Read it.

Using the smartphone as a point of entry, young people could be inspired to understand that every significant technological breakthrough that has transformed society results from continued human imagination, failure, persistence, courage and, above all else, ambition. Understanding the evolution of the smartphone could, in turn, spark dreams about inventing the future for understanding and changing the world for the better. But praising young people’s apparent technological prowess does the opposite. It encourages complacency and the lowering of ambition.

The result is as depressing as it is inevitable. Instead of a spark for knowledge and a future-oriented aspiration, the smartphone has become a tool of self-reflected indulgence and narcissism. Instead of inspiring young people to raise their eyes from their screens and engage the world around them, we have kindled introspection, a quest for inner identities which fatalistically trap us in the very biology our forefathers overcame with their imaginations.

I have an iPhone SE. Making phone calls is about #45 on the list of the top things I use it for. In fact, I don’t remember the last time I actually made a phone call on it (not to be confused with the last time a spammer tried to call me).

Long Run Health Matters.

Take whatever action you deem appropriate.

And people are less inclined to put up with your shit.

The Antiplanner.

The nation’s fifty largest urban areas housed 82.5 million jobs in 2020, and auto drivers could reach 98 percent of them in an hour of travel. Transit riders, by comparison, could reach only 8 percent in an hour while bicycle riders could reach 7 percent, according to the University of Minnesota Accessibility Observatory.

Washington Free Beacon.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D., N.Y.) office says she isn’t married. But she has described her fiancé, Riley Roberts, as her “spouse” in forms filed with the House Ethics Committee in 2023, which has a strict definition of that term—”someone to whom you are legally married.”

That could become a problem for the left-wing darling, since willful misrepresentations on the documents are a no-no—they could subject her to criminal prosecution, the forms state—and members of Congress are required to disclose the financial information of their spouses, which Ocasio-Cortez has declined to do.

But taken at face value, four legal filings submitted to the House Ethics Committee pertaining to AOC’s overseas travels in 2022 and 2023 suggest the pair have been legally married at least since Jan. 13, 2023. If that is the case, the “Squad” member can no longer leverage the so-called boyfriend loophole to evade public disclosure of his finances. While lawmakers are required to disclose financial information about their spouses, live-in romantic partners and fiancés are exempt from the rule.

Those who say that money can’t buy happiness are shopping in the wrong places.

Vanity Fair.

In a new book, former Secret Service agent Paul Landis, largely silent for 60 years, says he found a bullet in Kennedy’s limo. A sometime presidential historian explains why that’s so significant, if true.

I love the smell of conspiracy in the morning.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Read it.

The Huffington Post was envisioned from its inception as a progressive answer to conservative talk radio and various right-leaning voices being amplified by new technology. Most specifically, it was designed as a counterpoint to the Drudge Report, a widely read and highly profitable website with populist sensibilities. The players involved in planning the new venture belonged to a select clique of Hollywood liberals and political activists in Arianna Huffington’s orbit.

Among the cast of characters were film mogul David Geffen, a prodigious Democratic Party donor, along with Democratic political consultants Peter Daou and James Boyce. Jonah Peretti, a 30-year-old marketing whiz kid (and future BuzzFeed founder), was present at HuffPo’s inception, as was Kenneth Lerer, a New York investor who secured most of the money for the new venture.

The least likely member of the core group was Andrew Breitbart, a creative and energetic conservative blogger in his mid-30s who had worked on the Drudge Report himself. Although he passed muster with the group because he was relatively liberal on social issues, Breitbart’s real connection to the enterprise was that he had known Arianna Huffington since the 1990s — when she was still an outspoken conservative. The most charismatic collaborator, of course, was the eponymous founder herself.

Since Scott Adams has been ‘cancelled’ from his normal comic syndication deal, his cartoons have improved by orders of magnitude. Subscribe to his feed on Locals.com. It’s well worth the money.

NewsBusters.

Pauline Kael knew she wasn’t a representative American.

The onetime New Yorker film critic is famous in folk memory for having said she didn’t know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, when he won a 49-state landslide.

The way her words are misremembered, she was surprised that someone so reviled by her social set could win the White House.

In fact, she wasn’t surprised: Kael told the Modern Language Association in a Dec. 28 speech that year, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they (i.e., Nixon voters) are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.”

Kael’s example is worth keeping in mind when thinking about next year’s election.

Read it.

It is projected that in 2027, 86.5 million people will be freelancing in the United States making 50.1 percent of the population.

 

A no-brainer.

Gates of Vienna.

Mother Earth is quite adept at carbon sequestration, and carries it out with great efficiency. A surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere is absorbed by green plants during photosynthesis, and stimulates the growth of additional plant biomass to take advantage of all the ambient CO2.

I don’t see why this is considered a bad thing. More CO2 leads to more plant growth. More plant growth means greater crop yields and more acreage put into cultivation. The planet produces more food, which means that fewer poor people will starve.

Mind you, that last part may not be considered a negative outcome by the “Visualize Industrial Collapse” crowd. When you consider the human race to be a harmful virus infecting Gaia, the starvation and death of billions of people is something to be desired.

For everyone but the depopulation fanatics, however, more food production is a good thing, and the increase in atmospheric CO2 is something to be applauded.

Read it.

Rice is arguably the world’s most important staple crop. About half of the global population depends on it for sustenance.

But, like other staples such as wheat and corn, rice is cultivated annually. That means replanting the fields year after year, at huge cost to both the farmers and the land. For years, scientists have been tinkering with rice strains to create a perennial variety – one that would regrow after harvest without the need to be resown.

For what may be the first time in about ten thousand years of human rice cultivation, the new strains stay productive harvest after harvest.

This could be HUGE. It will save tremendous amounts of labor, time, and expense. And think of the advantage if perennial forms of wheat or maize could be grown.

Read it.

It’s an old story, manifesting now in new ways. The rich, buoyed by inherited wealth and access to credit, find a locale with the qualities they desire, and buy the choicest properties for their own use, and a surrounding band of nearby properties so they won’t be bothered by the bottom 99%.

This story has a new far more destructive chapter, generated by the boom in STVRs–short-term vacation rentals. The uber-wealthy don’t need more money but they’re trained, like hamsters in a lab, to seek ways to maximize their income and capital gains. STVRs–Airbnb et al.–are highly attractive investments to the wealthy and their money-managers–the hedge funds, private equity managers, family-wealth advisors, et al.

Residential real estate that can be converted to STVRs is well within reach of the top 10% households, who own between 80% and 90% of all income-producing assets such as housing rentals, stocks, bonds and business equity.

Read it.

Aristotle listed four characteristics of sound money: it must be durable, portable, divisible, and have intrinsic value. Gold possesses all of these characteristics, which is why gold has served as money for thousands of years.

It also expands/contracts the ‘money supply’ without reference to the underlying economy, which is why gold (and silver) cause knotty economic problems and why all modern governments don’t use commodity-backed money. Managing a commodity-backed monetary standard takes a lot more work than just shifting a government-mandated interest rate a few basis points here and there, which is why they prefer the latter to the former.

The American Mind.

Apparently, prescribing Ivermectin for people with Covid was fine all along. Sure, nearly every public authority vehemently denounced Ivermectin, calling it “horse dewormer,” and social media platforms censored people who dared mention it. And sure, they slandered medical experts like Dr. Peter McCullough and Dr. Robert Malone and even placed jaundiced filters on pictures of Joe Rogan, who credited Ivermectin for his quick recovery from Covid. But now, after some doctors are suing the FDA for all but banning an effective treatment for the coronavirus, FDA officials have claimed that their aggressive criticisms of the drug were “merely quips.”

When it comes to acknowledging the many blunders of the Covid response, none of this is surprising. Whether they were wrong about social distancing, lockdowns, masking, taking the jab, natural immunity, or finding the origins of the virus, the experts are oddly forgetful now of just how confident and belligerent they were at the time. In other cases, as with “public intellectual” Sam Harris, many leftists still maintain that imposing Covid vaccine mandates was justified because the virus could have been much worse—even though it wasn’t.

The American Mind.

Last month, the Supreme Court declined to review a federal appeals court ruling that would grant certain protections to persons suffering from gender dysphoria under the Americans With Disabilities Act. The decision itself will further entrench “gender identity” as the newest protected category under civil rights law, laying the table for numerous infringements of religious and civil liberties for Americans on the other side of this divide. But there is an even more unsettling and revealing aspect of this case: simply by discussing “transgender persons” as if the term had a stable and meaningful referent, conservative and liberal justices alike revealed that they had accepted a fundamental error in reasoning that threatens to undermine the very heart of American justice and America itself.

Read it.

They said they were annulling the results of Saturday’s election, in which President Ali Bongo was declared the winner.

The electoral commission said Mr Bongo had won just under two-thirds of the votes in an election the opposition argued was fraudulent.

His overthrow would end his family’s 53-year hold on power in Gabon.

Gabon is one of Africa’s major oil producers, while nearly 90% of the country is covered by forests.

Zeihan.

Thanks to the right demographics and cheap capital, we’ve been living in a period of extreme technological advancement and innovation. As our environment changes and new problems arise, will innovation be able to keep up?

Innovation requires a fairly specific set of circumstances. You need enough people in their 20s and 30s imagining a future and developing the tech, along with a capital-rich environment (since you won’t see any $$$ until you hit the backend of innovation). Our world is changing, and these conditions are no longer present, so we must temper our expectations.

Anything that hasn’t reached operationalization…probably won’t make it. Below are a few industries where transformative innovations are still getting lots of attention, so let’s look at those on a scale from least likely to happen to most likely: modular nuclear reactors, artificial intelligence hardware, space and satellites, biologic drugs, shale, and agriculture.

These technologies and industries will make some of the most significant impacts on the world, but it will be no small feat. There will be hurdles and obstacles along the path to innovation, and every country will have a different outlook, but I would expect the US to be one of the first through the gate on most of this.

Read it.

As I explained recently, it matters a great deal how we define ‘socialism.’ Our choice of definition makes a measurable difference in terms of what level of government intrusion into our lives that we are willing to accept.

Yet despite the unmistakable difference in outcomes depending on what definition we choose, the right-of-center political movement is surprisingly resistant to changing its mind when it has adopted the wrong definition. I am not going to speculate as to the origins of this resistance, but if it is a fear of being perceived as an intellectual turncoat, it might be worth remembering the following words of wisdom attributed to British economist John Maynard Keynes. When criticized for changing his mind too often, Keynes is said to have replied:

When someone presents me with a better argument than mine, I change my mind. What do you do?

There is, of course, also the possibility that some pundits, analysts, and scholars to the right of center are not too worried about the policy consequences of their writings and sayings. If so, it is very unfortunate: if we do not understand socialism, we also do not understand the policy that promotes socialism. If we cannot see that policy for what it is, we eventually become useful conduits for an ideology the end goal of which is the very antithesis of what both conservatives and libertarians want.

Out of the mouth of babes….

Read it.

The monstrous case of Lucy Letby reminds us that the devil wears many faces. The particular evil in this instance, is that she chose to hijack the compassion afforded by a nurse’s uniform to facilitate her crimes. While abhorrent, this should not surprise us; where else should evil gravitate, if not to those professions which grant immediate access to the vulnerable, the young, and the trusting? The malevolent hide in plain sight within the police force, masquerade as teachers, and perhaps vilest of all, occasionally pose as medical staff too.

Letby was sentenced last week to 14 whole-life jail terms, for the murder of seven babies, and the attempted murder of six others during her time at the Countess of Chester Hospital between 2015 and 2016. Although this already makes Letby Britain’s worst infant serial killer, these numbers are conservative. Cheshire Police have confirmed they will be examining the records of 4,000 babies Letby may have come into contact with, alongside fears that she harmed dozens more.

As San Francisco implodes under the weight of crime and Democrat dysfunction, tech billionaires are pivoting, setting their sights on building a new ‘smart city’ on the outskirts of the Bay Area. Perhaps it’s cheaper to build a new metro area rather than salvage the sinking ship that is San Francisco.

And who could blame them?

Tyler Cowen.

The evidence continues to accumulate that America’s nonprofit sector is failing the country in some basic ways. Specifically, it is not doing enough to break down unjust inequalities and barriers to opportunity.

The Foundry.

The first days and weeks of a new school year are always filled with anticipation, adjustments, transitions, and growth for parents and students. Yet, this school year’s “firsts” for an expanding pool of families also includes the first time that their children will have the resources and freedom to enroll in the school of their choice.

The short- and long-term consequences of these new opportunities for school choice aren’t just experienced within the four walls of a home or school building, or by the families now empowered to pursue them. The impact of education choice stretches across communities and economies, helping to unleash prosperity and growth that benefits everyone.

Since 2021, eight states have passed universal or near-universal school choice programs, affecting over 13 million students nationwide—a growth of over 4 million in just two years.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Our pal Mark Perry asks a simple question: If America is such a horrible systemically racist country why did the number of Black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean double from 2M to 4M between 2000 and 2019?

Zeihan.

Four big things have helped Texas climb to the top. Thanks to a low cost of living, Texans have been popping out babies left and right, contributing to strong demographic growth. Their proximity to Mexico has bolstered the Texan economy, trade, and manufacturing sector. Texas is a red state with blue cities, so residents can enjoy the perfect regulatory mix. And lastly, Texas has been able to attract businesses from other struggling states.

Read it.

When Wu began his surgical career in the late 1990s, most of his patients were in their sixties or seventies. But in the mid-2000s, he started to notice a troubling change. The people on his operating table kept getting younger. In 2016, Wu performed a scleral buckle surgery—fastening a belt around the eye to fix the retina into place—on a 14-year-old girl, a student at an elite high school in Kaohsiung. Another patient, a prominent programmer who had worked for Yahoo, suffered two severe retinal detachments and was blind in both eyes by age 29. Both of these cases are part of a wider problem that’s been growing across Asia for decades and is rapidly becoming an issue in the West too: an explosion of myopia.

I spent most of my life with myopia–I cannot remember a time when I didn’t wear glasses. When RK became available, I jumped on it (although I now wish I’d waited; Lasik doesn’t leave the same scars in its wake). That gave me about ten years of glorious life without glasses, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

For economies to continuously expand, education had to become central, and as this happened, the rates of myopia started to climb.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that education and myopia have a causal relationship, but it certainly seems suspicious. Of the three of us children to survived to adulthood, the two who were compulsive readers and eventually college graduates were extremely myopic, and the other–first born, in 1944–was never a heavy reader and never went to college.

HERE IS A non-exhaustive list of things that have been blamed for nearsightedness: pregnancy, pipe smoking, brown hair, long heads, bulging eyes, too much fluid in the eyes, not enough fluid in the eyes, muscle spasms, social class. “Any ophthalmologist who experienced a night of insomnia arose in the morning with a new and usually more bizarre theory,” wrote Brian Curtin in an influential 1985 book about myopia.

…

Morgan and his team also surveyed the participants about their daily routines and hobbies and discovered a surprising relationship. The more time kids spent outside, the less likely they were to have myopia.

Read it.

I spend a lot of time in prayer, both alone and in a quorum (a minyan) of men. Prayer is a form of quasi-meditation, once likened by Rabbi Sachs to focusing on micro-adjusting a shortwave radio dial to tune into a very faint and elusive signal. The “still small voice” might be our souls, or it might be the voice of the divine, or it might just be our imagination. I think it might, at times, be none of them, or all three together.

The point of prayer, like that of almost every religious practice, is to focus the mind of the participant on what is important from the aspect of that particular religion.