Steve Graham.

Why was I too blind to see this? Apparently, the Global Jewish Conspiracy is stealing elections from liberals now.

Isn’t this the same Global Jewish Conspiracy that makes about 90% of American Jews vote for liberals? It sounds like someone forgot the mission statement.

Sarah Hoyt is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Lately I’ve become an awful old woman. My reaction, during the con, to the little card hotels leave in your bathroom, in the hopes that you’ll save them laundry money — you know the one that says that if you want to help save the Earth or the Environment (I don’t remember which, precisely, these pagan divinities all run together in my head) you’ll hang up your towel and use it another day — was to sigh and say: Deary, the Earth has been here for billions of years before I was born. It will be here for billions of years before my very atoms have been dispersed in its general Earthness. I can’t save it. There isn’t a tupperware large enough. And besides where would I put it? Who would dust it?

In the event, the only audience for my musings was my husband who consented to chuckle at it, as he went on. And we didn’t hang up the towels. We might have, had they made a sensible business appeal “if you save us money, we’ll be able to keep our prices lower” but we’re not at home to religious pandering to religions not our own. As far as I’m concerned they might as well ask me not to use electricity so as to spare the feelings of Zeus, god of thunderbolt.

So, yes, you see, I have become an awful woman. Or if you prefer, I’ve become a fool or a sadist in Heinlein’s definition of such: Someone who tells the truth in social situations.

Power Line.

Today the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals decided Cajune v. Independent School District 194. That school district is immediately adjacent to the one where my kids went to school, and plaintiffs were represented by the Upper Midwest Law Center, on whose board I serve and which has often (albeit wrongly) been described as an “arm” of the policy organization that I run. Briefly, plaintiffs claimed that the school district engaged in viewpoint discrimination in violation of the First Amendment when it posted “Black Lives Matter” posters in classrooms, but refused a request to also post “All Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter” posters.

The 8th Circuit reversed the trial court’s Rule 12 dismissal of plaintiffs’ case, and remanded the case for further proceedings. So plaintiffs haven’t won yet. The school district’s principal defense is the “government speech doctrine,” which seems to post-date my law school training. The government speech doctrine holds that a governmental unit can engage in endless propaganda, as long as it is speaking on its own behalf. The remedy is at the ballot box.

Read it.

China stands accused of wholesale theft of intellectual property, cited in Senate, House, and Administration reports, at a cost estimated by the FBI at $225 to $600 billion a year. Nonetheless, American corporations with the most to lose from IP theft are eager to augment their research presence in China. Take for example Intel Corp’s new chip innovation center here in Shenzhen, or Big Pharma, which lives and dies on patent protection. Nokia, one of the two main Western competitors to China’s telecom giant Huawei, conducts most of its R&D in Shanghai Bell Labs, one of the 10 largest corporate research centers in the country. The Chinese government counts 531 foreign-funded R&D centers in Shanghai alone. US companies spent $8.2 billion on R&D in China in 2019.

A visit to Huawei’s 2,000-acre campus in Shenzhen helps make sense of this cognitive dissonance, in which corporate America makes enormous bets on IP in a country that the FBI claims is stealing IP from them. The simple answer is that Chinese R&D is very good and getting better fast. More critically, Chinese IP theft isn’t simply a matter of this or that technological advancement. It’s much deeper and broader than that: it’s about claiming and replicating the source of innovation. China is engaged in what might be termed the boldest act of IP theft in world history, or to borrow a Woke expression, the most egregious act of cultural appropriation ever. It is “stealing” Western high culture.

Politico.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his wife are moving their family back to Marin County, an exclusive pocket of Northern California with rolling hills and redwood groves that’s across the bay from San Francisco, POLITICO has learned.

The Newsoms will hold onto their six-bedroom property in the eastern Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks, and the governor and first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsom will spend some nights there. But they are relocating their four children back to Marin County, where they will stay with extended family and enroll in school for the fall semester, according to two people familiar with their plans, who were granted anonymity to convey private conversations.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Read it.

Intermittent fasting (IF) is currently one of the most popular health and fitness trends. But, as with anything popular, it has its nay-sayers. So, we looked at the science that backs up what these kinds of diets can do and busted some myths in the process.

Orthodox Christians fast every Wednesday and Friday–no meat or animal products (i.e. strict vegan)–and have been doing so for over a thousand years.

Sometimes the old ways are best….

Read it. And watch the video.

I think languages are really interesting but I’m also really bad at them. I cannot hack the memorization. I’ve mostly avoided conlangs (that’s Constructed Languages, like Esperanto or Klingon) because like, oh no, now there’s even more languages for me to fail at memorizing. So like, a language so minimal you can almost learn it by accident, suddenly my ears perk up.

Toki pona is really interesting, on a lot of different axes. It’s a thought experiment in Taoist philosophy that turns out to be actually, practically useful. It’s Esperanto But It Might Actually Work This Time¹. It has NLP implications— it’s a human language which feels natural to speak yet has such a deeply logical structure it seems nearly custom-designed for simple computer programs to read and write it². Beyond all this it’s simply beautiful as an intellectual object— nearly every decision it makes feels deeply right. It solves a seemingly insoluble problem³ and does it with a sense of effortlessness and an implied “LOL” at every step.

So what toki pona is. Toki pona is a language designed around the idea of being as simple as it is possible for a language to be. It has 120 words in its original form (now, at the twenty year mark, up to 123), but you can form a lot of interesting sentences with only around twenty or thirty (I know this because this is roughly the size of my current tok vocabulary).

Read it.

In the ninth instalment of an ongoing Quillette series on the history of Canada, Greg Koabel describes how the late 16th-century fur trade developed amid a disrupted Indigenous geopolitical landscape.

Fascinating stuff. Lots of good maps.

UnHerd.

In a short story published in 1955, Isaac Asimov imagined America’s Presidential election day in 2008. Amid intense excitement, the entire world watches on as an ordinary citizen is led forward to cast his vote — the only vote needed in the entire country, since he had been chosen by a supercomputer to be the completely representative citizen that year.

Asimov was inspired by CBS News’s Remington Rand UNIVAC I computer, which correctly predicted a landslide for Eisenhower on election night 1952 after only 3 million votes had been counted and Adlai Stevenson was ahead. It was the first instance of what has become a familiar feature of US elections, to the degree that most people treat the “calling” of the result early in the evening by the networks as the actual outcome of the election.

Asimov’s fantasy was a prophetic reductio ad absurdum of something which has played a steadily increasing role in modern politics: the idea that citizens can be represented by a carefully designed system in which they play no active role. The vogue for citizen juries is an illustration of this, while a number of theorists have gone even further and proposed that actual legislative assemblies should be chosen through some kind of lottery — what is technically termed “sortition”. The processes of voting and elections, on this account, are messy and corruptible: far better to have a system which is genuinely representative of public opinion. And a citizen jury will represent the population better than a committee of elected legislators scrutinising the same material.

Read it.

The analogy of mitochondria as powerhouses has expired. Mitochondria are living, dynamic, maternally in- herited, energy-transforming, biosynthetic, and signaling organelles that actively transduce biological infor- mation. We argue that mitochondria are the processor of the cell, and together with the nucleus and other organelles they constitute the mitochondrial information processing system (MIPS). In a three-step process, mitochondria (1) sense and respond to both endogenous and environmental inputs through morphological and functional remodeling; (2) integrate information through dynamic, network-based physical interactions and diffusion mechanisms; and (3) produce output signals that tune the functions of other organelles and sys- temically regulate physiology. This input-to-output transformation allows mitochondria to transduce meta- bolic, biochemical, neuroendocrine, and other local or systemic signals that enhance organismal adaptation. An explicit focus on mitochondrial signal transduction emphasizes the role of communication in mitochon- drial biology. This framework also opens new avenues to understand how mitochondria mediate inter-organ processes underlying human health.

Read it.

Just as society today grapples with the implications of AI, ancient philosophers such as Epicurus and Lucretius explored innovation, disruptive technologies, their impact on human life, and the ethical considerations of employing then-new tools in society.

Lucretius’ work not only preserved and clarified Epicurean philosophy, but also delved into the implications of technological advancements. By examining how Lucretius addressed the benefits and risks of new technologies, we can use his thinking to navigate the moral and existential questions posed by modern AI.

There is nothing new under the sun.

Read it.

Well, that’s good enough, as far as it goes, and probably a step in the right direction – but I notice that, of the four kids shown in the picture, not one is a white male child. So I’m curious as to what their ‘target demographic’ might be.

When my parents were teens (during the Great Depression, I might point out), high school was widely recognized as the terminal educational institution that most kids would attend, and so it had vocational training like Shop and domestic training like Home Ec to prepare kids to go out and get a job and start a family, which is what most of them were going to do.

By contrast, when I was in high school, it was all about going to college, and if you weren’t headed toward college they didn’t have all that much interest in you. (I remember one class where we were told to come prepared to discuss  five colleges where we intended to apply.)

So that really represents a regression to pre-industrial-revolution times in which  you only went to school if you were going on to university; otherwise, you were on your own.

Naval Gazing.

The basic case for missile defense is quite simple: nuclear weapons aren’t something you want detonating in your country, and shooting them down seems like a good idea. But as appealing as this is, it is usually countered by a pair of counterarguments, that it’s far too hard to shoot down all incoming missiles, and that it would be destabilizing if it was possible. But this relies on the basic premise that any missile defense system which can’t shoot down all missiles is useless, and there’s no reason that would be true unless someone was smuggling it in to defeat missile defense for other reasons. (We’ll come back to that in a bit.) A system which stops 50% of incoming missiles means that only half as many people will die in a nuclear war,1 obviously a desirable result.

Read it.

Costco wants to build a new store in Los Angeles’ Baldwin Village neighborhood. The problem with that is the same problem with building anything in California: years’ worth of process and public hearings, as well as the threat of after-the-fact lawsuits. Fortunately for Costco, YIMBYs in California have been chipping away at all this and there are now ways to bypass the legacy review process.’

Note how there is no suggestion that the process might have the wokery accretions that decades of public busybodiness have loaded onto modern life scraped off, or even lightly pruned.

No, no, no! Right-Thinking People must preserve and defend their indefeasible power to stick their noses into everybody else’s business! What’s Wrong With You!?

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: Sometimes the old ways are best. (Shit, man! Do you want to return to The Fifties!? Goddamned right I do–I lived in The Fifties, and I would rather live there than here.)

Read it. And watch the video.

I’d pay big bucks for a fridge thus equipped.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The Chinese aren’t exactly being subtle about what they are trying to do. Today, they own more than 300,000 acres of farmland inside the United States, and they have been specifically targeting areas that are located near important military bases. As you will see below, the Chinese now own farmland very close to 19 different U.S. military bases. How in the world could our leaders have allowed this to happen? Foreign adversaries should not be allowed to purchase farmland at all, and yet somehow they have been able to acquire land that is ideal for spying on our military bases over and over again.

Read it.

I know that they do something, I’m just not entirely sure what it is, and I don’t really miss them when I run out. Yet I keep buying them, because this what humans that cook do. They buy bay leaves and put them in things.

Read it.

An ingroup is a social group that a person identifies as being a part of, based on factors like nationality, race, religion, socioeconomic status, or political affiliation.

An outgroup is a social group that a person does not identify with, based on similar factors as would cause that person to identify with an ingroup (e.g., nationality and religion).

For example, a religious person might view members of their religion as being a part of their ingroup, while viewing members of other religions as being a part of their outgroup.

The concept of ingroups and outgroups has important implications in a wide range of contexts, so it’s important to understand it. As such, in the following article you will learn more about this aspect of social identity, understand the psychology behind it, and see what you can do to account for it in practice.

Read it.

The man had never met Ma’lokyattsik’i, but he hardly hesitated as he drove a pickaxe through her heart and toted away her salt. Also known as the Salt Woman or Salt Mother, Ma’lokyattsik’i lived in the form of a salt lake and had long attracted visitors from the pueblos of Zuni, Hopi, Acoma, Laguna, and beyond. These visitors came with care, carrying prayer plumes and gracious sentiments. Puebloan peoples even agreed among one another to leave behind weapons and warfare at their camps and villages whenever they needed salt. Puebloan peoples have long seen the Salt Woman as an animate part of their world. But the man with the pickaxe—a Spanish soldier led by Captain Marcos Farfán de los Godos—saw her as little more than an extractable resource, one that might justify imperial investment and colonial settlement in the continental southwest.

Vox.

I think there are a few reasons that parking makes people really upset, but perhaps the most obvious is that in almost every place in this country, it is obligatory to have a car, and there is almost nothing that you can do without a car. So to the extent that you are able to hold down a job or go to a restaurant or pick your kids up from school, you have to drive, and parking becomes the link between driving and whatever else you want to do with your life. And so naturally, there’s a great deal of importance placed on having a good parking space.’

… we have just catastrophically mismanaged the way we provide parking in this country, in a way that actually doesn’t make things better for people who are driving and parking. Parking is not shared, and it’s not properly priced. We have acquiesced to the idea that parking on city streets has to be a total free-for-all.

…

The first person to be killed in New York City this year was actually killed over a parking space. I estimate that it happens several dozen times a year in US cities.

Wired.

For nearly three days after a sperm meets an egg, the human embryo (a tiny, eight-cell blob) is managed by the egg’s genes. On day three, the embryo strips its entire genome naked, freeing itself of maternal control and exposing its genes for activation. Then, says computational biologist Manu Singh, “the army of the dead invades on day four.”

Steve Sailer.

Mays is probably the least unreasonable choice you could make as the greatest baseball player of all time. A majority of expert observers would likely disagree that he was the best ever, but absolutely none would scoff at your choice.

But, as is common knowledge, Steve Sailer is a notorious racist and white supremacist, so what does he know?

Read it.

MacKenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, awarded a $2 million grant to a Philadelphia-based community fund with ties to the Philly Palestine Coalition, the radical activist group behind the anti-Israel encampment at the University of Pennsylvania.

The billionaire divorcée announced the grant to Bread & Roses Community Fund on March 19, lauding the group and other grantees as “vital agents of change” that have overcome “discrimination and other systemic obstacles.” Just weeks later, in May, Bread & Roses honored the Philly Palestine Coalition with its “Victory is Ours Award,” which the fund gives to a local group that has “advanced moments for racial and economic justice.”

It’s hard to maintain the fiction that Republicans are ‘the party of the rich’ when most billionaires (and their former wives) are Democrats–or worse.

The Spectator.

Liberal democracy is endangered more by its friends than by its enemies. Neither Moscow nor Beijing lured the United States into strategic humiliations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Nor was the rise of China to the rank of a great power brought about by Westerners sympathetic to Beijing’s communist system. If liberal parties and movements in the United States and Europe seem to be losing ground to populists, this is not thanks to Facebook ads purchased by Vladimir Putin in support of Donald Trump or Brexit. Liberals themselves sabotaged liberal democracy by prioritizing liberalism over democratic legitimacy for three decades after the Cold War — on fundamental issues ranging from trade and foreign policy to immigration and national values.

The Spectator.

Japan has become another piece of fodder for the West’s culture wars. After a recent visit with his family, talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel praised the country for its clean toilets and lack of litter, only to be lambasted by right-wing pundits such as Ben Shapiro, who accused the comedian of having leftist beliefs that are completely at odds with what makes Japanese society so safe and orderly. Namely, Shapiro argued, Japan is a closed-off nation, unpersuaded by arguments to allow mass migration, and its homogeneity and “unique culture,” along with a strict legal system, help sustain this “package deal.”

During the height of the Syrian refugee crisis nearly a decade ago, amid intense international criticism, Japan refused to accept asylum seekers from the Middle East. Last year, its government recognized only 303 refugees, still a record high. Japan has been more generous in regard to the war in Ukraine, with around 2,600 individuals classified as “evacuees” accepted as of February 2024, but most do not hold official asylum status. Roughly 2,000 currently remain in the country, with the majority hoping to eventually return to Ukraine.

Tyler Cowen.

In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.

Read it.

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems.

To test the strong nuclear force, physicists turned to the helium-4 nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. When helium nuclei are excited, they grow like an inflating balloon until one of the protons pops off. Surprisingly, in a recent experiment, helium nuclei didn’t swell according to plan: They ballooned more than expected before they burst. A measurement describing that expansion, called the form factor, is twice as large as theoretical predictions.

“The theory should work,” said Sonia Bacca, a theoretical physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and an author of the paper describing the discrepancy, which was published in Physical Review Letters. “We’re puzzled.”

Read it.

Mental illness has been an enigma and point of confusion for many researchers and scientists. Despite medical advances, the root cause of mental illness has remained unknown.

However, a recent breakthrough in psychiatry may be the missing piece to this mysterious puzzle.

Dr. Christopher Palmer, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, has been connecting the dots of thousands of research articles regarding the relationship between mental illness and mitochondrial dysfunction.

According to Palmer, this collective research raises concerns about the current treatments used for mental disorders.

Read it. Or watch the video.

Desalination, or the removal of salt from seawater, is one of those technologies that has always seemed right on the horizon. It might surprise you to learn that there are more than 18,000 desalination plants operating across the globe. But, those plants provide less than a percent of global water needs even though they consume a quarter of all the energy used by the water industry.

Read it.

And it will serve you right.

Quillette.

We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.

To be sure, a large majority of American parents still believe that their children must attain a college degree for their welfare and happiness. Almost always, those parents are applying both their understanding of how the world works and their recollection of their own time in college. College as they knew it was the on-ramp to prosperous adulthood. But that outcome is steadily becoming less likely.

The American Mind.

No one stops you when driving across the border from Nogales, Arizona, into Nogales, Mexico; crossing the other way is a different story. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers often interrogate drivers and search vehicles inside and out, using drug-sniffing dogs, x-ray scanners, handheld chemical analyzers, and trained detectives. One reason is that Nogales, Mexico, is now the world’s epicenter of illegal fentanyl trafficking, and Arizona’s southern border is the primary point of entry for illegal fentanyl entering the U.S.

Read it.

A math geek reviews a math geek book. Both are worth reading.

The Guardian.

ince the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.

Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence.

But what if the question of genetic inheritance were even more nuanced? What if the old polarised debate about the competing influences of nature and nurture was due a 21st-century upgrade?

Read it.

When I was around eight years old, my baby-sitter let me watch a documentary on nuclear war. Unsurprisingly, it shook me to the core. It’s kind of hard to know what went on in her head, but those images of nuclear detonations never left my head. Looking back at it now, this ‘incident’ starts to make sense, kind of. This is because over the decades I’ve read a lot on nuclear deterrence and on nuclear war simulations. I have had this graving to understand nuclear warfare and deterrence basically throughout my adult-life.

Read it.

Created for US insurance firms during a period of devastating fires across the 19th and 20th centuries, the Sanborn maps blaze with detail — shops, homes, churches, brothels, and opium dens were equally noted by the company’s cartographers. Tobiah Black explores the history and afterlife of these maps, which have been reclaimed by historians and genealogists seeking proof of the vanished past.

I love maps. Always have.

Read it.

The Baltimore City Police Department is investigating a “possible chemical agent” released at a Pride event Saturday evening in the downtown area that sparked a “mass exodus.”

Local media outlet Capital Gazette said a “possible chemical agent” and fireworks were released during the Baltimore Pride parade around 830 pm local time.

Baltimore Police has yet to confirm the type of chemical agent that was released. The combination of the chemical agent and fireworks caused the large crowd to panic, scattering in different directions and resulting in several injuries.

Sounds as if the worm is definitely turning.

Read it.

Next step: Claiming that the Japanese, like the ancient Egyptians, were actually black.

Ka-ching!

Read it.

Ever since the start of Joe Biden’s presidency, curbing climate change has been a fundamental component of his energy policy agenda.

During the spring, for example, the Biden administration issued a power plant rule­­, imposing strict emissions reductions regarding the use of fossil-fuel power plants. There have been many other rules proposed as well, including regulating cars, stoves, dishwashers, water heaters, and even microwaves.

All of these rules are predicated on concerns about the effects of greenhouse gas emissions on global temperatures and climate change. If greenhouse gas emissions drive climate change, then curbing the use of sources of energy that emit them (such as coal, oil, and natural gas) should in theory curb these increases in global temperature.