Read it.

New York’s Jewish House members have disappeared because there are no longer Jewish Democrat communities. Instead there are Republican Jewish communities who are being gerrymandered and people with Jewish last names who belong to no community, who are generally agnostic when it comes to religion, and whose only culture is pop culture.

Jewish Democrats helped destroy their own electorate. And are eliminating themselves.

Read it.

Linguistic inflation is analogous to economic inflation, but it concerns a devaluation in meaning rather than price.

Inflation lies behind the popular use of such words as genius, epic, awesome, totally, and incredible. What they mean is often more modest than their traditional senses suggest: genius means clever, epic is impressive, incredible is surprising. Such is our need to imbue our words with force and significance, that we use hyperbole to entice people to pay attention – and the hyperbolic terms gradually normalise.

Say we’re sharing a link on the internet. Can we trust people to heed us if we say it’s “pretty good” or “rather interesting”? These intensifiers, which Orin examined last week, will seem mild in the midst of phrases like “insanely amazing” (which Google tells me has been applied to hair extensions and cheese dip recipes). So more people begin inflating their own lexical choices. Eventually the exaggerated forms become mundane.

The problem is the intersection of rampant narcissism and what might be called an evolving ‘attention society’. Status and remuneration flow toward those whose strident cries of ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ are most successful, therefore all the incentives are aligned toward ‘turning it up to eleven’.

Read it.

What happens when the workforce no longer wants to work? We’re about to find out. As with all cultural sea changes, macro statistics don’t tell the full story. The sea change is better illuminated by anecdotal evidence: workers constantly quitting to take better jobs; zero loyalty to corporate employers; workers cutting hours from full-time to part-time; workers going out for lunch and never coming back; workers giving up on selling sugar-water for the rest of their lives (echoing Steve Jobs’ famous challenge to John Scully: “Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life? Or do you want to come with me and change the world?”) and giving up on owning an insanely over-valued house.

Workers may sell sugar-water but their hearts are no longer in it. Some are interested in changing the world, and others are interested in changing their own lives as the means to change the world.

I, on the other hand, are looking for the cheat codes.

Read it.

People don’t go to MacDonald’s for healthy food.

Russia Says It Destroyed Depot With Western Weapons in Ukraine

Rafael unveils new Spike NLOS missile version with in-flight control transfer

I guess the war is wearing out its welcome.

Read it.

Less and less as time goes one.

Read it.

I use Harry’s products because I like them and they’re very cost-effective compared to Big Razor companies like Gillette and Schick. I also resist any urge that I might have – and, if it exists, it’s a small one – to buy stuff based on the politics of the people who make it. (Except Ben & Jerry’s; they deserve to die in penury.)

But I find this whole notion of ‘They won’t advertise with us because of our politics, so we’ll do what they do and do it better nyah nyah nyah’ to be strangely attractive and (dare I say it?) typically American.

My hesitation is due to the fact that ‘Jeremy’s razors’ sounds rather … metrosexual.

Restoration of empire is the endgame for Russia’s Vladimir Putin (CNN) Putin as the New Trump.

Kremlin Cronies Say Putin Is Ready to Go Full Kim Jong Un (Daily Beast) Putin as the New Trump.

How Russia is holding Ukraine’s wheat exports to ransom

How New EU Sanctions On Russia Will Shake Up Global Energy Trade

Biden Throws Zelensky Under The Bus: Ukraine Leader ‘Brushed Off’ Invasion Warnings

“When will my side learn not to give in to lefty scum?”

— Taki

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In the biological sciences, there are a group of measures used to test the health of an ecosystem or the health of a species. In the case of a species, estimates of the population are usually the starting place. Then it may be the population density of the species, which can determine if the pressure is the loss of habitat or some unknown environmental factor that is lowering fertility. It is assumed that a declining population relative to territory is always a sign of crisis in a species.

Of course, these measures are never used to test the health of European populations because that is a conspiracy theory. Everyone knows that all you have to do is utter the abracadabra phrase “conspiracy theory” and all of the related things that are easily observed can no longer be mentioned. Putting that aside, the same measures we use to test the health of a species could be applied to humans. In fact, we could have much more granular and accurate measures.

Read it.

Hunter Biden is not just a world-class artist, a celebrated author, a firearms and chemistry enthusiast and a brave military vet: he’s also the head of a giant multinational conglomerate.

That’s the only plausible explanation for why the president’s son paid a full-time salary to a woman he claimed he can never recall meeting.

A report from the Washington Examiner’s Andrew Kerr and Jerry Dunleavy details how Hunter’s company paid Lunden Roberts $1,500 for forty hours’ work in November 2018, according to “deleted payroll files recovered from a copy of his abandoned laptop.”

Lunden Roberts, you may recall, is an exotic dancer who formerly worked at MPire, a DC gentleman’s club just a short walk from the White House. She gave birth to Navy Joan Roberts, Hunter’s bastard daughter, in August 2018.

Ms. Roberts was also receiving health, dental and vision insurance from Biden’s company.

A caring employer.

Read it.

Threat to democracy: When Republicans win an election.

Read it.

The budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee would reduce mandatory spending by $11.86 trillion over 10 years while lowering nondefense discretionary spending by $3.64 trillion.

The U.S. government faces a budget deficit of $3.1 trillion. The accumulated national debt stands at $30 trillion.

But time and fortune happen to them all….

Read it.

From the very outset of this pandemic, the topic of natural infection has been a taboo. To suggest that anyone might have been better off risking infection and thereby gaining immunity from a respiratorial virus rather than hiding under the sofa for two years was seen as outrageous and irresponsible.

My theory is that the reason has always been political. And that’s tragic.

Generations have gone by that have understood it. A life strategy to flee all pathogens is deeply dangerous. The immune system, in order to be trained to protect against severe disease, needs exposure. Not to all things, of course, but to many pathogens that are not finally debilitating or fatal. We’ve evolved with pathogens in what Sunetra Gupta calls a “dangerous dance.” This dance is unavoidable, especially for fast-mutating viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

And yet from the beginning, this knowledge seemed to be lost. This is gravely embarrassing since it’s been known for 2,500 years. It was worse than just lost. As a person who wrote almost daily during the pandemic, I too was careful not to discuss this topic with too much bluntness. We all felt the political pressure to say silent or at least cloud our prose with euphemisms.

Read it.

All we know thus far is that the 59-year-old Middleton – who admitted Jeffrey Epstein to the White House seven out of at least 17 times – was discovered on May 7 hanging from a tree at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville by an electrical cord, with a shotgun blast to his chest. The ranch, located 30 miles from Middleton’s home, is owned by an anti-poverty nonprofit called Heifer International.

US Moves To Seize 2 Luxury Jets From Roman Abramovich Valued North Of $400 Million

Microsoft seizes 41 domains tied to ‘Iranian phishing ring’ (The Register)

What now for Russia’s oil and gas industry? (Financial Times)

Netherlands Becomes Latest Country To Be Cut Off From Russian Gas Over Payment System

US-Backed Kurds Offer To Work With Assad Government To Resist Turkish Invasion

US Broadcaster Radio Liberty Fined $325,000 in Russia for ‘Fake News’: Interfax

UK Joins US In Sending Longer-Range Rockets To Ukraine Despite Putin Warnings

WINNING: The Starlink Threats

Street Fighting Rages as Kyiv Seeks to Hold Sievierodonetsk Gains

Diia app: How using a smartphone app could make a civilian a legitimate war target

The Changing Narrative About Ukraine

Global Stagflation Threat Grows As World Bank Slashes Growth Forecast, Blames Putin

What Is the US End Goal in Ukraine?

IBM finally shutters Russian operations, lays off staff

Severodonetsk will decide Ukraine’s future

Read it.

A homeschool portfolio is a visual record chronicling a child’s entire homeschool year. There are basically two types of portfolios. The first, an academic-focused portfolio, serves as part of an annual assessment per your state homeschool law, and its primary purpose is to show that academic progress has been achieved. The second is meant to be a personal keepsake.

There are several benefits to creating homeschool portfolios. They can be powerful motivators and self-esteem boosters for your child. The simple act of seeing how far he or she has come in a single year can encourage your child to persevere, work harder, or consider setting more challenging goals next year. Invite your kids to join you in the assembly process and have fun reminiscing together as you look back over the school year.

Read it.

The top Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, Rep. Mike Rogers, introduced a measure that would withdraw the United States from the United Nations and the World Health Organization (WHO), claiming the bodies have been soft on China.

Rogers, R-Ala., told Fox News that the U.N. has “repeatedly proven itself to be an utterly useless organization.”

Got that right.

Read it.

It is only with the greatest reluctance that I reach the conclusion that the modern theory of multivalued logic is illogical, in that it is elliptical and superfluous to restate in confusing jargon what Medieval Schoolmen stated clearly, and in Latin.

UK to send long-range rocket artillery to Ukraine despite Russian threats (The Guardian)

Ukraine Foreign Minister Furious After Macron Says Russia Must Not Be Humiliated

Yandex CEO Arkady Volozh resigns after being added to EU sanctions list

A Flood of Black-Market High Tech Weapons From Ukraine

Russia Sees Extra $6.4 Billion Oil Revenue In June As Prices Rally

6.8 Million Now Seeking Refuge From Russian Invasion

INFANTRY: Give Ukraine Whatever You’ve Got

SUPPORT: Secret Of The Siege of Azovstal

Battle for Ukraine’s Sievierodonetsk Ebbs and Flows Through City Streets

Russia’s Lavrov Calls Decision to Block Plane ‘Unprecedented’

China’s War on the World

Germany Faces 5 Billion Euros a Year Hit From Russian Gas Sanctions

Poland moves to buy HIMARS, capping major May modernization push

Russia Retaliates for Sanctions

Taiwan bans exports of chips faster than 25MHz to Russia, Belarus

Turkey, Russia Agree To De-Mining Operation In Ukrainian Ports To Erect ‘Grain Corridor’

Chinese Surveillance Giant Arms Iran With Advanced Spy Tech

The Origins and Purposes of the Ukrainian War  Lord Black of Crossharbour.

Washington Dismisses Javelin Missile Sales by Ukrainians as Dark Web Russian Disinformation

Cash-Strapped Sri Lanka Turns To Russia To Quench Thirst For Oil

Read it.

I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

Read it.

Jews, like Chinese, breed for intelligence.

ZMan.

Politics in a democracy not only devolve into theater, but they select for the sorts of people attracted to the theatrical. The reason for this is democracy is about winning the crowd, which rewards those best at winning the crowd. Inevitably, elite interests will invest in those who show the ability to stand in front the mobs and win them over without making too many promises. After all, if you need to bribe the crowd then why bother investing in a guy trying to win the crowd?

Of course, the best stage performers are the people who are extraordinarily high in extraversion and very low in agreeableness. This person loves being the center of attention and likes meeting new people. A good actor can light up a room full of strangers and come away energized by it. He will also be very low in empathy and see others as either competitors of victims to be exploited. Great performers tend to be horrible people when away from the stage.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Sometime in the next couple days I’m going to formalize a new regular feature, Power Line’s Political Lexicon, which we’ll update regularly (especially with reader help). For now, I’ll offer the newest entry:

Expert (noun): People who are wrong about everything. Usually collaborators in Groupthink, and employed by government agencies or a university.

Steve Sailer.

Despite each killing at least three, none of these mass shootings would make the Mother Jones magazine list of Real Mass Shootings. They leave out all felony-related massacres, all ones vaguely attributable to “gangs” (i.e., black lowlifes who are peeved at each other), and ones that haven’t been cleared by the cops.

Read it.

For years, proponents have hailed indoor growing techniques like hydroponics (growing plants in nutrient-rich water rather than soil) and vertical farming (packing rows of plants beneath grow lamps inside of a warehouse, basement, or retrofitted shipping container) as ways to “democratize farming” for anyone who wants to give growing a go, regardless of whether they own any fertile land. And the indoor farming business is booming. In January, the commercial farming company Square Roots opened its fourth facility of shipping container farms in Wisconsin. The company says the collection of containers are capable of producing a couple million packages of plants—leafy greens like lettuce and herbs—per year. Walmart got in the indoor farming game in January when it invested in Plenty, another commercial vertical farming company. Some companies have even positioned themselves as one-stop shops for farm production, all packed into a single unit.

All they’ve managed so far is trendy low-rise crops like kale and lettuce, maybe some potatoes and strawberries. I’m waiting for them to do something significant with bulk row crops like wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize, or pole crops like beans and tomatoes.

(And don’t get me started on tree fruits like apples, pears, lemons, oranges, peaches….)

0Sanctioned Russian oligarch’s megayacht found in UAE creek  It’s all about the oligarchs.

Saudi Arabia ready to pump more oil if Russian output sinks under ban (Financial Times)

Here’s a way to make Russia pay for Putin’s ruthless war in Ukraine (CNN)

Kremlin TV Names the Country Putin Will Invade Next (Daily Beast) Well, not really.

Putin’s state TV propagandist Olga Skabeyeva says ‘World War III has already begun’

More Seek Gun Training in Taiwan as Ukraine War Drives Home China Threat

EU Slowly Weaning Off Russian Crude Gives Moscow Time To Divert Flows To Asia 

Milley Says Using Military To Open Ukrainian Ports Would Be “High Risk”

Saab’s anti-tank systems could find new life thanks to Ukraine conflict, updated capabilities

Russia Uses Chinese Ships And Indian Refiners To Stay Ahead of Oil Sanctions  What’s ‘Nyah nyah!’ in Russian?

Ukrainians Who’ve Fled to Canada Can Now Apply for Government Income Support

Communist China’s Global Plan Emerges

Read it.

The question is not “whether” but “when”.  Eventually we will have the technology to do it and at that point it will happen.

Hey, if it was easy, anybody could do it.

Read it.

There are millions of habitable planets in our milky way. Approximately four of them have hostile alien civilizations that could attack Earth, suggests new research by Alberto Caballero — a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain.

In his paper, Caballero asked: What are the odds that humans could one day contact a hostile alien civilization capable of invading our planet?

This is the basically ‘thinking past the sale’, like the people who just assume that sea levels are rising and put all their effort into figuring out what the results will be.

Read it.

Michael Shellenberger is an unusual political candidate. He’s also arguably the only person with a chance of stopping Gavin Newsom from spending four more years as governor of California.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

In the wake of the risible Sussman verdict, it has emerged that for the last ten years, the FBI has maintained a “secure work environment” within the offices of Perkins Coie, the Democratic Party’s law firm. Marc Elias, the DNC’s top lawyer, was until recently a partner in Perkins Coie. It was Perkins Coie that laundered the money the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS for what became the fraudulent Steele “dossier.”

One hand washes the other.

Read it.

The Alaska Republican Party no longer wants Lisa Murkowski. That’s just fine by her.

In a traditional one-person-one-vote system, Murkowski would be sweating bullets right about now. The Alaskan Republican Party has censured her and endorsed Kelly Tshibaka, the former commissioner of the state’s Department of Administration. President Trump has also thrown his weight behind Tshibaka. Murkowski has repeatedly voted against the Republican Party and Alaskan interests on key issues. In any other situation, she would be losing her seat — and for good reason.

Fortunately for Murkowski, this year will be the test of Alaska’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. The ballot measure, which passed narrowly in 2020, established a nonpartisan top-four primary and RCV for the general election. Although Maine and many locales use RCV, Alaska is unique in its top-four primary. The special election to fill the remainder of the late congressman Don Young’s House term will test the system, but the unusual and chaotic conditions of the special election will prevent it from being a great predictor of the Senate race in November.

EU secures compromise on Russian oil ban; Kremlin claims it now controls a third of key Donbas city

Chelsea Football Club, formerly owned by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich, sold in record deal  It’s all about the oligarchs.

‘No Restrictions’: NATO to Take More Aggressive Stance Against Russia

The New York Times’ Dramatic Shift On Victory In Ukraine

Iranian Military Base Attacked With Drones ‘Launched From Inside Iran’

China Expanding New Space Station To Rival ISS

Take A Look Inside Iran’s Secret Underground Drone Base

Moscow Shrugs Off EU Oil Ban: ‘Russia Will Find Other Importers’

Russia’s Gazprom Halts Gas Deliveries to Dutch Trader GasTerra, Effective Immediately

Iran Releases Video Of IRGC Storming Greek Tankers, Blames US For ‘Escalation’

Canada Adds Vladimir Putin’s Alleged Girlfriend, Alina Kabaeva, to the Sanctions List Innocent until proven guilty? Not in the Great White North.

Turkey Expands Demands For Finland, Sweden NATO Entry: Change Domestic Laws

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

A couple of weeks back, Tucker Carlson observed that most Republicans wake up in the morning and go to the New York Times. They and their staff read the thing over breakfast, because it is their guide throughout the day. This is true of mainstream conservatives as well. What passes for the Right in America is entirely controlled by the Left, which is controlled by the media. Old school liberals sound like Trump people when they complain about how the media runs their party.

There is a lot of truth to the media-ocracy claim. The backers of the Ukraine fiasco have been feeding the media nonsense tales about Ukraine. They handed them Ukraine lapel pins they had made up for the occasion. Note no one in the media looked into who supplied everyone on television with those pins. Instead, it was a unified media voice, a wall of sound, selling the Ukraine story. Washington and the political class in Europe were swept up in this unfolding disaster.

…

The Covid hoax, and it is fair to call it a hoax at this point, was not the result of clever scheming like the Russian collusion hoax. Instead, it was something like a stampede over a cliff. Unlike the animals in the herd, the people in this media stampede could question the rush over the cliff, but like the animals in the herd, they feared being trampled more than they feared the end result. As a result, fantasy became holy writ and Covid turned into a bizarre mass media religion.

Read it.

Regarding the Uvalde school shooting, most of us have already cycled through the Seven Stages of Vicarious Grief. That’s the process that follows every mass shooting, when we pick our “why” from the list of seven approved mass shooting causes, and we criticize everybody who picked a different one.

Here’s the list; feel free to print it out for next time.

Conrad Lord Black of Crossharbour.

In one respect President Joe Biden did speak faithfully for the nation when he returned from Southeast Asia and went straight to the White House and declared in his remarks about the appalling school murders in Uvalde, Texas, that he was “sick and tired” of these murders. So is the country.

He demanded the recovery of political “backbone” to ban assault weapons, clearly implying that he believed that that would seriously reduce the incidence of these terrible mass shootings. By indicating that he actually thought that he was proposing any kind of a solution when all informed Americans are aware that an assault weapon ban was attempted for 10 years and didn’t appreciably change the rate of incidence of such crimes, the president effectively acknowledged that he had no idea what to do.