Welcome to my world.

Washington Post.

Research shows food prescriptions by medical professionals can improve well-being. But food isn’t a pill and knowing what to prescribe is complicated.

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Common sense. How can you possibly be against it? Americans of a certain generation used to talk about “Mom and apple pie” as examples of things that you cannot help but love, and it looks like common sense should get the same thumbs-up. But what is common sense?

If we are going to be persnickety then we have to go back to Plato and Aristotle. The ancient Greek word equivalent to “common sense” was doxa, which actually turns philologically into “dogma.” Latin-speaking translators of Aristotle (Boethius being the most famous, before he went to jail) used “sensus communis,” but this is more to do with our actual physical senses, as you would expect from the empirical Aristotle. It means that we all experience the world in much the same way. But common sense now has a more modern meaning, essentially translating from the classical world as “Don’t be a dumbass.”

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“Vegetable oils” in this context refer to oils extracted from seeds, grains, and legumes, and include soybean oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, canola oil, peanut oil, rice bran oil, grape seed oil, and cottonseed oil.

You will note the one ‘vegetable oil’ not mentioned: Olive oil.

Vegetable oils, while nearly nonexistent a hundred years ago, now account for 20% of Americans’ calories and have made their way into nearly every packaged food and restaurant meal we eat, from oat milk, tortilla chips, margarine, and mayonnaise to Subway’s breads, Domino’s pizza crust, and Chipotle’s rice

So: Don’t eat any of these, and you’re good.

Consuming vegetable oil increases your risk of death more than physical inactivity and heavy drinking, and for all the attention that red meat and sodium get, eating vegetable oil is 12 to 20 times more deadly.

Moral: Eat meat. Not too much. Mostly cow.

NOTE: This article demonstrates the rotten core of modern medicine–all of these studies are statistical correlations that are then assumed to indicate actual medical causation. One of the most basic principles of modern science (actual science, not what Dr Fauci peddles) is that CORRELATION DOES NOT IMPLY CAUSATION. Now, certainly there is no causation without correlation; but the opposite is not true. Any study that depends on statistical correlations IS NOT SCIENCE. It is opinion, nothing more, nothing less. Unless a doctor can describe to you the actually physical, chemical process whereby Y results from X, it is just an opinion; it is NOT SCIENCE. Actual science works every time–not 67% of the time , not 85% of the time, not 98% of the time–it works 100% of the time. That’s what makes it SCIENCE. Just because numbers are involved (and statistics can provide you with some very persuasive numbers) doesn’t make it science. You have to be able to follow the actual physical process, and that process has to lead to the same result every time it’s tried.

Don’t get fooled by ‘studies’. Insist on Actual Science.

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Education policy became a top issue in 2021’s gubernatorial race in Virginia. Parents were fired up about the breakdown of public schools, from extended school closures during the pandemic to contentious left-wing doctrine being inserted into official curricula. Republican Glenn Youngkin rode this wave to the governor’s mansion. Once there, he quickly racked up several victories for the movement for greater parental rights in education, including banning Critical Race Theory, issuing new guidance on how schools should accommodate transgender students and rescinding mask mandates in schools.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I am not as averse to the current general scene as many commentators. In fact I think there is something useful and healthy to disrupting business as usual in Congress—sort of like the effect Trump had. As I put it on Twitter, not having a functioning House of Representatives is almost as good as a government shutdown.

The American Mind.

To understand how to view Trump, I think it’s important to appreciate why the showdown he kicked off is not yet finished.

I’ve explained elsewhere that even when we set aside any claims about outright voter fraud, it’s clear the federal government is no longer accountable to the will of the people. Thus, our electoral system over the last 50 years most nearly resembles the Las Vegas gambling cartel. The casinos have the same relationship to their customers that the permanent government in DC has to the Republican base. The game is designed to maintain the illusion of fairness by consistently permitting a significant number of winners (but never too many). Some lucky folks periodically hit a jackpot—perfectly calculated to impress the gullible. In fact, the casino might even show a quarterly loss now and then. Yet the final outcome, in aggregate, is never in doubt. Over the long term, the house always wins. Sound familiar?

ZMan is not afraid to ask the obvious questions.

National conservatism, a movement created by Israeli Zionist Yoram Hazony, has gained some degree of respectability over the last decade. People associated with the movement have been given space on mainstream platforms. His conferences get a large crowd of academic types, most of whom get a speaking role. The event is one part academic conference, one part networking event. Of course, it is all made possible by billionaire Peter Theil who underwrites it.

Therein lies the first puzzle. Look at the collection of people associated with the movement and it is hard to find common ground. Peter Theil calls himself a libertarian, but he supported Trump. Granted, the space between Trump’s 1980’s civic nationalism and libertarianism is not that great, but most libertarians threw their dresses over their heads and went squealing into the night when Trump arrived. They joined their friends on the Left in calling him a fascist.

It gets fuzzier when you see paleos like Paul Gottfried and Daniel McCarthy, along with varieties of the “new right” like Michael Anton and Josh Hammer. The only thing these people have in common is support for Trump. Otherwise, they do not have much in common with one another, at least on the surface. Then you have people like Rod Dreher and David Goldman speaking at these events. Hazony’s events are the bar in Star Wars for dispossessed right-wing intellectuals.

Women appear to be pretty hard to please.

Joel Kotkin.

In recent decades, progressive politics has been underwritten by the ascendant economic titans of capital, technology, and communication. Big Tech and financial firms have long financed Democratic causes, led by those such as George Soros and the now-disgraced crypto-master Sam Bankman-Fried, who was released last month on a $250 million bail deal.

Yet for all its claims to represent the future, this ephemeral economy is starting to unravel, as the world begins to wake up to the fundamental realities underlying daily life. It turns out that, while they may seem old-fashioned in today’s digital world, material goods actually matter when they are hard to procure. Over the past year, traditional industries such as manufacturing, agriculture and energy have thrived, while media companies have lost $500 billion in value and tech firms have suffered a reversal of an astounding $4 trillion. Today, it’s not steel companies or gas plants that are experiencing mass layoffs, but firms such as Goldman Sachs, Meta, Amazon and Google.

Count me in.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

Peggy “High” Noonan devotes her weekly Wall Street Journal column to the case of Rep.-elect George Santos. Noonan might have gone into a trance and produced it via automatic writing. On second thought, she probably didn’t need to go into a trance to produce it, but I’ll stick with the automatic writing part. She gives us the predictable screed in “Why George Santos’s lies matter.” She advises the GOP: “They can’t afford to keep him. He is a bridge too far. He is an embarrassment.” The Journal turns over a lot of editorial page real estate to Noonan on a weekly basis for this kind of wisdom.

Francis Menton takes a slightly different angle at his aptly named Manhattan Contrarian site. Beginning where Noonan begins, Menton moves on to consider “a bunch [of political liars] I think are worse. The funny thing about these, though, is that not a single Democrat seems to care about them. All involve current officeholders, who are not subject to any widespread demands that they resign. Let’s consider.”

Peggy Noonan has been an apparatchik of the Uniparty since Bush left office.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I have tried to maintain cordial relations with my old Weekly Standard friends who have gone on to their successor media outlets, especially The Bulwark. I’ve even placed an article or two there. I have acknowledged the reasonable case at the core of The Bulwark’s outlook that Donald Trump and the broader populist current he galvanized have exerted some negative forces in the Republican Party, though my own balance sheet concludes that Trump was much more sinned-against than sinning, and think the populist turn among conservatives is long overdue and largely healthy. (By the way, someone who thought this a long time ago was . . . Irving Kristol. See below.*)

But it became clear a while ago now that the “Never Trump” disposition has become fanatical to the point that Bulwarkers and others in the same camp have gone nuts, throwing every conservative principle over the side simply because Trump embraced them. But Last—tempting to call him “the Last Man”—really scraped bottom with his clubfooted treatment of Scruton. Much of Last’s article consists of classic “ventriloquist journalism,” citing in a faux-questioning way an article by Alan Elrod (I’ve never heard of him either) in Arc Digital, most of which doesn’t deserve the dignity of a response.

The Kristol Krew at The Bulwark have fully descended into Junior Wokerati Liz-Cheney-Land and are fully-paid-up members of the Narrative Media.

BuzzFeed.

On Sunday, Reddit user u/dramaticatlady asked, “What’s a profession that will cease to exist in the near future?” People gave examples of careers/jobs that will probably be obsolete in the near future due to technology, apps, and other advancements.

Newsweek.

Who’s going to clean up their poop, that’s what I want to know.

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Skiers in Colorado have had their iPhone 14 or Apple Watch automatically call 911 using a new feature, putting a strain on emergency resources.

ZMan does a deep dive.

In modern usage, the terms sophism and sophistry are used interchangeably with “inaccurate” or “deliberately misleading.” A sophist is someone who relies upon fallacious arguments or reasoning to win a debate. Someone can be accused of sophistry because they are too stupid to see the flaws in their reasoning. Other times they are accused of deliberately misleading arguments. The motivation is malice rather than stupidity or carelessness.

This negative view of sophistry was not always so. We get the word from the Greeks who used the word to mean teacher. A sophist hired himself out to rich families to instruct their sons in philosophy, math, rhetoric and music. The ability to debate in public was an important skill for an ambitious Athenian, so educating your children to be convincing orators was a primary goal of rich parents. A good sophist was one who was good at making convincing arguments.

Our negative view of this also comes from the Greeks. The reason we know about Socrates is we have the writings of Plato, who tells us Socrates was opposed to sophistry in his day. He thought arguments had to be logically sound and factually accurate, rather than just convincing. Of course, Socrates was forced to drink poison by the Athenians, because he was condemned for undermining public virtue. It turns out that the truth does not always set you free.

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Cities are loosening rules on building parking spots with new buildings: ‘It’s about the climate, it’s about walkability’

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Maybe this happens to you sometimes, too:

You go to bed with some morning obligation on your mind, maybe a flight to catch or an important meeting. The next morning, you wake up on your own and discover you’ve beat your alarm clock by just a minute or two.

What’s going on here? Is it pure luck? Or perhaps you possess some uncanny ability to wake up precisely on time without help?

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A growing number of men are undergoing a radical and expensive surgery to grow anywhere from three to six inches. The catch: It requires having both your femurs broken. GQ goes inside the booming world of leg lengthening.

On the other hand, you get titanium femurs, and how cool is that?

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Believe it.

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

Of course, you have to be rich or have a job that doesn’t tie you down to one place. How many 28-year-olds can say that?

(Key point: “… it’s cheaper than living onshore in Southern California …”)

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It needs reliable cheap electricity.

IN JUNE, A vast new vertical farm opened on the outskirts of the English town Bedford. At a swanky opening event, members of the UK Parliament heard that the gleaming facility would one day produce 20 million plants annually. It was the latest opening for Infarm, a European vertical farming company that had raised over $600 million in venture capital funding, promising a future where vegetables are grown in high-tech warehouses stacked with LED lights rather than in open fields or greenhouses.

But now the future of the Bedford farm looks less than gleaming. On November 29, Infarm’s founders emailed its workforce to announce they were laying off “around 500 employees”—more than half of the workforce. The email detailed the firm’s plans to downsize its operations in the UK, France, and the Netherlands, and concentrate on countries where it had stronger links to retailers and a higher chance of eventually turning a profit. In September, Infarm had already laid off 50 employees, citing a need to reduce operating costs and focus on profitability.

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The tedious proglodyte trope “FOLLOW THE SCIENCE!” gets threadbare pretty quickly when you realize that THE SCIENCE changes from year to year, sometimes even from month to month. Remember when red meat was bad for you? Remember when butter was bad for you? Remember when eggs were bad for you? Remember when fat was bad for you? Well, it turns out that THE SCIENCE was actually wrong.

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The key distinction here is between income and wealth. Really Wealthy People have income, of course, but they don’t need it; if you have a million dollars, you can spend $50,00 a year (and I could live quite comfortably on $50,000 a year) for twenty years with no income at all.

The fly in the ointment is that everyone, no matter what his or her income, can always think about somebody who is far richer, and naturally thinks, by comparison with that person I am middle class.  That’s why the vast majority of people in the U.S. think they are ‘middle class’, even if they are demonstrably not.

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Supposedly, European high-speed trains are so successful that the airlines stop operating when new high-speed rail corridors open. The reality is much more dismal: in order to guarantee customers for its trains, France is banning airline flights in corridors served by high-speed rail. This is a tacit admission that government-owned trains can’t compete without forcibly shutting down competitors.

Under the new rule, commercial air flights are banned in corridors where trains can make the same journey in under 150 minutes. So far, this is limited to Paris-Bordeaux, Paris-Lyon, and Paris-Nantes. The French government wanted to extend it to five more city pairs, but the European Commission ruled that France could only ban air travel in corridors that had not just fast but frequent rail service. Members of France’s Green Party also want to extend it to corridors where trains make the journey in under 240 minutes.

Paris-Lyon is supposed to be the most successful high-speed rail corridor in Europe, one that supposedly makes a profit. The Antiplanner has questioned such claims because the state-owned rail company hasn’t published actual numbers, but France’s effort to legislate away the competition suggests that the trains aren’t doing as well as people claim.

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We’ve all seen the videos of activists from Extinction Rebellion and similar groups who glue themselves to roads, trains, walls, and works of art to protest governmental and corporate climate policies. Motorists in Germany had apparently had enough of all that nonsense, and forcibly removed the glued-on protesters.

It’s important to note that these pro-active citizens seemed to be “New Germans”. Perhaps “Germans who have been here longer” were unwilling to take the risks associated with unauthorized spontaneous actions.

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Sometimes I wonder whether he’s even Christian.

The title of this post is a reference to an old rhetorical question — which was also usually accompanied by an allusion to the defecatory habits of ursines in an arboreal environment — intended to convey the idea that one’s interlocutor was stating something obvious. Concerning the Pope, however, the question is no longer a rhetorical one. He’s not really Catholic, but what is he?

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You have to see it to believe it.

How Greenland’s Mineral Wealth Made It a Geopolitical Battleground (Foreign Policy)

Norwegian companies submit record $20.5 billion fossil fuel investment plans amid Russia-Ukraine war

Moldova suspends 6 TV channels over alleged misinformation (Washington Post)

Germany Unleashed Half-Trillion Dollar ‘Energy Bazooka’ To Keep Lights On

Kremlin TV Stars Combust as Russians Admit War Is Aimless (Daily Beast)

How Putin’s technocrats saved the economy to fight a war they opposed (Financial Times)

Pacifist Japan unveils biggest military build-up since World War Two (Reuters)

Russian Diplomat Hospitalized In Mail-Bomb ‘Terror Attack’

Japan Unveils Biggest Military Buildup Since WW II Amid China Worries

Fresh Missile Barrage Leaves Cities Across Ukraine Without Power Or Water In Sub-Zero Temps

India Test-Fires Nuclear-Capable Ballistic Missile After Minor Border Clash With China

Ukrainian Commander: High-Caliber Weapons Dealing Russians ‘Heavy’ Losses

South Dakota Gov. Noem Proposes Legislation To Restrict Chinese Purchase Of US Farmland

US Sends Infantry Unit To Base Just Miles Away From Russian Border In Estonia

Blossoming Iran-Russia Axis Becomes a Big Problem

Peace Between Jordan and Israel Unraveling, Report Says

US Believes Ukraine Can Retake Crimea, But May Provoke Nuclear Escalation

Iran asking Russia to sell military ships, help build new designs: Israeli sources

However, she now qualifies for a Federal agricultural program that pays her more for NOT raising sheep than she ever made from raising them. Plus she now has more free time for social media.