Russia Says It Destroyed Depot With Western Weapons in Ukraine

Rafael unveils new Spike NLOS missile version with in-flight control transfer

I guess the war is wearing out its welcome.

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Less and less as time goes one.

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I use Harry’s products because I like them and they’re very cost-effective compared to Big Razor companies like Gillette and Schick. I also resist any urge that I might have – and, if it exists, it’s a small one – to buy stuff based on the politics of the people who make it. (Except Ben & Jerry’s; they deserve to die in penury.)

But I find this whole notion of ‘They won’t advertise with us because of our politics, so we’ll do what they do and do it better nyah nyah nyah’ to be strangely attractive and (dare I say it?) typically American.

My hesitation is due to the fact that ‘Jeremy’s razors’ sounds rather … metrosexual.

“When will my side learn not to give in to lefty scum?”

— Taki

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

In the biological sciences, there are a group of measures used to test the health of an ecosystem or the health of a species. In the case of a species, estimates of the population are usually the starting place. Then it may be the population density of the species, which can determine if the pressure is the loss of habitat or some unknown environmental factor that is lowering fertility. It is assumed that a declining population relative to territory is always a sign of crisis in a species.

Of course, these measures are never used to test the health of European populations because that is a conspiracy theory. Everyone knows that all you have to do is utter the abracadabra phrase “conspiracy theory” and all of the related things that are easily observed can no longer be mentioned. Putting that aside, the same measures we use to test the health of a species could be applied to humans. In fact, we could have much more granular and accurate measures.

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Threat to democracy: When Republicans win an election.

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The budget proposal from the Republican Study Committee would reduce mandatory spending by $11.86 trillion over 10 years while lowering nondefense discretionary spending by $3.64 trillion.

The U.S. government faces a budget deficit of $3.1 trillion. The accumulated national debt stands at $30 trillion.

But time and fortune happen to them all….

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From the very outset of this pandemic, the topic of natural infection has been a taboo. To suggest that anyone might have been better off risking infection and thereby gaining immunity from a respiratorial virus rather than hiding under the sofa for two years was seen as outrageous and irresponsible.

My theory is that the reason has always been political. And that’s tragic.

Generations have gone by that have understood it. A life strategy to flee all pathogens is deeply dangerous. The immune system, in order to be trained to protect against severe disease, needs exposure. Not to all things, of course, but to many pathogens that are not finally debilitating or fatal. We’ve evolved with pathogens in what Sunetra Gupta calls a “dangerous dance.” This dance is unavoidable, especially for fast-mutating viruses like SARS-CoV-2.

And yet from the beginning, this knowledge seemed to be lost. This is gravely embarrassing since it’s been known for 2,500 years. It was worse than just lost. As a person who wrote almost daily during the pandemic, I too was careful not to discuss this topic with too much bluntness. We all felt the political pressure to say silent or at least cloud our prose with euphemisms.

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All we know thus far is that the 59-year-old Middleton – who admitted Jeffrey Epstein to the White House seven out of at least 17 times – was discovered on May 7 hanging from a tree at the Heifer Ranch in Perryville by an electrical cord, with a shotgun blast to his chest. The ranch, located 30 miles from Middleton’s home, is owned by an anti-poverty nonprofit called Heifer International.

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A homeschool portfolio is a visual record chronicling a child’s entire homeschool year. There are basically two types of portfolios. The first, an academic-focused portfolio, serves as part of an annual assessment per your state homeschool law, and its primary purpose is to show that academic progress has been achieved. The second is meant to be a personal keepsake.

There are several benefits to creating homeschool portfolios. They can be powerful motivators and self-esteem boosters for your child. The simple act of seeing how far he or she has come in a single year can encourage your child to persevere, work harder, or consider setting more challenging goals next year. Invite your kids to join you in the assembly process and have fun reminiscing together as you look back over the school year.

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It is only with the greatest reluctance that I reach the conclusion that the modern theory of multivalued logic is illogical, in that it is elliptical and superfluous to restate in confusing jargon what Medieval Schoolmen stated clearly, and in Latin.

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I find it difficult to find anyone who uses more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (=arithmetic, and a little bit of algebra, statistics and programming). In the summer of 2007 I taught an advanced geometry course and had two students in the class who had been engineers and one who had been an actuary. They claimed never to have used anything beyond Excel and eighth grade level mathematics; never a trig function or even a log or exponential function! There is in fact a deskilling going on in our economy, where even the ability to make change is about to disappear as an important skill.

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Jews, like Chinese, breed for intelligence.

ZMan.

Politics in a democracy not only devolve into theater, but they select for the sorts of people attracted to the theatrical. The reason for this is democracy is about winning the crowd, which rewards those best at winning the crowd. Inevitably, elite interests will invest in those who show the ability to stand in front the mobs and win them over without making too many promises. After all, if you need to bribe the crowd then why bother investing in a guy trying to win the crowd?

Of course, the best stage performers are the people who are extraordinarily high in extraversion and very low in agreeableness. This person loves being the center of attention and likes meeting new people. A good actor can light up a room full of strangers and come away energized by it. He will also be very low in empathy and see others as either competitors of victims to be exploited. Great performers tend to be horrible people when away from the stage.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Sometime in the next couple days I’m going to formalize a new regular feature, Power Line’s Political Lexicon, which we’ll update regularly (especially with reader help). For now, I’ll offer the newest entry:

Expert (noun): People who are wrong about everything. Usually collaborators in Groupthink, and employed by government agencies or a university.

Steve Sailer.

Despite each killing at least three, none of these mass shootings would make the Mother Jones magazine list of Real Mass Shootings. They leave out all felony-related massacres, all ones vaguely attributable to “gangs” (i.e., black lowlifes who are peeved at each other), and ones that haven’t been cleared by the cops.

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For years, proponents have hailed indoor growing techniques like hydroponics (growing plants in nutrient-rich water rather than soil) and vertical farming (packing rows of plants beneath grow lamps inside of a warehouse, basement, or retrofitted shipping container) as ways to “democratize farming” for anyone who wants to give growing a go, regardless of whether they own any fertile land. And the indoor farming business is booming. In January, the commercial farming company Square Roots opened its fourth facility of shipping container farms in Wisconsin. The company says the collection of containers are capable of producing a couple million packages of plants—leafy greens like lettuce and herbs—per year. Walmart got in the indoor farming game in January when it invested in Plenty, another commercial vertical farming company. Some companies have even positioned themselves as one-stop shops for farm production, all packed into a single unit.

All they’ve managed so far is trendy low-rise crops like kale and lettuce, maybe some potatoes and strawberries. I’m waiting for them to do something significant with bulk row crops like wheat, oats, barley, rye, and maize, or pole crops like beans and tomatoes.

(And don’t get me started on tree fruits like apples, pears, lemons, oranges, peaches….)

0Sanctioned Russian oligarch’s megayacht found in UAE creek  It’s all about the oligarchs.

Saudi Arabia ready to pump more oil if Russian output sinks under ban (Financial Times)

Here’s a way to make Russia pay for Putin’s ruthless war in Ukraine (CNN)

Kremlin TV Names the Country Putin Will Invade Next (Daily Beast) Well, not really.

Putin’s state TV propagandist Olga Skabeyeva says ‘World War III has already begun’

More Seek Gun Training in Taiwan as Ukraine War Drives Home China Threat

EU Slowly Weaning Off Russian Crude Gives Moscow Time To Divert Flows To Asia 

Milley Says Using Military To Open Ukrainian Ports Would Be “High Risk”

Saab’s anti-tank systems could find new life thanks to Ukraine conflict, updated capabilities

Russia Uses Chinese Ships And Indian Refiners To Stay Ahead of Oil Sanctions  What’s ‘Nyah nyah!’ in Russian?

Ukrainians Who’ve Fled to Canada Can Now Apply for Government Income Support

Communist China’s Global Plan Emerges

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The question is not “whether” but “when”.  Eventually we will have the technology to do it and at that point it will happen.

Hey, if it was easy, anybody could do it.

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There are millions of habitable planets in our milky way. Approximately four of them have hostile alien civilizations that could attack Earth, suggests new research by Alberto Caballero — a doctoral student in conflict resolution at the University of Vigo in Spain.

In his paper, Caballero asked: What are the odds that humans could one day contact a hostile alien civilization capable of invading our planet?

This is the basically ‘thinking past the sale’, like the people who just assume that sea levels are rising and put all their effort into figuring out what the results will be.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

In the wake of the risible Sussman verdict, it has emerged that for the last ten years, the FBI has maintained a “secure work environment” within the offices of Perkins Coie, the Democratic Party’s law firm. Marc Elias, the DNC’s top lawyer, was until recently a partner in Perkins Coie. It was Perkins Coie that laundered the money the DNC and the Hillary Clinton campaign paid Fusion GPS for what became the fraudulent Steele “dossier.”

One hand washes the other.

ZMan peers behind the curtain.

A couple of weeks back, Tucker Carlson observed that most Republicans wake up in the morning and go to the New York Times. They and their staff read the thing over breakfast, because it is their guide throughout the day. This is true of mainstream conservatives as well. What passes for the Right in America is entirely controlled by the Left, which is controlled by the media. Old school liberals sound like Trump people when they complain about how the media runs their party.

There is a lot of truth to the media-ocracy claim. The backers of the Ukraine fiasco have been feeding the media nonsense tales about Ukraine. They handed them Ukraine lapel pins they had made up for the occasion. Note no one in the media looked into who supplied everyone on television with those pins. Instead, it was a unified media voice, a wall of sound, selling the Ukraine story. Washington and the political class in Europe were swept up in this unfolding disaster.

…

The Covid hoax, and it is fair to call it a hoax at this point, was not the result of clever scheming like the Russian collusion hoax. Instead, it was something like a stampede over a cliff. Unlike the animals in the herd, the people in this media stampede could question the rush over the cliff, but like the animals in the herd, they feared being trampled more than they feared the end result. As a result, fantasy became holy writ and Covid turned into a bizarre mass media religion.

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Regarding the Uvalde school shooting, most of us have already cycled through the Seven Stages of Vicarious Grief. That’s the process that follows every mass shooting, when we pick our “why” from the list of seven approved mass shooting causes, and we criticize everybody who picked a different one.

Here’s the list; feel free to print it out for next time.

Conrad Lord Black of Crossharbour.

In one respect President Joe Biden did speak faithfully for the nation when he returned from Southeast Asia and went straight to the White House and declared in his remarks about the appalling school murders in Uvalde, Texas, that he was “sick and tired” of these murders. So is the country.

He demanded the recovery of political “backbone” to ban assault weapons, clearly implying that he believed that that would seriously reduce the incidence of these terrible mass shootings. By indicating that he actually thought that he was proposing any kind of a solution when all informed Americans are aware that an assault weapon ban was attempted for 10 years and didn’t appreciably change the rate of incidence of such crimes, the president effectively acknowledged that he had no idea what to do.

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I am prepared to believe it.

Awareness of the centuries old concept of The Cantillion Effect has been experiencing a revival of late, particularly since the extraordinary acceleration of monetary injections that occurred under COVID. Named for the French-Irish economist who died in 1734 (he was murdered), the Cantillon Effect is when you create a bunch of new money and inject it into an economy. What happens is the people at the front of the line who receive the new money first become wealthier, while the people at the end of the line who receive it last are further impoverished.

This is not peculiar to the post-Covid era. For more than a decade I’ve been describing how rampant money creation and credit expansion skews formerly free markets into a kind of economic vampirism, without actually knowing there was a term like this to describe it.

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And it serves you write, oppressor of the working class.

Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug) peers behind the curtain.

Twitter is unlike The New York Times, which wields oligarchic power directly. Twitter, when it works, creates a vacuum of power, which democratic power fills. By default, Twitter isn’t in any way in control of the portal of pure chaos it creates.

“Twitter is a natural cradle of any kind of counter-establishment power—good or bad.”
As any Arab despot can tell you, Twitter is the most powerful weapon of democracy ever invented. If Twitter is bad, Twitter is bad because democracy is bad. While there is a real case for this point of view, few dare to make it.

Twitter is a natural cradle of any kind of counter-establishment power—good or bad. If the words “oligarchy” and “democracy” don’t mean “establishment” and “counter-establishment,” these words have lost all meaning.

Joel Kotkin.

Glenn Ellmers’s analysis of COVID and Trump represents a classic, and effective, account of the situation from the perspective of declining liberty and adherence to traditional values. But though it is important and necessary to hold onto our highest ideals, I would like to emphasize what is actually taking place on the ground and its likely long-term implication.

Statistics show that COVID accelerated economic, demographic, and geographic trends which were already existent, but rarely acknowledged. These trends include large-scale migration to the south, the west, and the suburbs. COVID also, as Ellmers suggests, sharpened the conflict between many Americans and the ruling “expert” class, who, unlike most Americans, actually flourished under COVID.

I am less sure that Trump was a force for good in all this, given his profound personal failings and mixed messaging during the pandemic. Yet he did stir up dissent against the overweening policies of some governors. In this sense the health crisis intensified an already existing political one. Looking forward, post-COVID reality has seen the emergence of powerful populist politics in both parties, and a marked drop in public esteem for the nation’s once-revered institutions.

Israel Rejects US Request To Transfer Missiles To Ukraine

UK Slaps Windfall Tax on Energy Firms; Russia Preps to Seize Exiting Western Firms

Terrifying TOS-1A Thermobaric Artillery Strike Recorded In Ukraine

What HIMARS Rocket Artillery Systems Can Actually Do For Ukraine

How China’s Push for AI Weapons Threatens the World

EU Suspends Russia’s Access To Vital Crime Data Sharing Program

LEADERSHIP: China Reconsiders Russian Military Reforms

US Seizes Russia-Flagged Tanker Full Of Iranian Oil Near Greece

Putin Assembles Eurasian Economic Union to Counter Western Sanctions

In Stunning Shift, WaPo Admits Catastrophic-Conditions, Collapsing-Morale Of Ukraine Front-Line Forces

Americans Are Increasingly Wary Of US Efforts To Harm Russia Causing Economic Damage In America  Nobody in the government, of course.

The Russo-Ukrainian War: A New Opportunity for Demagogues to Destroy Freedoms at Home

Iran Seizes 2 Greek Tankers In Gulf As Retaliation For US Taking Oil

Guangdong Province Shifting to ‘Wartime System’ Poses an Imminent Threat to Taiwan

I remember 1995. I prefer it to today.

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Mmmmmm, could be.

ZMan turns ’em over.

Wars often turn over rocks exposing truths about the age that have either been ignored or hidden from the world. Old tactics, in the case of the Great War, were exposed as obsolete by modern weapons. Sometimes it is in war that the hollowness of a great power is exposed. This was the case of the Soviets in Afghanistan. That war exposed the internal weakness of the regime. The war in Ukraine is similarly exposing problems in the collective West.

The first lesson of this war so far is that Western intelligence has been exposed as useless in understanding modern Russia. At every turn, the information provided to political leaders about what Russia is doing and planning to do has turned out to be more fantasy than reality. The West has been operating on assumptions that may have been true twenty-five years ago but are no longer true today. The result has been a total political failure in response to the invasion.

Freeberg discusses the elephants in the room.

Let is dispose, I say, of the following bits of sticky persistent nonsense. I can see here there’s work for me to do, because I’m seeing lots of people crying out for “new solutions that will work,” and then answering their own plaintive pleas with a lot of garbage that everyone’s heard lots of times before. Into the breach I bravely step.