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In the latest ambitious project to use solar energy in space for powering the earth, a public-private Japanese partnership plans to test as soon as in 2025 if solar power generated in space can be beamed to the earth and converted into electricity.

This was one of Jerry Pournelle’s perennial projects.

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Q: What’s the difference between Hunter Biden, Konstantin Kisin and you?

A: Access to banks

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“This breakthrough means that custom enzymes for almost any chemical reaction could, in principle, be designed.”

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Spain will soon have a public reckoning with surrogacy.

The Spanish gossip magazine Lecturas announced that 68-year-old actress Ana Obregón will be returning to Spain from Florida on June 14th with her biological granddaughter.

The actress caused a stir when she announced the baby girl’s birth on March 20th. After being conceived with the semen of Obregón’s son, who died three years ago of cancer at the age of 27, the baby was reportedly born to a Cuban-born woman in Florida under a surrogacy arrangement.

The U.S. is one of the favourite destinations of Europeans for surrogacy as several states have laws that facilitate the practice and allow the contracting persons to appear as if they are the child’s parents by natural birth on the birth certificate, either through recognising surrogacy contracts or through pre-birth adoption arrangements.

But Obregón could face legal problems at home in Spain.

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In a nation long dominated by the Left, a new conservative political party, Nova Direita (Portuguese for ‘New Right’) is trying to seize the moment. The movement is led by Ossanda Liber, an Angolan-born lawyer who has become a rising star for the weakened and fractured Portuguese Right.

Liber, 46, is a fresh face in politics, although she is not without experience. Her first taste of front-of-the-line politicking was in 2021, when she ran for mayor of Lisbon. During the campaign, she made a name for herself in a much-discussed interview with state-owned broadcaster RTP, in which the journalist bluntly told her that he believed “Portugal to be a systemically racist country.” “Do you think so? I do not,” answered Liber, in what became a major moment for anti-‘woke’ politics in the country. Liber then proceeded in 2022 to run for parliament as part of Aliança, a small right-of-centre party. With the European parliamentary election drawing near, she is now launching her own force.

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Notable:

1. All of them use wind to assist, not as the sole means of power.
2. All of them use vertical wings, not sails.

Washington Post.

Those who came up in the ‘move fast and break things’ era are learning to slow down and make things.

Vox.

People who pretend to be other people for a living will say anything they’re paid to say. That’s their business model. If you’re fool enough to believe them, well….

On the other hand, in world in which I get my heater, air conditioner, water softener, dryer vent, and garage door inspected annually, it’s not to much of a stretch to extend that to my body.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

This week we have seen two more contenders join the Republican primary field, promising to be happy warriors to save America. Tim Scott from South Carolina and Ron DeSantis of Florida bring the field to eight, as far as the candidates with any chance of getting on the debate stage. With the exception of Trump and Ramaswamy, the field is all doing some version of conservative nostalgia. That is a mix of the crucible, the covenant, and the creed.

That last bit comes from a short little book titled After Nationalism which describes the three main ways the American ruling class has unified the country. The crucible is the melting pot story of America. The covenant is the claim that America has a special purpose in the world. The creed is the old familiar civic nationalist argument that America is just a collection of ideas. Conservatism has relied on all three to market candidates and programs over the years.

The theme of the book is that those three unifying narratives are no longer working as the country devolves into warring tribes. You can see that in the presentation from the Republican candidates as they announce their campaigns. The Tim Scott show was like a 1990’s Conservative Inc. fantasy about the black vote. The DeSantis campaign teased his announcement with this ad on Twitter, which is Bush era patriotism without the promise of a crusade against Islam.

Sarah Hoyt.

Phantom — in comments, recently — mention at the basis of all the leftist policies is the idea of overpopulation: the Malthusian hot mess that believes humans, like some kind of fungus will reproduce till the Earth can’t support them.

I’d never realized that. It is true sort of, though it’s perhaps based on an even crazier premise which in turn is at the very heart of not just socialism/communism but the idea that anyone gets to arrange all of human life from the top down, to spare individuals’ making wrong decisions. Which is, objectively, an idea so crazy that you can’t figure out how any human alive can think it.

And yet, if your theories tell you that humans are too stupid to stop reproducing when they’re starving, then any level of intervention is justified, because, OBVIOUSLY humans are brainless.

Except for the Ruling Class, of course.

The American Mind.

Many policy experts, politicians, and everyday citizens have long been concerned with the breakdown of the family as a result of divorce or separation. But the lack of family formation in the first place is now an even more pressing problem. Birthrates have been falling around the world, a complex phenomenon with many contributing factors. Women are not finding partners in time to become mothers (though the vast majority want children), and young men are disproportionately single.

Sociologist Andrew J. Cherlin has observed that marriage—to the extent it is desired at all—is now viewed as a “capstone” rather than a “cornerstone” of life. That is to say, marriage is no longer considered the foundation of adult life but a kind of feather in the cap of a successful person. We have lost a shared understanding of the human person, of how familial and civic responsibility provide meaning, and what encompasses a life well-lived (as evidenced by this recent Wall Street Journal-NORC poll). These shifts in beliefs have affected marriage rates. But technologies like the smart phone, social media, and online dating have exacerbated the family formation crisis for the youngest generations.

Think of it as evolution in action. The only women who will have children are those who put family ahead of career, and thus the Power Feminists will slowly get weeded out of the gene pool. Natural Selection works even when you don’t want it to.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

The scientific method works as follows: 1) You come up with a hypothesis. 2) You look for the implications of the hypothesis. What will be the case if the hypothesis is true, but will not be the case if the hypothesis is wrong? 3) You carry out observations or run experiments to find out whether the facts implied by the hypothesis do or do not obtain. 4) If you find that a fact implied by the hypothesis is indeed the case, it provides support for the hypothesis. If you find a number of such facts to be true, as implied by the hypothesis, then you may have strong support. 5) But it is not conclusive: if a fact or condition implied by the hypothesis is shown by observation or experiment not to be the case, then the hypothesis is refuted, and you go back to the drawing board.

Global warming hysteria is politics or religion, not science. This conclusion follows from the fact that the global warming models have generated many predictions that turned out to be wrong. A single wrong prediction is enough to disprove a model. Numerous, consistently repeated failures mean that the model is a joke.

Sarah Hoyt cuts to the chase.

We live longer healthy lives, and in fact my dad retired at 80, and husband has worked with 80 year olds who got bored in retirement.

What does this mean? Well, we choose our career absurdly early, and expect it to last life-long. That’s half of it. A lot of us come to not like/loathe what we loved as kids. Now, I’m not suggesting the training to be self sufficient should be later. Let the kids grow up. Just …. we probably shouldn’t going for graduate degrees before 32 or so. Because we will change. Or at least a significant subset will.

The problem of course is that our legacy educational system is still geared for people who live till sixty just about, and therefore if you don’t pursue your education early and hard and to the extreme you want to take it, people will look at you funny, which in the case of people who work for college admissions might mean you don’t get in.

Steve Sailer.

A decade ago, I correctly called that the New York Times was promoting transgenderism as the Next Big Thing after gay marriage.

What’s next?

Pedophilia? Bestiality?

Recently, I came around to thinking polygamy (although no doubt under some more euphemistic term) would be next.

Read it.

When we buy cereal or bread, few pay attention to the fact that most grains are protected or even patented. Most farmers don’t own the seeds they sow on their fields. “They are renting them,” Kloppenburg, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and co-founder of OSSI says with disgust. The problem with that? “A few global companies have the monopolies on global seed trade, and they breed cash crops like corn and soy, purely for money. They don’t care about biodiversity, world hunger or about the small farmer.” What sounds like a business problem impacts everybody, Kloppenburg insists. “These few gene giants on top of the food chain decide what ends up on our plates.”

Read it.

Fast food chain Wendy’s is testing new technology to automate its stores. This is more bad news for human workers as automation and artificial intelligence invade the fast food industry.

Wendy’s announced a new partnership with Pipedream, a hyper logistics company, to pilot-test the first underground autonomous robot system that will allow food from the kitchen to be sent to designated parking spots via an underground network of pipes.

Remind me to avoid Wendy’s.

The American Mind.

As a conservative AP English teacher and AP Exam reader, I have something of a love-hate relationship with College Board.

On one hand, I love the rigor and standards of Advanced Placement classes. For students willing to work hard and make the most of their time in high school, AP classes are a great option that will challenge them and offer them a chance at earning college credit. Moreover, they find their community in AP, something especially critical in otherwise rundown public schools where the world outside the AP bubble is mired in crime and mediocrity—for all its cheesiness today, the eighties film “Stand and Deliver” actually captures this reality pretty well. Both as a student and teacher, I’ll always be grateful that AP was there for the kids who needed it.

On the other hand, the leftist bias in the curricula, along with progressive pedagogy that emphasizes skills over content, has tarnished the luster of College Board. In history courses, which seem to receive a makeover every few years, these problems are especially pronounced. In English, there’s been a noticeable shift toward diverse ethnic or racial voices, and there’s certainly a relativistic approach to texts featured in these courses (for example, students were asked to analyze a portion of Sonia Sotomayor’s memoir to demonstrate their knowledge of rhetoric). I do encounter teachers, usually from very progressive states, who take a progressive approach in their classes and score exam essays with this prejudice, but indoctrination isn’t implicit in the course curriculum itself.

Washington Free Beacon.

Most feminists—heck, most people in general—like to see themselves as being on the side of progress. Not Mary Harrington, a self-described “reactionary feminist” and the author of Feminism Against Progress.

What does it mean to be “against progress” in the name of feminism? That turns out to be mostly a semantic matter: Harrington does not want to lose the right to vote, and while she takes some swipes at the “Progress Theology” of folks like Steven Pinker, she doesn’t deny, much less bemoan, that humans have become richer and live longer lives in recent centuries.

What Harrington dislikes are some major changes we have seen in the relations between the sexes in the past 60 years or so: The essence of her view is that not every change that free markets enable—or that societies enthusiastically embrace—is necessarily an improvement on what came before. Just as ubiquitous sugar is a poor fit for a species that evolved in an environment where calories were scarce, perhaps dating apps, “gender affirming” medical interventions, and even the Pill are a poor fit for humanity too, offering instant gratification but longer-term harm.

Read it.

OK, here’s my little result. I took a quick look at demographic variation in the frequency of the filled pauses conventionally written as “uh” and “um”. For technical reasons that I won’t go into here, I used the frequency of the definite article “the” as the basis for comparison. Thus I selected a group of speakers (e.g. men aged 60-69), counted how often they were transcribed as saying “uh”, and to normalize that count (since the number of people in each category was different) I divided by the number of times the same speakers were transcribed as saying “the”.

 

Victor Davis Hanson.

Almost everyone who originally had opposed the absolute monarchy, and, like the Americans, wished for a constitutional replacement, was eventually executed by revolutionaries who were then executed by more radical revolutionaries. The longer and more radical the revolution ran, the meaner, dumber, and more deadly the revolutionaries who emerged from the woodwork.

Finally, what could not go on, did not go on, as French society unraveled. Then the so-called Thermidors put an end to the madness of the Robespierre brothers and their sidekick, the 26-year-old Saint-Just, and did to them what they had done to thousands.

The final revolutionary correction saw a Directory, then a Consulate, and finally the dictator Napoleon—the self-described emperor who claimed he was the final absolutist manifestation of the “Revolution.”

The American Mind.

Norms. Remember those? If you do, you’re one of the few.

I used to be a normie. I come from a long line of normies stretching back through time to my first normie ancestors, who set foot on these shores, looked around, and thought, where should we put the TV, honey?

2023 is shaping up to be a bellwether year for normies and all their pesky norms. Are you still a normie? Do you ever lay awake at night wondering why it seems like everywhere you look, American society seems to be actively working against you? Like, despite your hard work, things aren’t improving. Things are really starting to suck, in fact. Bags of chips keep getting smaller but cost double. You had to tell your kids they can no longer watch Mr. Beast on YouTube (“Why, Mommy?” “Er, just because, okay?”).

You had to endure yet another humiliating DEI Zoom session at work, followed immediately by a Zoom call where your manager informs your team that ChatGPT will, in fact, put you out of work in three to five years.

The American Mind.

Up until a week ago, the 2024 presidential election campaign was by and large an uninteresting slog. The arrest of President Trump had shown some promise of injecting life into the race, but just a few short weeks later it is all but forgotten. Events that used to carry great significance which would be etched into the public memory for decades—like the investigation, prosecution, or impeachment of a president—have now been reduced to farcical shadow-play, gone in a moment. To generate lasting outrage or even attention, a story needs some element of surprise or departure from normalcy. But the new norm in politics is to destroy all norms. And since mainstream press catastrophizing has been dialed up to 11 since at least 2016, it rings hollower with every passing cycle. To anyone who has been paying attention, not even the most breathless histrionics on the part of professional observers makes a mark.

ZMan cuts through the fog.

One of the strange and unnoticed aspects of the modern age is how much time is spent debating imaginary things. In fact, most of our public debates are about things that may happen or could never possibly happen. The things that are actually happening get very little attention. In some cases, like the ongoing criminal operations of the Biden family, the only people discussing them are “conspiracy theorists”, a term that has been transformed to describe imaginary villains.

In fact, much of what passes for public debate is the shift from things that are real and observable in the present moment to things that do not exist. Crackpot libertarian congressman Thomas Massie spends most of his time warning about a highly unlikely problem with E-Verify, so that his voters do not notice the waves of migrant invaders filling up their cities and towns. He is not alone. Every politician is an illusionist now, making reality disappear behind a curtain of deceit.

What has happened to modern American society is a form of the Peter Pan syndrome, in that society prefers to live in a world of make believe, rather than face up to the tough choices that come with adulthood. Libertarian kooks would rather think about a world governed by the non-aggression principle than think about the problems that the current world is presenting to us. Ten thousand migrants a day cross the border, but libertarian guy is concerned about theoretical abuses of state power.

Lifehacker.

Historically, carrying a gun with which to shoot the shooter seems to work out pretty well.

Real Clear Wire.

Please keep this in mind amid all the hyper-ventilating over potential default. Janet Yellen, the walking, talking-est contrarian indicator on earth claims default would be “catastropic,” while the always and everywhere expert reverent Catherine Rampell tells readers “If you’re not afraid yet [about default], you should be.” Wise minds will be calm. This is such a non-story.

For one, As evidenced by the floating, occasionally very weak dollar over the decades, the U.S. has defaulted numerous times. And that’s not a partisan point. Left-of-center economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff are clear in their book This Time Is Different that when FDR revalued the dollar from 1/20^th of a gold ounce to 1/35^th, the U.S. defaulted.

All of which brings us to the present. In contemplating the present, it’s useful to think about another book written by left-of-center reporters Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. Baker and Glasser’s book was very fair, and among other things the authors noted about President Reagan was that much as he wanted a smaller, much more limited government, the act of achieving “it proved harder than Reagan’s team had imagined – every program they wanted to cut had a constituency, it seemed, often including fellow Republicans.” Translated, while some politicians want limited government, they all have at least one program that’s near and dear to them. Since they all do, government will always and everywhere grow as votes are traded back and forth so that everyone gets what they want.

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During a peak of violent crime in New York City, ordinary guy Bernhard Goetz made international headlines when he defended himself from an attempted mugging in a subway car by shooting his four attackers. He became known as the “Subway Vigilante.”

In 1981, Bernhard Goetz was one of many New Yorkers to fall prey to violent crime. He had been beaten and mugged by three assailants, none of whom were successfully prosecuted, and like many New Yorkers, he was tired of living in fear of being attacked. Unlike most, he was prepared when it came—with a five-shot .38 revolver and plenty of practice using it.

While on his afternoon subway commute in December of 1984, four youths assumed threatening positions around him—isolating him near the back of the car—and he quickly mapped out a rapid pattern of fire. One of the young men, Troy Canty, said, “Give me five dollars.” Some details of what happened next are in dispute, but the following is agreed upon.

The Spectator.

Marooned in London for a day between meetings, I walked for miles in an attempt to find something good to say about the city. This was not a wholly unsuccessful expedition — those Nash terraces have an allure, Regent’s Park has been cutely de-manicured to encourage the wildlife and it was possible to buy a plastic replica of Big Ben almost every fifteen yards, which came in handy. It was the Londoners I found problematic. Smirking rat-faced hipsters and man-bunned bike dweebs, buzz-cut, granite-headed lezzas, the performative callisthenics of middle-class thirty-somethings who believe they will never die, Arabs flogging tat every five paces, lithe, snake-hipped homosexuals having a pleasant lunch of kale with yeast extract at one of a million cafés with the word “plant” somewhere in its name, overconfident, braying gap-year yankees, Afghans driving Uber cars as if they were in the Lashkar Gah Grand Prix, desperate, half-dead, joggers, young white businessmen jabbering to themselves like psychos as they stepped over the sprawled bodies of dozing Romanian beggars. London — all of human life is here. Except the good bits.