, that it would only be remarkable if there were a close election where there wasn’t any. We expect it. If we can’t easily see it, we expect it to be only because it’s a little better hidden than usual.

The Democratic Party is and always has been a party of corruption, heavy on power, short of or bereft of principle. The only difference between it and any given sub-Saharan African kleptocracy is in the shade of skin.

Does anybody seriously think that Biden got more votes than Obama did in 2004 and 2008?

Tyler Cowen.

I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins. Here goes:

People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of noble purposes in the intellectual infrastructure. But in reality their main effects are either to raise or lower the status of the elites in their society.

Noam Chomsky, for instance, has lowered the status of American elites. That is his net long-run effect, not that he drummed up sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. A lot more people, for better or worse, are more skeptical of a bunch of things because of Chomsky.

The New York Times, in contrast, works hard to raise the status of elites. It tries especially hard to raise the status of Democratic elites, but still it is raising the status of elites for the most part.

Most ‘thinkers’ are in love with thinking, and spend little time thinking about whether what they’re thinking has any connection to reality. Usually they think of ‘connection to reality’ as a bug, not a feature

It is hard to lower the status of elites without lowering your own status as well.  It is not just that the elites will not like you, or may treat you and your PR harshly.  You also have to come across as quite negative, and furthermore some of the negativity you create for your targets will rub off on you, at least in the eyes of much of your audience.  Plus being too relentlessly critical, rather than constructive, tends to make people stupider.

I can live with it. Most people will grow stupider over time all by themselves; I am happy to help that process along pro bono publico. Think of it as evolution in action.

Happy Labor Day.

“How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man don’t even trust his own pants.” — Henry Fonda, Once Upon a Time in the West

Hey, me too…

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On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that illegal aliens do not have the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, due to the fact that they are not American citizens.

As reported by Fox News, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that federal law prohibiting illegal aliens from owning firearms is legal, as the Constitution does not apply to anyone who has entered the United States illegally.

The decision came as the result of an appeal by an illegal alien named Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, who had been arrested in Texas in 2022 by the Border Patrol. He was charged with illegal possession of a handgun, and illegally re-entering the country after having already been deported.

No-brain journalism strikes again: ‘Not an American citizen’ and ‘in the country illegally’ aren’t the same thing.

“The Second Amendment protects the right of ‘the people’ to keep and bear arms. Our court has held that the term ‘the people’ under the Second Amendment does not include illegal aliens,” said U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho in a concurring opinion. “As to common sense, an illegal alien does not become ‘part of a national community’ by unlawfully entering it, any more than a thief becomes an owner of property by stealing it.”

Love that analogy.

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The Committee on House Administration subpoenaed high ranking officials at five government agencies on Thursday requesting they appear at depositions over concerns federal funds were used to encourage more Democrat voting.

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In a sharp escalation of Italy’s ongoing crackdown on illegal migration across the Mediterranean, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has impounded a humanitarian rescue ship for the 23rd time. The vessel, Geo Barents, operated by the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), was detained in the port of Salerno this week following its rescue of 191 migrants.

The 60-day detention order, issued on Monday night, is one of the most severe actions taken in an 18-month campaign against humanitarian groups operating in the Mediterranean. Italian authorities accused Geo Barents of endangering lives and failing to provide timely information during a night-time rescue last Friday, when the crew intervened to save migrants from a small fiberglass boat that was being approached by a Libyan coastguard vessel, FT reports.

God forbid the Libyan coastguard should ‘rescue’ them and return them to Libya where they came from.

Read it.

Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham caused a bit of a stir last week at the Democratic National Convention.

Grisham, who resigned on Jan. 6, 2021, in a supposed protest against President Donald Trump for his alleged inaction when demonstrators invaded the U.S. Capitol, endorsed Kamala Harris and claimed that from her personal knowledge Trump has “no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.”

But wait a minute.

How did Grisham become an arbiter of morals and a purveyor of “fidelity to the truth”?

After all, Grisham worked for Trump and his wife, first lady Melania Trump, for six years, starting as a campaign worker in August 2015 and then working as press secretary to both the first lady and the president after Trump’s election in 2016.

You have to ask yourself how Grisham had worked for the Trumps for six years without managing to notice that they were rotten scum. One is supposed to believe that she only figured out that Trump was a bad person two weeks before he left office when she resigned in protest. But if she knew Trump as well as she claims, and he was as horrible as she says now, then she should have quit years before.

Don’t think of it as selling out–think of it as buying in.

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In an email, UNL Chancellor Rodney Bennett said to the campus community on Tuesday that the Office of Diversity and Inclusion will be closing, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.

The change also means the university’s vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion position, held by Marco Barker, will be eliminated come December. Including benefits, Barker’s salary is almost $320,000.

$750,000 will also go back into the university’s overall budget, which was previously allocated for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

• Strong and invincible
• Poor pitiful victim

You don’t know which one you’ll get until you open the box.

ScienceAlert.

No surprises here. When ‘gender’ is a social construct that you can pick from an extensive menu and nobody thinks that genes determine anything, in a world where ‘mysogyny’ is ‘terrorism’, who needs the Y chromosome?

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First, teachers must leave the classroom and become administrators or counselors to earn above the standard teacher salary.

Second, colleges of education can’t prepare new teachers nearly as well as an apprenticeship under a veteran teacher who has consistently demonstrated mastery of the craft. Thankfully, K-12 education can rework how it prepares new teachers and rewards quality veteran educators to solve both problems simultaneously.

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Astonishing.

The actions the loader goes through are exactly the actions that a real tank loader would take: Get the shell from the back ammo rack, throw it into the breech until the breech block locks, wait for the shot and the casing to be ejected, and repeat.

Of course a tank round weighs quite a bit more than a soda bottle, but still….

(Don’t get me started on how tricky this is when there are expended shell casings rolling around on the floor of the turret.)

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An Idaho man has been arrested in connection with the shooting death of a woman in California more than 50 years ago, authorities said.

DNA evidence led investigators to identify Michael Eugene Mullen, 75, as a suspect in the death of Nina “Nadine” Fischer in 1973, the Marin County Sheriff’s Office said. Mullen was arrested near Salmon, Idaho, on Wednesday, and he is being held in jail while awaiting extradition to California.

You can run, but you can’t hide, apparently.

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As the United States continues its rush to shutter the nation’s remaining coal plants, energy analysts are debating what should fill the gap to meet the growing need for electricity. Increasingly, many are pointing to nuclear energy as the solution.

According to the Department of Energy (DOE), nearly one-third of existing U.S. coal plants are scheduled to be shut down by 2035.

“If you wanna get ahead ya gotta hump ‘n’ git it.” — Merle Haggard

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For many Europeans, the American mind is a hard thing to fathom. Considering the cultural influence the United States have exercised over the Mother Continent since 1918, and their political dominance since 1945, it is an important question. Nor are the Americans one is likely to meet in Europe much help—we are hardly representative of our countrymen. Less than 20% of Americans own passports, and a minority of that number actually use them beyond Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. We Americans abroad may be very pro- or anti-European, well-informed or ignorant, but we are not typical.

Even if we were, as a whole, Americans tend not to be very introspective. We may seek the self-affirmation of American Exceptionalism or the self-hatred of Wokery, but the calm pursuit of self-knowledge is not usually in our purview. This, of course, is not uncommon amongst either Imperial or Calvinist peoples; we are both—the latter in a strange, secularised sense peculiar to ourselves. So it is that probing the American mind presents unique challenges even to natives—let alone Europeans.

It has been observed that at the bottom of American differences from Europe lie two qualities: race and space. Certainly, the Indian and Black issues on the one hand, and the sheer immensity of our country on the other, make for a very great difference. So does the great divorce between rulers and ruled, despite the need of the former to corral the latter into election booths every so often. I often tell foreigners that if they want to love my country, they need to take a long road trip through it; if they wish to hate it, they need only to read the history of its foreign policy. The dissonance between the two experiences is astonishing.

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For many humans, plants might seem stationary and even a little dull. But green things actually move a lot. If you watch a timelapse video of a sunflower seedling poking up from the soil, for example, it doesn’t just shoot straight up. Instead, as the sunflower grows, its crown spins in circles, twists into corkscrews and, in general, wiggles around—albeit very slowly.

Now, researchers co-led by Orit Peleg at CU Boulder and Yasmine Meroz at Tel Aviv University have discovered one role for these chaotic movements, also known as “circumnutations.” In greenhouse experiments and computer simulations, the group showed that sunflowers take advantage of circumnutations to search the environment around them for patches of sunlight.

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Whatever the motivations, spending trillions of dollars to replace fossil fuels with expensive and unreliable wind and solar sources is foolish, futile and dangerous.