I certainly hope so.

Vox.

At least as long as human beings have lived in large, close groups, respiratory viruses have been present — sometimes an annoyance, sometimes a catastrophe. Though we’ve managed to create vaccines and drugs to blunt their effects, the viruses endure.

But there is a group of people who think we do not need to live this way. These scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs believe we’re going to look back on this era, one of commonly endured airborne infections, as a case of antiquarian barbarism, a bunch of needless suffering that we accepted because we didn’t know any better. They believe that we have the technology now, and will have even better technology soon, that could end respiratory infections for good, the way that disinfecting our drinking water with chlorine helped end typhoid as a major cause of death in the US.

The technology is called germicidal ultraviolet light (GUV), and in particular, a relatively novel kind of ultraviolet light often denoted as “far-UV.” “We have so much data suggesting that this is far and away the most impactful technology, when it comes to protecting people from infectious disease, that exists today,” says Kevin Esvelt, a professor and biologist at MIT who has championed the idea.

I would encourage him to do so. Sauce for the goose….l

Read it.

Thomas Molnar (1921-2010) was a Hungarian-born philosopher, a professor at Brooklyn College, a friend of Russell Kirk, and the author of more than forty books, including Politics and the State: The Catholic View, originally published in 1980 by Franciscan Herald Press. In 2018, that work was reissued by Cluny in the edition under review herein: an affordable softcover volume titled The Church and the State, published with ecclesiastical permission and with the subtitle The Catholic Tradition as an Integral Element of Western Political Thought. The work is divided into a brief preface, an expansive introduction, and five chapters.

The preface begins by identifying a philosophical circumstance peculiar to American political thought. Molnar argues that Americans are reliant upon manifest pragmatism to determine the range of their political theory, as a consequence of their scepticism regarding such theories. Consequently, in America, there is a widespread acceptance (or quasi-acceptance) of only four conservative approaches to political theory: one derived from interpretations of The Federalist, one based upon the theories of Leo Strauss, one based upon the theories of Eric Voegelin, and a half-respectable, somewhat un-American one in the form of Marxism. The last of these, Molnar observes, “in spite of the popularity of its advocates in some academic circles, has not entered the mainstream of American political thought”—a statement that still rings true today, albeit less certainly than when it was originally published in 1980, now that congress finds itself beleaguered by a squad of far-left Marxists.

The problem with ‘conservatism’ is that it isn’t really an ‘-ism’, i.e. an ideology that strives for a certain end-state, like progressivism or Marxism. As Russell Kirk famously pointed out, ‘conservatism’ is actually anti-ideology, in that it reflexively opposes ideological movements of any kind.

ZMan intrudes some reality.

The false dilemma is an informal fallacy which is based on the false premise that there are only two options in a particular situation. The fallacy is not in the logic, as with other fallacies, but in the premise. It is a useful rhetorical trick, so it turns up in political debates and propaganda. “We must do X or Y will happen” with Y being something everyone assumes to be bad. The idea is to limit the choices to one that is preferred and one that no one would willingly choose.

It is such a highly effective rhetorical strategy that what we call conservatism rests on a foundation of false choices. No matter what the left proposes, the right opposes by offering an option that is doomed to fail versus what the left proposes. A good example was the homosexual marriage debate. The left proposed redefining marriage to mean sharing rent and a bed. Instead of rejecting this out of hand, the right proposes civil unions, thus leaving us with two degenerate options.

We are seeing this again with the war over the antiwhite pogroms labeled Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. It is not an accident that the acronym DEI could easily be DIE, as the people behind this do not hide their intensions. When they say they want to eliminate whiteness, there is only one way this can happen. If one were to call for eliminating Jewishness, you get compared to Hitler. Therefore, logic dictates that when they say they want to eliminate whiteness, they mean white people.

One of the very shopworn tools in the proglodyte toolbox is the rhetorical trick of “So….”, as Scott Adams is constantly pointing out. If you say X, they say “So then you want Y?” which is not even in the same ballpark as X. Every attempt at clarification is met with a reiteration of “So then you want Y?”, as if you weren’t even in the conversation.

Read it.

If it ain’t broke, break it.

That’s Joe Biden’s guiding principle. He took President Donald Trump’s much-tighter southern border and ripped it as wide open as a gutted trout’s belly.

Biden turned Trump’s energy independence into begging Iran and Venezuela to pump more oil. And Biden devolved Trump’s peace in the Middle East into a five-front Arab war on Israel, even as the ayatollahs’ Houthi pals ignited the Red Sea with anti-ship missiles and anti-American drones.

And for his next trick, Biden wants to impersonate a Latin autocrat.

We are living through Atlas Shrugged. I’m sure Ayn Rand would be pleased, if there were a God and an afterlife.

The Register.

And it couldn’t happen to a … nicer group of people.

Read it.

As a result of this history as well as current events, I was asked by a member of my congregation to sit outside during services that Saturday. I, of course, said yes. So that morning, myself and another member showed up before services, got a couple of chairs, and placed ourselves outside the main doors of the Synagogue.

We were, again of course, both armed, though his wife asked us not to bring rifles. We complied, but next time we may have a couple of ARs staged at the door, just in case.

…

During services, a member came outside to check on us and see if we needed anything. Right before he went back inside, he asked if we had whistles or some other type of noisemaker to alert those attending services if there was trouble outside.

My fellow sentry and I exchanged a knowing glance and assured him that A) we did, in fact, have noisemakers, and B) they would certainly be loud enough to be heard inside if we needed to use them.

We found out later he was completely unaware of the types of noisemakers we were carrying. After he left, we shared some good natured banter about “noisemakers.”

ZMan examines the tea leaves.

These sorts of rodents scurry around every presidential primary, but we have some unusual vermin this time. Nikki Haley is running as a standard issue regime Democrat in the Republican primary. The base assumptions of her campaign are that Trump will be removed from the ticket and the party is ready to throw in the towel and merge with the Democrats like you see in most Democrat states. In those states, the Republicans run lighter versions of the Democrats in statewide elections.

What she hoped for in Iowa was a clear second place finish. This would have knocked DeSantis out of the race. She would then be the sole anti-Trump option for the next few months, establishing herself as the logical alternative for when the party removes Trump from the ballot. Instead, she came in third place, with her support coming mostly from Democrats crossing over to vote for the most virulent anti-Trump option. She was close enough to DeSantis, however, to stay in the race.

…

Through the media, we can see that the regime has determined that Haley is a good replacement for Biden, even if she is in the wrong party. In a way, they are trying to engineer the primary into a version of Hillary versus Trump in 2016. This may be why Haley is running around praising Hillary Clinton. This is the narrative framing that the regime is conjuring, so Haley is leaning into it. After all, from her perspective, the real nominating process is in Washington.

Heated car seats are a cornerstone of civilization.

Read it.

In this era of hoaxes, euphemisms, obfuscation, and lies, I once again offer the following as a public service.

• *Ableism: the unfounded and bigoted belief that people who are capable of doing a certain job should be hired over those who are not.

I don’t do surveys.

Watch it.

White people are the only people in America who aren’t allowed to prefer living among people who look like them.

Read it.

Since we live in democracies, our view of justice is colored and shaped by a democratic bias. The source of right for us is the proposition that all are created equal, and over time we advance and demand ever-greater political and social equality. To see what true justice is, and also what we are, clearly and free of prejudice, we must discover and confront our political (mis)education: we must turn our heads around, see, and cross-examine those hidden puppeteers of our cave. Liberal education is the opposite of political ‘education,’ or propaganda: it is education that liberates.

It is for this reason that David A. Eisenberg’s ambitious book, Nietzsche and Tocqueville on the Democratization of Humanity, is so welcome and needed. In it, he examines the grand democratizing sweep of Western history and its consequences for human life and thought. In the book’s opening chapter, we confront our greatest puppeteers: the philosophers who most advanced democracy and did so with almost prophetic power, given the great inequalities between men then. From Hobbes, Locke, and Descartes, down through Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel, Eisenberg argues they “all . . . reduced man to a common denominator in order to ground their philosophic visions. Uniform drives and appetites were rendered paramount.” Even Hegel, at first glance an exception with his master-slave dialectic, eventually resolves that fundamental conflict “so that the outcome of the historical process was one where uniformity supplanted man’s deep-rooted dichotomy and did so, moreover, in favor of the slave.”

Read it.

The legendary historian Will Durant famously wrote that civilizations are born stoic and die epicurean. He meant that through a warrior ethos and a propensity to endure and ignore pain, out of chaos a people might create order—the definition of civilization—which eventually grows, first prosperous, then decadent, and, finally, gives itself over fully to pleasure. It forgets the outside world and ceases to strive for higher purposes, indulging in the sensual and material as the only goal in life. Then a new group of stoics comes and conquers them. The most famous example of this phenomenon is, of course, the fall of the Roman Empire. But Indian history, however unknown in the West, actually illustrates this point clearly with its three and a half thousand years of continual invasions by younger warrior cultures: Aryans, Greeks, Kushans, Ghurid Sultans, Mughals, and Brits, who relieve one another of power once their predecessors have grown decadent in the steamy climate of the subcontinent.

Navy Matters.

Reader ‘Robtze’ just thoroughly embarrassed me in a comment with an incredibly astute observation that I completely missed. He observed/asked whether the Houthis were executing the same mission the Marine Corps envisions with their island/coastal missile shooter concept.

To address his comment, yes, this is almost exactly the mission set. Let’s take advantage of this remarkable similarity and examine how the coastal ‘missile sniping’ concept is working out.

Read it.

The back up for intermittent renewables will come from 40 year old plants, which should have been shut down already.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

If the election comes down to Trump versus Biden again as is likely, it is a certainty that there will be no debates between them—the first presidential race in 50 years without debates. The Biden White House is already floating the trial balloons for refusing to debate Trump while concealing the real reason—they know Biden is not longer up to it. He can no longer do press conferences or one-on-one interview with friendly reporters.

Dementia Hitler, as Scott Adams calls him, is no longer up to a conversation with Trump, much less a debate.

Read it.

The Portland, Oregon, area is currently experiencing an explosion of shigellosis, a highly infectious, often antibiotic-resistant intestinal disease caused by contact with human feces.

Most of the outbreak—at least 218 cases in 2023, 45 of them reported in December—has taken place in Old Town, a once-lively restaurant and shopping destination near downtown Portland that’s now the site of numerous homeless encampments whose residents often use sidewalks as restrooms.

The Portland City Council, alarmed at a surge in the area’s homeless population, now estimated at about 6,000, in June 2023 passed severe restrictions on camping in public places. Tents and campsites are now technically banned during daytime hours and limited to certain designated areas at night. But no one in famously progressive Portland tried to enforce the legislation until the fall, when this latest infestation of shigella bacteria (there had been a similar outbreak among the homeless in 2021) began to generate headlines.

Babylon Bee.

At a press conference this week, Sony producers announced the production of a new modern adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopic novel 1984 that will feature the character of Big Brother as the good guy.

And, oddly enough, he looks very much like Joe Biden.

Read it.

For their latest magic trick, physicists have done the quantum equivalent of conjuring energy out of thin air. It’s a feat that seems to fly in the face of physical law and common sense.

“You can’t extract energy directly from the vacuum because there’s nothing there to give,” said William Unruh, a theoretical physicist at the University of British Columbia, describing the standard way of thinking.

But 15 years ago, Masahiro Hotta, a theoretical physicist at Tohoku University in Japan, proposed that perhaps the vacuum could, in fact, be coaxed into giving something up.

Read it.

You will be happier if you spend your money on experiences rather than possessions… or so says the modern truism, supposedly proven by psychological science. Researchers call it the “experience recommendation.”

It sounds good, right? It’s very flattering to a certain class of worldly people who spent their capital on accruing anecdotes. Ah, yes—we who go on retreats in Bali are much happier than the unsophisticated materialistic people who spend money on handbags or whatever.

It also supports the notion, which occasionally floats around, that wealthy people aren’t really made happy by their fancy possessions, which is comforting if you like to believe that wealthy people are idiots.

If you think that money can’t buy happiness you’re shopping in the wrong place.

Read it.

When we speak to visitors or students about our medieval manuscripts, we frequently find ourselves spending a significant amount of time talking about how such books were created. We discuss the ways that scribes worked and artists painted, and quite often we will then be asked just how it is that we can know such details. There are, of course, medieval manuals for craftspeople that still exist, but often we can find clues in the manuscripts themselves. Writing was a skill that was hard-won and greatly valued, and many authors and scribes were memorialised by their artisan brethren.

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It’s tough out there for a hungry grasshopper on the Kansas prairie. Oh, there’s plenty of grass to eat, but this century’s grass isn’t what it used to be. It’s less nutritious, deficient in minerals like iron, potassium and calcium.

Partly due to that nutrient-deficient diet, there’s been a huge decline in grasshopper numbers of late, by about one-third over two decades, according to a 2020 study. The prairie’s not hoppin’ like it used to — and a major culprit is carbon dioxide, says study author Michael Kaspari, an ecologist at the University of Oklahoma in Norman.

Read it.

Markets work, even when you don’t want them to.

Read it.

The world’s fifth richest person, with a fortune worth almost $127 billion – and one-time would be sparring partner of Elon Musk – says his goal is to “create some of the highest quality beef in the world” on the island of Kauai.

“The cattle are Wagyu and Angus, and they’ll grow up eating macadamia meal and drinking beer that we grow and produce here on the ranch,” said the unlikely cowboy-cum-data-wrangler via his Instagram account.

Alex Tabarrok.

Why do today’s dishwashers typically take more than 2 hours to run through a normal cycle when less than a hour was common in the past? The reason is absurd energy and water “conservation” rules. These rules, imposed on dish and clothes washers, have made these products perform worse than in the past, cleaning less well or much more slowly. One of the best things that the Trump administration did (other than Operation Warp Speed, of course) was creating a product class–superwashers!–that cleaned in under an hour and were not subject to energy and water conservation standards. The Biden administration reversed these rules but the 5th circuit just ruled that the reversal was “arbitrary and capricious.”

Unfortunately, he gives no clue as to how to buy one of these marvelous machines.

Read it.

A U.S. appeals court on Jan. 6 allowed a judge’s ruling that blocked California from enforcing a new gun-control law that bans the carrying of firearms in most public places on the grounds that it was unconstitutional.

Which it obviously is.

UPDATE : Ore. Judge Enters Final Order Striking Down Gun Control Law

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In a January 2023 preprint in The Lancet, the New Zealand government released a study showing a 70 percent increased rate of kidney injury following two doses of Pfizer mRNA vaccines. Even more telling of injury was the dose-dependent effect. That is, one dose of Pfizer showed a 60 percent increased rate of injury within three weeks post-injection, while two doses showed a 70 percent increased rate of injury three weeks post-injection. “Acute kidney injury” was not defined by the authors but is understood in a clinical setting to include measurable changes in lab results and/or serious signs and symptoms such as bleeding, pain with urination, kidney stones, nephritis, nephrotic syndrome, or other renal dysfunction.

Read it.

The long-awaited tort action from the family of Ashli Babbitt has now been filed in Southern California. Babbitt was shot and killed on Jan. 6th and her family is seeking $30 million in a wrongful death action.

Equally important, the lawsuit could force additional answers to why Capitol Police Lt. Michael Byrd shot and killed the unarmed protester as she attempted to climb through a window near the House Chamber.

Read it.

Four more heat pump manufacturers have successfully developed cold-climate prototypes as part of the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Residential Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge.

To take part in the Challenge, manufacturers’ heat pumps must deliver 100% heating capacity without the use of auxiliary heat, with significantly higher efficiencies at 5F (-15C), and ideally operate at -15F (-26C), among other specifications.

In December 2022, Johnson Controls, now officially part of the Challenge, announced that it had developed an air source heat pump prototype that can operate in temperatures below -20F (-29C) as part of the DOE’s challenge.

The American Mind.

Early on in the pandemic, we were told—by government, the media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma—that an equally dangerous contagion was spreading in parallel to the novel coronavirus. An “infodemic” of “misinformation” about the virus, and about the official response to the virus, was putting lives at risk and threatening to prolong the crisis further. Publications like National Geographic drew comparisons with “decades” of climate change “denial,” flying in the face of scientific “consensus,” and noted how experts in and out of government were drawing together sophisticated techniques to ensure people had access to information they could trust, without falling prey to “dangerous” narratives that licensed non-compliance.

Although it was obvious from the start that government, the media, Big Tech, and Big Pharma were working in tandem to control the flow of information and guide public behavior in a way that had no precedent, the depth of this collaboration, and the methods employed, took some time to become clear. Investigations by brave individuals, publications, and organizations like Big Brother Watch provided vital information. They revealed that huge amounts of data, including personal data that should have been off-limits to government, were being collected and monitored, and even how military-grade psychological-warfare techniques were being used on the public through units such as the British Army’s secretive 77th Brigade and the Canadian Joint Operations Command.

As we near the fourth anniversary of the start of the pandemic, none of this is news—or, rather, none of it should be. It should be no surprise, either, to learn that the parties to this brave new world of information control have not surrendered their powers or ceased to collaborate with one another now that the pandemic is officially over.

Read it.

The morale and willingness to fight among Russian troops continues to plummet. One reason for this is the heavy losses, about 350,000 dead, Russia has suffered in Ukraine so far. Since late 2023 Ukrainian troops have increasingly encountered Russian troops who would surrender at the first opportunity and often do it in a dramatic fashion. This included dropping their weapons during their first encounter with Ukrainian soldiers. In other cases, Russian troops were encountered who had already dropped their weapons and were looking for someone to surrender to. While troops can be motivated or compelled to fight, they are often ineffective. That means they suffer a lot of casualties while still unable to gain much ground.

Of all of the things I do with my ‘phone’, making (or receiving) a call is at the bottom of the list.

New York Times.

An interesting story about a ‘journalist’ (working for a Narrative media outlet) who deliberately downscales and then uses that experience as a typical Crustian ‘all about me’ source of ‘content’.

Those of us who avoid ‘social media’ tend not to have smartphone addiction quite this badly; I use my iPhone to make (and, more often, receive) occasional calls and texts, but my ‘phone’ is used primarily as a Kindle reader, calendar, camera, and calculator.

One of the most significant indicators of the world in which a Crustian ‘journalist’ lives comes near the end:

“More and more people are starting to see that these platforms, these products are intentionally designed to be addictive,” said Camille Carlton, a policy manager at the Center for Humane Technology, a nonprofit in California founded by former tech employees to raise awareness about the negative effects of the kinds of products they worked on.

Ms. Carlton compared smartphones and social media apps to junk food and tobacco, and suggested that lawmakers should regulate the design of these products to protect our health. Britain’s rules for tech products aimed at children, discouraging the use of infinite scroll, autoplay and addictive design features such as Snapchat streaks, were “fantastic,” she said. (Similar laws in the United States have been challenged by tech companies as unconstitutional.)

Apparently the first thing a Crustian reaches for is government action to ‘solve’ a perceived ‘problem’ that ought to be left as a matter for individual choice in any rational society. Sad, but there it is.

Read it.

The difficulties in talking about causes in biology have been recognized for over two centuries.1 It’s just that the issues were largely set aside in the era of molecular biology due to the expectation that our rapidly growing powers of minute analysis would bring full causal understanding. Biology would soon be rid of its troublesome language of life in favor of well-behaved molecular mechanisms. And yet today, after several decades of stunning progress in molecular research, the struggle to fit our understanding of living activity into the comfortable garb of familiar causal explanation looks more hopeless than ever.

Business Insider.

“I’m always looking for someone who has a stable career, who is preferably well off,” she said, “not to say that I’m looking for sugar daddies but someone who can take care of themselves.” On LinkedIn, she figured, she could fairly assess whether a romantic prospect’s employment history, education, and career aspirations lined up with the kind of partner she envisioned for herself. At the very least, she would know whether the man had a job.

Can’t argue with that.

Read it.

First I will present the main sources for these recipes, then my actual recipes for these ales, and finally a discussion of the recipes. This discussion starts with a brief summary of ale and ale brewing in medieval England, and then discusses my choices of ingredients, the quantities and proportions involved, and finally the methods used to make the ales. This discussion section is critical to the appreciation of the recipe, since some of the methods differ substantially from modern, or even 16th–17th C. beer brewing methods.

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Well, this is a damning indictment of our society. In a relatively short stretch of time, we’ve gone from wearing cameras to record cool action-sports stunts, to wearing cameras for security purposes. The PhoneCam, by Dutch product design and development company SlimDesign, is billed as “a breakthrough solution for individuals and businesses seeking accessibility to safety.”

…

Pressing it a second time turns the light red, at which point it begins recording, uploading footage to the cloud, and simultaneously sends a request for help to your nearby contacts, along with your location. In other words it goes straight to Call the Cavalry.

Quite useful in California these days, I should think; especially in Compton.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

From time to time, I have mentioned that when it comes to politics, most people use their stupid brain rather than their everyday brain. You see it with the Harvard case where conservatives are celebrating over the ouster of the plagiarizing president, as if this will make any difference to them. Harvard will just replace one antiwhite bigot with another antiwhite bigot, probably one even more nasty than Gay.

It is not that conservatives are stupid, although many of them are quite stupid, it is that they slip into political brain when they look at this issue, rather than use their normal brain that they use everywhere else in their life. Even the people protesting pornography in the schools figured out that it was not just the books, it was the people on the school board that was the problem.

Dissidents like to quote Carl Schmitt about politics being about friends and enemies, but in many respects, this is bad for dissidents. Inside conventional politics it is fine to play Cowboys and Indians, but for dissidents this is a danger. It is how weirdos and lunatics turn up in the ranks and how otherwise useless people make themselves into influencers until they are revealed to be nuts.

Watch it.

Musical notation certainly discouraged me from learning how to do music other than at the ‘by ear’ level.

I do love people being dyspeptic, though. And this is a fascinating look at the history of music.

Every clever saying has some asshole who is determined to screw it up.