New York Times.

Violent political speech has increasingly crossed into the realm of in-person confrontation for members of Congress in both parties, raising the prospect of a disastrous event.

Well, perhaps if they did the jobs they were elected to do rather than being total whores and tools, they might not have this problem.

Biden administration unveils Russia sanctions in response to annexations (The Hill)

US imposing ‘swift and severe costs’ on Russia following Putin’s Ukraine annexation (CNN)

Zelensky Asks Ben Stiller If He Can Put Him Down As A Reference On His NATO Application (Babylon Bee)

WARPLANES: Ukraine Builds Its Own

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Companies haven’t yet internationally outsourced many jobs that require higher education, Stansbury tells Fortune, adding that many call center-type jobs, or remote-first jobs like software design or back-end engineering have already been offshored.

But if high-paying white collar jobs can be done remotely, outsourcing them to cheaper areas could “pretty clearly” offer huge savings. The potential for change “would be seismic if all of these well-paid white collar jobs were suddenly outsourced to less rich countries,” she adds.

“If people that code for Google and Facebook were able to live wherever in the U.S. they wanted and [work] for a year and a half without ever going to the office, it seems very, very likely that a lot of companies will be rethinking this longer-term and outsourcing those kinds of jobs that didn’t used to be outsourced,” Stansbury adds.

Read it.

It’s tempting to interpret the Italian electoral results this past Sunday as voters merrily hurling a bowl of lush papardelle with wild boar ragu over the collective bland faces of the toxic unelected Euro-oligarchy sitting in Brussels.

Well, it’s complicated.

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Republican senators are growing concerned by colleague Mitt Romney’s refusal to help fellow Utah Republican Mike Lee decisively win his re-election campaign — a posture that could potentially keep their party from gaining a majority in the November elections. Unlike every other Republican senator, the 2012 failed Republican presidential candidate is declining to express a preference in Republican Lee’s re-election effort against Democrat-endorsed Evan McMullin.

“I respect [Romney], and I understand that each state has its own dynamics, but I do not understand why he is remaining neutral,” said one Republican senator who asked not to be identified. “Whatever our differences, we all try to support each other around election time.”

…

Even so, the poll suggests the strategy McMullin shared with left-wing allies at The Washington Post and other corporate media — building a coalition of Democrats, independents, and Romney and his supporters — is working at least somewhat according to plan.

Romney needs to be primary’d and replaced with a real Republican.

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‘Clean’, like ‘smart’, has become the prerequisite for all technology. Both are myths.

Smart technology is surveillance technology. It is not smarter because of its inherent qualities, but because it sends and receives data that allows it to be ‘smarter’ in manipulating users. The smart part of smart technology comes from human beings. So does the stupid part when people sacrifice their privacy and independence for the benefits of technology being shaped to them.

Clean energy is even more of a myth. The Inflation Increase Act doles out another stream of billions toward the inefficient forms of energy generation that the government has been subsidizing for over 50 years because some Madison Avenue ad agency branded them ‘clean’.

Energy is inherently clean and dirty. Making the inherent forces of the universe useful requires mining metal, cutting down trees, and turning fossil fuels into plastic to assemble machines. Once those machines are running, they will shed heat because ‘clean’ or ‘dirty’, that is how the second law of thermodynamics works. Not even Al Gore can evade entropy and not even the shiniest solar panel, sleekest wind turbines or smoothly humming Tesla will prevent energy from being wasted as it is transferred, stored or used to do one thing or another locally or nationally.

ZMan looks ahead.

The first step in surviving a nuclear war is to avoid a direct hit. Washington DC will get several direct hits and the initial flash will vaporize most of the population. The shock wave will level most of the city. By now, the Russians and Chinese know to target Northern Virginia, so it will be a saturation bombing. The five percent that survive the initial blast will be radiated and die soon thereafter. Therefore, the first rule of nuke club is to be outside the target zone.

The safe bet is to be away from the coasts. The Rockies or Appalachia are the best bet for making it through the first stage. Denver will be nuked, for sure, but the damage will be contained to that plateau. People in the mountains will escape the flash and the blast, even if Denver takes multiple strikes. The Green Briar will get hit, for old times sake, but most of West Virginia will be spared. There are lots of places to escape the flash and the blast in the mountains.

Once things settle after the final missile strikes, there will be four key things to surviving the aftermath. You will need water, shelter, food and a way to defend yourself from the people who were not prepared. Imagine a land ravaged by mask wearing Covidians and you get the picture. You will have to be prepared to kill a lot of people in order to avoid ending up like them. This means you need to pick a spot that has access to water, a food source and is defendable.

Smith & Wesson are your friends.

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Despite what you’ve been told, the American left is not composed of people who hate the country and want to see its institutions burned to the ground in an orgy of rage. Oh, sure, those people exist — but they’re not the whole left. Not even most of the left. Nor are they, on their own, all that dangerous, since burn-it-down-style radicalism inevitably runs up against the natural human desire for peace and order. (Even in Seattle, CHAZ could last only so long.) No, the great majority of Americans who identify with the left belong to a different faction: the whigs.

When I say “whig,” I’m not talking about powdered faux hair or the Democratic Party’s long-lost rival or British parliamentary politics. I’m talking about those Americans — and there are many of them — who take a whiggish view of the country’s history. Such people consider themselves patriotic. They hang red, white, and blue flags from their porches. They watch fireworks shows and march in July 4 parades. They swoon at the sight of military regalia. They flock to old battlefields and can rattle off facts about Benjamin Franklin and the Constitutional Convention. They also believe that Elizabeth Warren is the fullest expression of the Lincolnian spirit and that gas-powered cars must be abolished, lest life on Earth end.

If the whig left had a creed, it might be this: Social change is America’s genius. Resistance to social change is illegitimate and un-American. The Democratic Party, as the progressive party, is the natural steward for the best parts of American history — a history that consists of a series of virtuous struggles against oppression: the oppression of the British crown, the oppression of slavery, the oppression of the patriarchy, the oppression of unbridled capitalism, the oppression of the Jim Crow regime, the oppression of homophobia, the oppression of immigration restriction, and so on.

Whigs were Progressives before they came up with a cool new name.

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Not as efficiently as journalists can stiff out white supremacists….

Joel Kotkin.

The conflict between the material economy and the economy based in ephemera – such as the creative industries, tech and financial services – is likely to define the coming political conflicts both within countries and between them. The laptop elites, led by Silicon Valley, the City of London and Wall Street, generally favour constraining producers of fuel, food and manufactured goods. In contrast, the masses, who produce and transport those goods, are now starting to realise that they still have the power to demand better futures for themselves and their families. Like railway workers, they can threaten to shut things down and win much higher pay.

Ukraine Situation Report: Multiple Russian Aircraft Shot Down In A Day

World opinion shifts against Russia as Ukraine worries grow (Associated Press)

China says US sending ‘dangerous signals’ on Taiwan (The Guardian)

Nuclear War Is “Possible” For 1st Time Since Cold War: US Commander

China Using Civilian Ships to Enhance Navy Capability, Reach

Finland Shuts Borders With Russia As Military Age Men Flee  Welcome to the quagmire.

Drowning Of Russian Executive Latest In A String Of Mysterious Deaths  Dunh dunh DUNHHHHH.

Hey, we didn’t say it would be easy.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

A little change of pace this week as the news is mostly made up nonsense about the war on Russia and, of course, stories about Trump. The obsession with Trump moved past whatever lies beyond absurd years ago. Even if you get the symbolism of Trump to the managerial elite, their obsessing over him is exhausting. It is as if they want to talk about him to the point where his fans are sick of the subject.

Scan the millions of posts about Trump in the regime media each week and it is like watching a man deliberately slip on a banana peel. His attempt to entertain the audience just creates a sense of shame. You are embarrassed for him. That is the same feeling I get when I read a New York Times piece about Trump. How humiliating and degrading it must be to write those posts.

The Finns have a word for this, myötähäpeä, which roughly translates into secondhand shame or shared embarrassment. Fremdschämen is the German version of it, which means the feeling you get when seeing someone do something so embarrassing that you start to feel shame by watching it. English does not have a corresponding word, which is odd given the history of the English language.

People often ask me why I never smile. I respond that I do smile but just not when they’re around.

Read it.

Sarah Hoyt.

What I am calling for is a cold, hard look at the utility of mass-industrial, state enforced education as we head out of the mass-production, mass-skills era.

Read it.

Delaware’s Governor has said they are ‘preparing’ for any migrants that may be sent to Biden’s home state by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis – as the plane which was flown into Martha’s Vineyard heads towards Georgetown airport.

Pass the popcorn.

ZMan points out some inconvenient truth.

The blank slate crowd are sure that everything about a human society is a construction of the mind and can therefore be deconstructed. Western society, which has towered over the rest of mankind for more than five hundred years, can be disassembled and then reassembled to put non-Western people in charge. There is no evidence to support the claim, but a great global experiment is underway, nonetheless. There is mass migration from the Global south into the West.

A dozen years ago, Jason Richwine did his doctoral thesis in the topic and found that migration into the United States from the south was decreasing the quality of human capital by reducing the over all IQ of the population. He relied upon the mountain of IQ studies that show the average intelligence of Hispanics to be ten points below the average for Europeans. The usual suspects flew into a rage and had Jason Richwine condemned for heresy.

No one bothered to challenge the conclusions of his study, as that would suggest moral claims can be subject to objective measures. A key component of any religion is that the moral claims are unassailable. The new religion of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity operates like every other religion. Its principles are beyond question. In this case, it means that all people are equally capable and the differences seen between people are due to the racism of white people.

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The immigrants are being transported from Republican-led border states to northern Democratic enclaves, which have long proclaimed themselves “sanctuaries” for the migrants they are now so appalled to find arriving. Democrats charge that it’s a stunt, and they are partly right. But it is a very shrewd stunt with a far-reaching impact. Although the buses carry a vanishingly small number of the illegals arriving daily in Texas and Arizona, they are making several big points.

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What people in the UK may not realise is that there are teams of contractors who start the American harvest in the south, almost on the Mexican border, and as the year progresses, they move steadily north, combining as they go. After all, the further north, the later the harvest. They finish somewhere in Canada playing chicken with winter.

Now some of these chaps work closely with the major machinery manufacturers. After all they might have several big combines and tractors and they will change them every three years. Not surprisingly, because their machinery works hard. They can be combining, 24 hours a day, for days on end when harvest is ready. So, some of these contractors will effectively have new machinery on standing order. It’s metaphorically got their name on it even as it proceeds along the production line.

One of these chaps was approached by a representative of the company he deals with. The company wanted him to go electric.

His response was simple. “How do I charge these combines when they are many miles from an electrical mains supply, in the middle of a cornfield, in the middle of nowhere?” “How do I run them 24 hours a day for 10 or 12 days straight when the harvest is ready, and the bad weather is coming in?” “How do I get a 50,000+ lb. combine that takes up the width of an entire road back to mains electricity 20 miles away when the battery goes dead?”

Apparently, the answer is ‘we’re working on it’.

Uh, yeah….

Russia’s underperforming military capability may be key to its downfall (The Guardian)

Russia is Running Out of Options to Recruit More Soldiers (Newsweek)

Coal stoves and wood thieves: Europe braces for winter without Russian gas (Washington Post) Boy, those sanctions really work, don’t they.

“Mass Graves” Allegation Becomes Focus Of Calls For Putin To Face War Crimes Tribunal

Senate Bill On Taiwan Will “Make War Much More Likely”

Putin’s Energy War with Europe Seems to Falter  Seems pretty on-track to me….

Europe, More Than Putin, Must Shoulder The Blame For The Energy Crisis

Ban On All Russian Tourists In Baltic States & Poland Takes Effect  Putin cooties are almost as bad as Trump cooties.

Kremlin Rejects Mass Grave “Lie” & “Provocation” As Bodies Exhumed

The Full $16Bn List Of What Biden Has Sent Ukraine

ZMan attempts to follow the bouncing ball.

The so-called reactionaries cannot be working from fear for what change will do to their social power, when they have no political or social power to conserve. This does not stop the radicals from pretending their victims have power, but it is a self-serving game of make believe. The people on the receiving end of radicalism know who has the whip hand.

This is why the old Left-Right framing makes no sense. The people claiming to be on the Right these days are not monarchists. They are not in genuine opposition to the people on the Left. They simply prefer a slower pace of change. The Left is certainly not opposed to institutional power, like all prior left-wing movements. They worship institutional power and act in defense of it. To maintain the old framing, the dissidents are the New Left and the regime is the New Right.

Recent events support this new framing. The election integrity protests during the 2020 cycle looked like every other protest against power. The people in control of the institutions certainly saw it that way. They still carry on like January 6 was a failed Bastille Day or the echoes of 1848. In response, they are acting like institutional power always reacts to threats. They are rounding up opponents, abusing the rights of their citizens and threatening retribution.

Read it.

Concerned about privacy? Got ya covered.

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One London evening in 1914, just after Great Britain had declared war on Germany, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey was in his parliamentary office talking to a journalist. This is not always advisable for today’s politicians, but in those days statesmen from Westminster and hacks from Fleet Street took dinner at the same club, or at least within the same social set, and his confidant was John Alfred Spender, editor of the influential Westminster Gazette. “The lamps are going out all over Europe,” said Sir Edward mournfully. “We shall not see them lit again in our lifetime.” A quotable quote, certainly, as long as we bear one thing in mind: Sir Edward was speaking figuratively.

Almost a quarter of a century later, Winston Churchill updated the phrase during a speech broadcast in America just before World War II, saying that “the lights are going out” across Europe, and referring of course to the rise of Hitler. Once again, he spoke figuratively. Eighty years after that, a man who has been called “literally Hitler” made a speech to the United Nations. In that speech, Donald Trump was not being figurative when he informed delegates that following the German energy model of almost complete reliance on power supplied by Vladimir Putin’s Russia would be ruinous. The German delegation openly mocked him. This has turned out to be unwise, particularly when you are from the country that invented the word schadenfreude.

Sister of oligarch Alisher Usmanov removed from EU sanctions list (The Guardian) Not enough Putin Cooties, I guess.

As India Joins China in Distancing From Russia, Putin Warns of Escalation (N.Y. Times)

UK Defense: Russia at Risk of Losing Luhansk

EU Calls for War Crime Tribunal Over Mass Graves in Ukraine

China Enjoys Energy Bonanza As NATO Sanctions Against Russia Fail

PEACE TIME: Another Putin Political Punishment Plot

Ukraine’s ambassador describes ‘war crimes of massive proportions’ (Politico)

Russia Widens Strikes on Ukrainian Civilian Targets After Frontline Setbacks

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Industrial heat consumes a huge proportion of global energy. Rondo Energy says its brick-toasting heat storage device is so cheap and efficient that it makes decarbonization an instant no-brainer across a huge range of industries. Bill Gates agrees.

Oh,  well, if Bill Gates agrees, that settles it.

Scott Johnson at Power Line.

The Martha’s Vineyard’s meltdown illustrates the efficacy of a few of Saul Alinsky’s Rules For Radicals. Governors Abbott and DeSantis have put several of Alinsky’s rules in play Among them:

• Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

• Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.

• A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

• Keep the pressure on.

• The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

• Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.

These rules were formulated for the use of the left. When employed to mount opposition to the left, the axis of American life and politics tilts. The end of the world is nigh.

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

On YouTube there is a genre of video about living off-grid. That is, living in a rural area without electricity, gas, internet and so on. Many, if not most, are fake because most everything is fake these days. Some are legitimate and they make for interesting viewing because it is mostly problem solving. Watching a guy noodle through how to make a tiny hydroelectric system is interesting.

I call it ‘retired’.

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I love books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.

The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. This leads to FOMO and occasional pangs of guilt over the unread volumes spilling across my shelves. Sound familiar?

But it’s possible this guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of intellectual failings. Quite the opposite.

Better too many books than too few.

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Cheese, curry, beer: We can thank our ancestors who put food scraps to creative use. What we’re leaving our children is garbage

To be fair: We’d love it if a restaurant or grocery store would sell us only as much food as we wanted. But they don’t. You get a choice of what they consider an economic quantity of food for them to sell, and if it’s more than you need (or want), tough shit.

Read it.

The underground excavation industry is exploring mini robots, plasma torches, and superheated gas to replace the massive boring machines now in use.

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A woman whose DNA from a rape kit was used by cops to arrest her for an unrelated burglary filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco on Monday, alleging the police invaded her privacy.

The DNA of the woman, known as Jane Doe, was stored by the SFPD as part of a domestic violence and sexual assault case in 2016. According to her lawyer, Adanté Pointer, the same sample was used to charge her with retail theft five years later.

The lawsuit claims that the victim’s DNA was entered without her knowledge or consent into a database used to identify perpetrators in other crimes.

In pari delicto.