“Just because they really are out to get you doesn’t mean you aren’t paranoid. If they’ve been after you long enough, paranoia can become a reflex.”

— Steven Brust, Issola

Babylon Bee.

Satire–read it quick, before it comes true.

“Why won’t you become Orthodox, my friend?”

“Because your priests look like foreigners and your bishops look like hoboes.”

“Hmmm. Can’t say you’re wrong.”

CNN.

The two NASA astronauts who piloted the first crewed test flight of Boeing’s Starliner capsule — and were left behind on the space station as the beleaguered spacecraft returned to Earth — took questions on Friday for the first time in weeks.

Butch Wilmore, a Tennessee native and former Navy test pilot, said during the conversation that he and crewmate Suni Williams were “very fortunate” to have the ability to stay on the International Space Station a few more months and come home using a back-up option: hitching a ride on a SpaceX-made Crew Dragon vehicle.

“There’s many cases in the past where there have not been other options,” Wilmore said.

You’ll be glad you did.

Read it.

Researchers from the Sonia & Marco Nadler Institute of Archaeology at Tel Aviv University have used a range of modern technologies, including drones, remote sensing, and 3D digital modeling, to generate the first objective, quantified analysis of the Roman siege system at Masada. Findings indicate that, contrary to the widespread myth, the Roman army’s siege of Masada in 73 CE lasted no more than a few weeks.

Read it.

Nothing exposes the mythical thinking behind learned helplessness better than Stockholm syndrome: a diagnosis assigned to women who show affection for their captors, and a distrust of authority. It’s a classic throw-away line we use to describe the mental condition of domestic abuse victims, but it’s also a term that’s still taken seriously by some psychologists. ‘A classic example [of Stockholm syndrome] is domestic violence,’ says Oxford psychologist Jennifer Wild, ‘when someone – typically a woman – has a sense of dependency on her partner and stays with him.’

But Stockholm syndrome – a dubious pathology with no diagnostic criteria – is riddled with misogyny and founded on a lie. The psychiatrist who invented it, Nils Bejerot, never spoke to the woman he based it on, never bothered to ask her why she trusted her captors more than the authorities. More to the point, during the Swedish bank heist that inspired the syndrome, Bejerot was the psychiatrist leading the police response. He was the authority that Kristin Enmark – the first woman diagnosed with Stockholm syndrome – distrusted.

Babylon Bee.

In an attempt to sway voters away from voting for former President Donald Trump, a group of well-known leaders from different fields — politics, religion, and entertainment — came together to publicly voice their support for their chosen candidate.

Read it.

The Maldives’ remarkable investments in infrastructure and the scientific evidence of island geomorphology suggest that the only thing sinking is the fearmongering stories of nations disappearing because of climate change.

Gothamist.

Brooklyn Councilmember Farah Louis says her bill “was initially expected to pass months ago,” but stalled because of “considerable doubts” from her colleagues.

What credibility can a black woman have who does her best to avoid looking like a black woman? For the record, I have the same issue with Joy Reid.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

Philadelphia between Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Given the result of the last Trump – Biden debate, this one should get a good audience. Despite the massive marketing campaign on her behalf, people know little about Harris. She has been a colored ornament on the Biden administration and the butt of jokes on the internet, but most people have no genuine sense of her.

That is the reason it could be the last debate of this cycle. Harris has a poor reputation as a public speaker. Her only real debate experience was in the 2020 Democratic primary and she was horrible. Despite having millions in tech money and a favorable media, she used the debate to alienate every constituency in the party and dropped out soon after it. Her recent CNN interview, which was heavily edited, suggests she has not gotten better over the last four years.

It is possible this may be the last presidential debate we see at all. It is assumed that debates are part of the show, but for most of the country’s history debates were not a part of our political process. The first general election debate in our history was the 1960 debate between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. Prior to that, there were a few debates between members of the Democratic party on specific issues like foreign policy, but those were a rarity.

Read it.

Most of the sins of Big Government arise from a conviction on the part of the Cloud People that the Great Unwashed have to be protected from themselves by means of stringent regulation and requirements for permission to do even the most petty daily activities.

Read it.

Through a sequence of random events (seeing a note about an Alto emulator, listening to a truly atrocious podcast-retelling of the NeXT computer company) I found myself reading about the PERQ computer this evening.

Reader: the modern Mac is not “a copy of an Alto”. I mean it kinda is. But more recently than that, it’s really a copy of a PERQ.

The PERQ is an early, commercial, and technical-user-focused version of an Alto. Except not quite. It had the same fast CPU, large local memory and bitmapped display with fast microcoded rasterops (a so-called “3M machine” — 1 MIPS CPU, 1 megabyte RAM, 1 megapixel display, “and 1 megapenny of price”, about $10,000). It had the same GUI with overlapping windows. It also had Pascal, Fortran, C and Lisp. It also demoed and started taking orders in 1979 and shipped in 1980, before the competition, including before Xerox. The Xerox Star (Xerox did finally commercialize the Alto) and Apollo/Domain each shipped a year later, in 1981.

Read it.

If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

Alma Boykin.

My car was getting worked on, and another person in the waiting area was listening to a podcast about the End Times and how they were Nigh. They also needed to have their hearing checked, because if I can hear your ear-buds from ten feet away, you need to turn the sound down. Anyway, I mostly tuned the discussion out because 1) I’ve heard most of it before and 2) it wasn’t loud-loud.

Many cultures and belief systems have an idea of an earlier time, when things were much better than they are today. A Golden Age, the time of the Legendary Emperors, the world before the Fall, before the coming of private property when all were Noble Savages, the Dream Time when the gods walked among men and animals spoke, when the living was easy, or easier. When all people were equal (“When Adam delved and Eva span, then there was no noble man”), and a just ruler oversaw a time of peace (Numa Pompillius, Quetzalcoatl, what have you).

Some, not all, also have an end time idea. This may vary, and sometimes shows up in faiths that don’t usually focus on eschatology, like Buddhists or American Indians, or the modern Environmental movement’s more radical offshoots. Judaism has had end times movements, and Christianity is well known for people who think that the End is Nigh and can be predicted. Some people even want to bring about that end time, thus calls of “Don’t immenatize my eschaton.” The government of Iran is the best known at the moment, although I’ve heard that there are Jewish and Christian groups who seek to bring about the Second Coming or just the arrival of the Messiah by— Several things. Extinction Rebellion and some even more radical environmentalists want to trigger the return of wilderness* to the world and restore Nature to its pre-lapsarian state. Which lapse varies from group to group, and which state is often left vague, although “pristine Nature without the corruption of mankind/the free market/the patriarchy/Western Civilization/pick three” seems to be common.

Alma Boykin has many very readable fiction books on Amazon. Highly recommended.

ds

Read it.

The president’s desk bears a remarkable pedigree. Its story ties together several disparate historical threads, including a ghost ship, polar exploration, and relations between the United States and the UK. The tale begins with a certain British Admiral, Sir Edward Belch.

Tom Kratman.

In the first place, there are two things we mean by “the election was stolen.” They’re mutually reinforcing, yes, but they’re not the same. The first of these is via the influence of media and social media. It was not illegal for them to have been Biden’s campaign, but they _were_ Biden’s campaign. What that means, in practice, is that they used their privileges under the first amendment to violate the intent of the first amendment. I say “privileges,” by the way, rather than “rights” because by their conduct they have undermined the first amendment to the point we can calmly consider killing it, as regards the media, as so many lefties want it to be killed for the common citizenry. It no longer serves its purpose.

The second factor is our belief that actual spurious ballots were introduced into the system by both mailing in and other means. And the numbers were not even that large; Trump “lost” by about twelve thousand in Georgia, eighty thousand in Pennsylvania, and under twenty-one thousand in Wisconsin. Let’s not pretend that those were particularly difficult numbers to have illegally come up with.

…

In short, election fraud is so completely a part of the Democratic Party and the left, more generally, and has been for so long, that it would only be remarkable if there were a close election where there wasn’t any. We expect it. If we can’t easily see it, we expect it to be only because it’s a little better hidden than usual.

The Democratic Party is and always has been a party of corruption, heavy on power, short of or bereft of principle. The only difference between it and any given sub-Saharan African kleptocracy is in the shade of skin.

Does anybody seriously think that Biden got more votes than Obama did in 2004 and 2008?

Tyler Cowen.

I don’t agree with this theory as stated, but it can be worth spelling such things out, if only to see their weaknesses, or perhaps some strengths at some of the more unusual or less likely margins. Here goes:

People, especially “thinkers,” like to believe they serve all sorts of noble purposes in the intellectual infrastructure. But in reality their main effects are either to raise or lower the status of the elites in their society.

Noam Chomsky, for instance, has lowered the status of American elites. That is his net long-run effect, not that he drummed up sympathy for the Khmer Rouge. A lot more people, for better or worse, are more skeptical of a bunch of things because of Chomsky.

The New York Times, in contrast, works hard to raise the status of elites. It tries especially hard to raise the status of Democratic elites, but still it is raising the status of elites for the most part.

Most ‘thinkers’ are in love with thinking, and spend little time thinking about whether what they’re thinking has any connection to reality. Usually they think of ‘connection to reality’ as a bug, not a feature

It is hard to lower the status of elites without lowering your own status as well.  It is not just that the elites will not like you, or may treat you and your PR harshly.  You also have to come across as quite negative, and furthermore some of the negativity you create for your targets will rub off on you, at least in the eyes of much of your audience.  Plus being too relentlessly critical, rather than constructive, tends to make people stupider.

I can live with it. Most people will grow stupider over time all by themselves; I am happy to help that process along pro bono publico. Think of it as evolution in action.

Happy Labor Day.

“How can you trust a man who wears both a belt and suspenders? The man don’t even trust his own pants.” — Henry Fonda, Once Upon a Time in the West

Hey, me too…

Read it.

On Tuesday, a federal appeals court in New Orleans ruled that illegal aliens do not have the right to bear arms under the Second Amendment, due to the fact that they are not American citizens.

As reported by Fox News, a three-judge panel of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that federal law prohibiting illegal aliens from owning firearms is legal, as the Constitution does not apply to anyone who has entered the United States illegally.

The decision came as the result of an appeal by an illegal alien named Jose Paz Medina-Cantu, who had been arrested in Texas in 2022 by the Border Patrol. He was charged with illegal possession of a handgun, and illegally re-entering the country after having already been deported.

No-brain journalism strikes again: ‘Not an American citizen’ and ‘in the country illegally’ aren’t the same thing.

“The Second Amendment protects the right of ‘the people’ to keep and bear arms. Our court has held that the term ‘the people’ under the Second Amendment does not include illegal aliens,” said U.S. Circuit Judge James Ho in a concurring opinion. “As to common sense, an illegal alien does not become ‘part of a national community’ by unlawfully entering it, any more than a thief becomes an owner of property by stealing it.”

Love that analogy.

Read it.

The Committee on House Administration subpoenaed high ranking officials at five government agencies on Thursday requesting they appear at depositions over concerns federal funds were used to encourage more Democrat voting.

Read it.

In a sharp escalation of Italy’s ongoing crackdown on illegal migration across the Mediterranean, the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has impounded a humanitarian rescue ship for the 23rd time. The vessel, Geo Barents, operated by the international medical charity Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), was detained in the port of Salerno this week following its rescue of 191 migrants.

The 60-day detention order, issued on Monday night, is one of the most severe actions taken in an 18-month campaign against humanitarian groups operating in the Mediterranean. Italian authorities accused Geo Barents of endangering lives and failing to provide timely information during a night-time rescue last Friday, when the crew intervened to save migrants from a small fiberglass boat that was being approached by a Libyan coastguard vessel, FT reports.

God forbid the Libyan coastguard should ‘rescue’ them and return them to Libya where they came from.

ZMan looks behind the curtain.

A new trend in the world of internet politics is a reboot of an old trend in actual politics and that is the abortion issue. Abortion was good politics for both parties since Roe because it let them posture without having to do anything. The Democrats promised to defend abortion and Republicans promised to end it. Meanwhile the issue languished in the courts until the Trump court overturned Roe. Since then, both sides of the abortion battle have been trying to revive their money maker.

To some degree, they have been successful. The people we call the left have convinced themselves that the election will turn on abortion. They generate fake polls and fake news stories to goose the online influencer community. Of course, the most gullible of that bunch, the right-wing influencers, take the bait. There is no group less politically astute than the right-wing influencers. The media then uses online chatter to talk about the abortion issue as if everyone cares.

The truth is, no one cares. Just two percent of people list abortion as a major concern going onto the election. As always, economics is what matters. The people who care about abortion are the most predictable voting bloc in America. The pro-abortion people vote Democrat and the anti-abortion people vote Republican. It is why both parties took these voters for granted for fifty years. They knew that these voters would never alter their behavior.

From an evolutionary standpoint, abortion (like homosexuality) is a self-correcting problem–although, admittedly, on a geologic scale.

Read it.

Former Trump administration press secretary Stephanie Grisham caused a bit of a stir last week at the Democratic National Convention.

Grisham, who resigned on Jan. 6, 2021, in a supposed protest against President Donald Trump for his alleged inaction when demonstrators invaded the U.S. Capitol, endorsed Kamala Harris and claimed that from her personal knowledge Trump has “no empathy, no morals and no fidelity to the truth.”

But wait a minute.

How did Grisham become an arbiter of morals and a purveyor of “fidelity to the truth”?

After all, Grisham worked for Trump and his wife, first lady Melania Trump, for six years, starting as a campaign worker in August 2015 and then working as press secretary to both the first lady and the president after Trump’s election in 2016.

You have to ask yourself how Grisham had worked for the Trumps for six years without managing to notice that they were rotten scum. One is supposed to believe that she only figured out that Trump was a bad person two weeks before he left office when she resigned in protest. But if she knew Trump as well as she claims, and he was as horrible as she says now, then she should have quit years before.

Don’t think of it as selling out–think of it as buying in.

Read it.

In an email, UNL Chancellor Rodney Bennett said to the campus community on Tuesday that the Office of Diversity and Inclusion will be closing, according to the Lincoln Journal-Star.

The change also means the university’s vice chancellor for diversity and inclusion position, held by Marco Barker, will be eliminated come December. Including benefits, Barker’s salary is almost $320,000.

$750,000 will also go back into the university’s overall budget, which was previously allocated for the Office of Diversity and Inclusion.

• Strong and invincible
• Poor pitiful victim

You don’t know which one you’ll get until you open the box.

ScienceAlert.

No surprises here. When ‘gender’ is a social construct that you can pick from an extensive menu and nobody thinks that genes determine anything, in a world where ‘mysogyny’ is ‘terrorism’, who needs the Y chromosome?