Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

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.

Read it.

Mmmmmm, could be.

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.

Read it.

The concept and governance of name, image, and likeness has always been highly politicized. But the deals themselves have largely stayed out of politics — until now.

Dresser Winn, a quarterback at the University of Tennessee at Martin, has signed a partnership to support the candidacy of Colin Johnson, who is running for District Attorney General for Tennessee’s 27th Judicial District.

The deal is considered to be the first to support a political candidate. It’s also an example of how athletes who may not have major followings or a Power 5 platform can ink partnerships in their community, as one of Winn’s agents, Dale Hutcherson, pointed out on Twitter.

They have always said that politics is show business for ugly people. It was inevitable that some sort of hustler would connect the dots and count up the zeroes.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Salvador Ramos’s evil rampage in Uvalde, Texas has had the inevitable consequence: it was politicized within minutes by Democrats calling for more gun control. Michael Moore, at least, was honest. He said the Second Amendment should be repealed. That, one suspects, is what many Democrats want, but most aren’t bold enough to say it. Instead, they beat around the bush, like Joe Biden who blamed the Uvalde murders on the “gun lobby” and fumed: “When in God’s name will we do what we all know in our gut needs to be done?” What, exactly, is that, Joe? He didn’t say.

The fundamental point to be made about mass school shootings is that they are extraordinarily rare.

…

The “solutions” proposed by Democrats are laughable, obviously intended for political gain rather than practical benefit. Banning “assault rifles,” while likely unconstitutional, would do zero good. In close quarters, handguns are better than rifles, even short-barreled rifles like AR-15s. In the worst school shooting rampage so far, at Virginia Tech, the murderer used handguns. And when the ill-fated ban on “assault weapons” expired in 2004, the homicide rate went down, not up.

Read it.

Australia uses this method in its elections. It is often referred to at the ‘automatic run-off’ method.

Read it.

The vegan runner who lines up next to me at the start of the weekly Park Run doesn’t even wear running shoes; he runs in bare feet and those feet look like something that would grace one of Tolkien’s hobbits. This got me thinking:

It transpires that they wear quite a lot on their feet and I must admit that some of it looks quite smart. If Google is to be trusted then you can get shoes that, superficially, are almost indistinguishable from leather ones and they can even be polished to a reasonable shine (with the appropriate range of vegan cleaners and polishes, of course). Apparently if you’re a vegan soldier then the army has it covered in the shape of vegan combat boots.

I’m wondering how many of those parents are wishing that they had decided to homeschool their kids?

UPDATE: Ghoulish NBC Exploits Texas Shooting by Repeating False Mass Shooting Stat

Read it.

UPDATE: Seven Teslas have caught fire in the last four days

Russian officer reveals why he risked it all to quit Putin’s war (CNN)

U.S. Preparing Plan To Destroy Russia’s Black Sea Fleet—Ukraine (Newsweek)

Pentagon Denies Ukrainian Claims of ‘Plan to Destroy’ Russia’s Black Sea Fleet (U.S. News & World Report)

Putin Leaving Meetings to Get Medical Treatment, Christopher Steele Says (Newsweek)

Ukraine rules out ceasefire deal that gives land to Russia (BBC)

Erdogan Tells Finnish & Swedish Leaders To Get “Serious” About Terrorism In Tense Call

China Launches Military Exercises In South China Sea As Biden Arrives In Asia

ARTILLERY: British Boxed Brimstones In Ukraine

Russia Rewrites The Art Of (Hybrid) War

Read it.

We investigate this by using as a natural experiment the effect of the online publication of the names and addresses of holders of handgun carry permits on criminals’ propensity to commit burglaries. In December 2008, a Memphis, TN newspaper published a searchable online database of names, zip codes, and ages of Tennessee handgun carry permit holders. We use detailed crime and handgun carry permit data for the city of Memphis to estimate the impact of publicity about the database on burglaries. We find that burglaries increased in zip codes with fewer gun permits, and decreased in those with more gun permits, after the database was publicized.

Imagine that.

Read it.

A post recently made the rounds on hacker news claiming that you should teach your kids poker, not chess. The comments on that post go through a lot of the reasons why poker is a bad game to teach your children, but I felt that I was well suited to opine on this topic, and explain why duplicate bridge is the best game for practicing the life skills involved in business and programming, compared to all of the alternatives.

Results of Polish elections by party.

Read it.

Although real-world data is scant, proponents say robotics and AI will soon revolutionize agriculture.

Russian oligarchs loved luxe Sardinia. Now they’re frozen out of paradise. (Washington Post) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Putin Allies’ Wealth Will Keep Him From Reviving USSR (Newsweek)

Vladimir Putin Has a Strange Smell, Number of Oddities—Fiona Hill (Newsweek)

Putin’s plan to starve the world

A Nuanced View of the Russia-Ukraine War

Putin: Oil Sanctions Will Be Europe’s “Economic Suicide” On Orders From “American Overlords”

LEADERSHIP: Blame It On The Chop  “I’ll go apologize to Lord Vader.”

1,000 Azovstal Fighters Have Surrendered Since Monday, But Top Commanders Remain: Kremlin

Turkey Blocks Sweden, Finland NATO Accession Talks; Issues List Of Demands

Ukraine shows that city hopping is the ‘new era’ of defensive warfare

Israeli military exercise to simulate attack on Iranian nuclear targets

Blinken Announces US Embassy Reopening In Ukraine’s Capital  If I were Putin, I would immediately bomb it. But that’s me.

Russia to deploy nuclear-armed drone torpedo

Be the first on your block….

Read it.

To breastfeed, or not to breastfeed? it is one of those parenting decisions that, at first pass, seems to carry little to no political import. For most people most of the time, it’s the sort of thing that you can safely ignore as someone else’s personal preference, having nothing to do with anything or anyone else—none of your business especially. And for all intents and purposes, that’s right. To challenge a new mom on how she feeds her child would be utterly presumptuous, let alone extremely rude.

But as mothers across the country scramble to find ways to feed their infants in the face of a formula shortage, people have begun to wonder—why don’t more American mothers breastfeed? It’s a good question, even if for some, it carries an air of malice and blame. Unbeknownst to the critic, the economic, political, and social environment makes things infinitely more complicated than “you’re just not trying hard enough.”

Ukraine can win this war, NATO chief says; Finland and Sweden move to join military alliance (CNBC)

Ukraine: The Pfizer and Moderna Open-Air Testing Laboratory

Russian Lawmaker Says Poland Next In Line For ‘De-Nazification’

European Natural Gas Prices To Triple In “Perfect Storm” 

ARMOR: BMPs, M113s and MRAPs Abide

Ukraine: Donbas Battles Intensify

McDonald’s to Exit from Russia

At Least 20 European Gas Buyers Open ‘Rubles-For-Gas’ Account With Gazprombank

Putin’s Ukraine War Fail: The Ukrainian Military Is at the Russian Border

Europe Predicts Full-Blown Stagflationary Shock If Russian Gas Supplies Disrupted, Folds To Putin’s Payment Demands

Why Did Rand Paul Delay Washington’s $40 Billion Ukraine Giveaway?

Amid Ukraine crisis, Lockheed-Raytheon partnership gets $309M for Javelins  KA-CHING!

Putin Says Finland, Sweden Entering NATO Doesn’t Threaten Russia, But Will Likely ‘Trigger’ Response

Doug Watt: ‘If I Can Find You, I Can Target You’

Russian troops are proving that cell phones in war zones are a very bad idea  Duh.

Read it.

The Stealth Tubeless Tag Holder is a protective three-part silicone and rubber tubeless mount for your AirTag. Its valve bases seal against your bicycle tire’s rim. The accessory’s stem protects both the rim and AirTag from impacts as it can compress and rebound under extreme loads. It can also allow sealant and air to flow so it won’t rattle inside the tire rim.

…

The product is a good idea – if someone’s going to steal your bike, it’d be pretty easy to spot an AirTag if it’s hanging by a keychain or something similar. However, this accessory seems like it could be a pain when you need to exchange or remove the AirTag. AirTag batteries only last about a year, so it’s likely you’ll need to exchange the battery multiple times within your bicycle’s lifetime.

I presume that living in a place where people are unlikely to steal your stuff is not an option.

This Is Where the Oil Price Would Be Without the War

Does Poland Have Designs on Western Ukraine?

ARTILLERY: Ukrainian Tech And NATO

Finland’s President Informs Putin Of Application To Join NATO

China May Be Retrofitting Nuclear Submarine With New Missile System

Sweden Declares NATO Membership Bid Hours After Neighboring Finland

Turkey Lays Out Demands Over Finland, Sweden’s “Outrageous” NATO Bids  I have an idea: Let’s kick Turkey out of NATO. It doesn’t border on the Atlantic, after all.

Glenn Greenwald.

If we were to create a framework in which prominent people were held responsible for any violence carried out in the name of an ideology they advocate, then nobody would be safe, given that all ideologies have their misfits, psychopaths, unhinged personality types, and extremists. And thus there was little to no attempt to hold Maddow or Sanders responsible for the violent acts of one of their most loyal adherents.

UK hits Putin’s rumored girlfriend in latest sanction sweep

Vladimir Putin’s rumored girlfriend Alina Kabaeva hit with sanctions from UK  Presumed innocent? Not if you’re Russian.

The Race To Break The Russia-China Alliance & The “Ukraine Of The Asia Pacific”

Russian toops are proving that cell phones in war zones are a bad idea  Duh.

The Frozen Russian Superyachts (And Those That Got Away)

US Army To Revamp Alaska Forces To Prepare For Arctic Conflicts  After all, Alaska once belonged to Russia, just like Ukraine.

Read it.

It’s just that simple. Really.