Babylon Bee.

Harry Splugwarp, a deacon at Straight & Narrow Church, began searching the scriptures fervently for Jesus’ teaching about funding Lockheed Martin following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s comments that funding a war in a foreign land was tantamount to feeding someone who was hungry.

Steve Sailer.

Say you have an athletic child in middle school: Specializing in which sport in high school would make it most likely for your son or daughter to earn a college scholarship? The new self-help book from data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Don’t Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life, which attempts to be “Moneyball for your life,” crunches the numbers on this and other intriguing topics.

Gaming the system is the new American Dream.

Read it.

The UK government will start informing some illegal immigrants this week of its intention to relocate them to Rwanda, the Home Office confirmed on Tuesday.

The recipients will be warned that they may not be admitted to the UK’s asylum system because they had “travelled through safe countries where they could and should have claimed asylum,” the Home Office said.

Joel Kotkin.

The Department of Homeland Security revealed last week that it was creating a Disinformation Governance Board to distribute “best practices” for countering disinformation. The new board joins a growing chorus—which includes President Biden and former President Barack Obama—that views disinformation disseminated on social media as one of the biggest threats facing our democracy.

But there’s a much bigger threat to democracy coming out of Silicon Valley and it’s this: America’s largest financial and tech companies increasingly act as independent countries, routinely exporting jobs, money and technology to our most significant global adversary. These companies, their assets, and increasingly their workers, exist wholly outside of America’s democratic borders and under the auspices of China’s anti-democratic ones. And they are bringing these undemocratic pressures back home with them, subverting our democracy from within.

Read it.

The problem with money is it isn’t just one thing. We think it’s one thing because we use it to buy things, but it’s actually a bunch of different things. This is why I often refer to it as “money:” in other words, one of the class of things that are stores of value, transactional grease, debts and various other bits and pieces.

Recall that “money” is not a fixed class of things; it is a social construct. People agree to use (or are forced to use) something to transact tax payments, debt payments, stores of value, etc. “Money” only has value in a socio-economic system that is a social construct with social contracts and power relations.

Read it.

Whoever, with the intent of interfering with, obstructing, or impeding the administration of justice, or with the intent of influencing any judge, juror, witness, or court officer, in the discharge of his duty, pickets or parades in or near a building housing a court of the United States, or in or near a building or residence occupied or used by such judge, juror, witness, or court officer, or with such intent uses any sound-truck or similar device or resorts to any other demonstration in or near any such building or residence, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than one year, or both.

Nothing in this section shall interfere with or prevent the exercise by any court of the United States of its power to punish for contempt.

Wally is my hero.

Paul Graham.

Life is short, as everyone knows. When I was a kid I used to wonder about this. Is life actually short, or are we really complaining about its finiteness? Would we be just as likely to feel life was short if we lived 10 times as long?

Since there didn’t seem any way to answer this question, I stopped wondering about it. Then I had kids. That gave me a way to answer the question, and the answer is that life actually is short.

Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it’s impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.

Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?

Russia-Ukraine war: dozens feared dead after bombing of Luhansk school; Kyiv claims sinking of second Russian ship (The Guardian)

Fox News deals in Kremlin propaganda. So why not freeze Rupert Murdoch’s assets? (The Guardian) Never let a crisis go to waste!

Italy orders seizure of yacht linked to Putin (BBC) It’s all about the oligharchs.

When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?  When it’s seen by a ‘journalist’.

Ukraine Grain Strain: Almost 25 Million Tonnes Blocked From Export

Russia’s Victory Day Could Be A Crucial Moment For Oil

Western Banks Brace For $10 Billion Hit Over Russia Exit

Read it.

Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than seven hours a night, says evolutionary anthropologist David Samson at the University of Toronto Mississauga. That’s a surprising number when you consider our closest animal relatives. Humans sleep less than any ape, monkey or lemur that scientists have studied. Chimps sleep around 9.5 hours out of every 24. Cotton-top tamarins sleep around 13. Three-striped night monkeys are technically nocturnal, though really, they’re hardly ever awake — they sleep for 17 hours a day.

Samson calls this discrepancy the human sleep paradox. “How is this possible, that we’re sleeping the least out of any primate?” he says. Sleep is known to be important for our memory, immune function and other aspects of health. A predictive model of primate sleep based on factors such as body mass, brain size and diet concluded that humans ought to sleep about 9.5 hours out of every 24, not seven. “Something weird is going on,” Samson says.

Check it out.

It is the simplicity of Seinfeld that makes it so appropriate for use in economics courses. Using these clips (as well as clips from other television shows or movies) makes economic concepts come alive, making them more real for students. Ultimately, students will start seeing economics everywhere – in other TV shows, in popular music, and most importantly, in their own lives.

Read it.

Right now, tech companies who appreciate the effects Blue state policies have on their businesses and employees are oozing their way around such policies by tranferring activities to Red states with better attitudes toward business and taxes — Austin TX is a blatant beneficiary of this process; a Blue pustule on the rosy Red butt of Texas, proglodytes in Travis county try their best to turn Austin into a little bitty corner of California on the prairie, but are constrained by the sanity of the state as a whole so that their Wokeness can’t get out of hand (Texas taxes aren’t going to jump to California levels, and Texas social policies aren’t going to reach California levels of weird). So they can signal their virtue like fidget-spinners without any danger of having to suffer from the results.

But abortion is the keystone of the Woke edifice, and if that goes away, well, they’re between a rock and a hard place. AWFLs are going to shun Texas, and Wokerati already in Austin will probably decamp precipitously of Texas moves to restrict or ban abortion (as I expect it will). The squeeze will be on, and the Austin (and San Antonio, it’s little sister) economy could quite possibly crash into rubble. This next year will be very interesting.

How millions of Russians are tearing holes in the Digital Iron Curtain (Washington Post)

Can Denmark’s ‘energy islands’ help it escape Russian fossil fuels? (Euronews)

Superyacht allegedly linked to Putin blocked from leaving Italian shipyard (The Guardian) Putin cooties! Oh no!

Financial War Takes A Nasty Turn

China Has ‘Financial Nuclear Bombs’ If West Levies Russia-Style Sanctions, Beijing Warns

Adam Kinzinger Executes Neocon Vision For Ukraine

The Dangerous American Game Of Helping Kill Russian Generals

Ukraine’s Kharkiv Counter-Offensive Could Threaten Russians in Izyum

Italy Seizes $700 Million Superyacht Linked To Putin   Mammas, don’t let your babies grow up to be Linked To Putin.

Embassy Alerts Americans To “Avoid Large Public Gatherings” On Russia’s Victory Day

Biden Signs New $150 Million Military Aid Package For Ukraine

“A big part of the incentive problem is that future people don’t have the vote. Future residents don’t have the vote, so we prevent building which placates the fears of current homeowners but prevents future residents from moving in. Future patients don’t have the vote, so we regulate drug prices at the expense of future new drug innovations and so forth. This has always been true, of course, but culture can be a solution to otherwise tough-to-solve incentive problems. America’s forward looking, pro-innovation, pro-science culture meant that in the past we were more likely to protect the future.

“We could solve many more of our problem if both sides stowed some of their cultural agendas to focus on areas of agreement. I think, for example, that we could solve the climate change problem with a combination of a revenue neutral carbon tax and American ingenuity. Nuclear, geo-thermal, hydrogen–these aren’t just clean fuels they are better fuels! Unfortunately, instead of focusing on innovation we get a lot of nonsense about paper straws and low-flow showers. I hate paper straws and low-flow showers! There is a wing of the environmental movement that wants to punish consumerism, individualism, and America more than they want to solve environmental problems so they see an innovation agenda as a kind of cheating. Retribution is the goal of their practice.”

— Alex Tabarrok

Alex Tabarrok, a Real Economist, does the necessary.

The primitive communism of hunter-gatherers is no different in principle from the primitive communism of the wifi service at Starbucks, the modern day police and fire departments, or the use of Shakespeare’s works. As Barzel put it, “New rights are created in response to new economic forces that increase the value of the rights.” Thus, in this respect, there are no major differences among peoples, only differences in transaction costs, externalities, and technologies of inclusion and exclusion.

Read it.

As attention turns to the future presidential election in 2024, it might be time for conservatives to think along radical lines if only to come to terms with the fact that, as things stand, it no longer matters who is president. By deliberate design, the presidency means nothing while the executive branch is everything. Should the candidate be a Trump, that candidate’s hands will be tied behind his back; if cut from the cloth of Biden, it is more sock-puppet imbecility. If the candidate is a combination of Reagan, Theodore Roosevelt, Eisenhower, James Madison, Russell Kirk, Churchill, and Edmund Burke fused into one philosopher-king, it still will not matter. The governance of our grand experiment has been reduced to a faceless shadow executive utterly without accountability; that body’s feckless annex and amen corner called “Congress”; and a medieval guild that makes up our Supreme Court, in whose pasty hands the liberty of an entire nation is subjected to degrees of benevolent-to-diabolical ideological whim.

Joel Kotkin.

We Americans like to think of ourselves as a thoroughly modern people — living proof of what, with enough toil and grit, the rest of the free world can one day hope to be. And yet for all our progressivism and idealism, America’s political culture finds itself unable to escape the past. We may be living in a 21st century democracy, but that “democracy” increasingly resembles something that could have been plucked out of feudal Europe or, perhaps more accurately, feudal Japan.

For much of its history, Japanese politics was characterised by conflicts among its ruling daimyo, and later between the great industrial zaibatsu who replaced them as dominant powers. Similarly, America’s politics is now being shaped by a civil war not between classes, but within the ruling capitalist elite.

Ukraine Situation Report: Top Russian General Did Visit Ukraine, Pentagon Says

It’s not just Russia – China’s also contributing to higher inflation worldwide, report says (CNBC)

Germany will support an EU oil embargo on Russia (CNN)

Why Belarus matters: Like Ukraine, democracy is at stake (Washington Post) Is there anywhere that democracy isn’t at stake for the Washington Times? Mars, maybe?

The war in Ukraine boosts Belarusian opposition (Washington Post)

Oligarch Who Criticized Putin Says He’s Been Forced to ‘Sell Everything,’ Fears for His Life (Daily Beast) It’s all about the oligarchs.

Ukrainian children have learned to hate  But they’re hating Russians, so that’s all right.

Russian Generals Keep Getting Killed  Think of it as evolution in action.

US Informs Taiwan Of Howitzer Delivery Delay Due To “Crowded” Production Line

Ukraine Missile Attack Just Misses Secretive Visit By Russia’s Top General To Front Line

Optimism about the threat of nuclear war

“Ghost Of Kyiv” Fighter Ace Was Fake News, Ukraine Military Admits

EU Considers Exemptions As Hungary Threatens To Veto Russian Oil Ban

Credit Suisse Sued Over Doing Business With Russian Oligarchs  It’s all about the oligarchs.

LEADERSHIP: Ukraine As A NATO Partner

Pope Admits NATO Likely Provoked Putin’s Invasion: “Barking At The Gates Of Russia”

Putin Tells Macron In 2-Hour Call: ‘Moscow Still Open To Dialogue’

US army considers Israeli-made Firefly loitering mini-drone

Barrage Of Cruise Missiles Rock Western Ukraine, Plunging Lviv Into Darkness

Pelosi: Russia’s War Requires “Strongest Military Response”

Read it.

Most automakers are dying to sell you—and the world—an electric car. But they’re up against the challenge of our global-warming time: dauntingly tight supplies of both batteries and the ethically sourced raw materials required to make them.

Tesla and Volkswagen are among the automakers who see manganese—element No. 25 on the periodic table, situated between chromium and iron—as the latest, alluringly plentiful metal that may make both batteries and EVs affordable enough for mainstream buyers.

That’s despite the dispiriting history of the first (and only) EV to use a high-manganese battery, the original Nissan Leaf, beginning in 2011. But with the industry needing all the batteries it can get, improved high-manganese batteries could carve out a niche, perhaps as a mid-priced option between lithium-iron phosphate chemistry, and primo nickel-rich batteries in top luxury and performance models.

“We need tens, maybe hundreds of millions of tons, ultimately. So the materials used to produce these batteries need to be common materials, or you can’t scale.”
—Elon Musk

Read it.

A bit of foreshadowing, perhaps? Big Tech behemoth Amazon reportedly announced it would dole out big money to reimburse employees who travel for treatments including abortions. The news dropped just one day before Politico shared a leaked U.S. Supreme Court draft opinion revealing SCOTUS is expected to overturn the notorious 1973 Roe v. Wade decision.

Reuters reported in a May 2 story that Amazon “will pay up to $4,000 in travel expenses annually for non-life threatening medical treatments including abortions.” To put that in perspective, the pro-abortion Guttmacher Institute found that 23.7 percent of women in the United States — almost one in four — will have an abortion by age 45. Amazon data indicated that 46.9 percent of the company’s total workforce of 918,261 employees in 2020 were women.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

I have a simple theory about why Donald Trump ended up running and governing as a conservative, after a lifetime of inconsistent views that much of the time aligned him with liberal Democrats. Startled by the vicious reaction of the media and the left after he said some mean things about Obama and illegal immigrants, he decided to throw in fully with conservatives, who were willing to be (mostly) more loyal.

I wonder if the same thing is happening to Elon Musk. His ideological and political history is similarly murky and unsound at many points in the past (and present), but as he sees the hysterical reaction of the media and the left to his proposed takeover of Twitter, like Trump he appears to have started recognizing who his friends are (or could be), and why the left and the media are his implacable foes. Connect the dots accordingly.

Read it.

Dan O’Dowd is hardly the first California tech titan to bankroll his own campaign for high political office. What makes him unusual is that he has no interest in winning the US Senate seat he is vying for, or even in challenging the other candidates competing in the 7 June primary.

O’Dowd, a software entrepreneur with a 40-year history of working on military, aerospace and other commercial contracts, is running, rather, out of frustration at his fellow tech entrepreneur, Elon Musk, whom he accuses of endangering road safety with a driver assistance software package he’s put in his Tesla electric cars.

New gas pipeline boosts Europe’s bid to ease Russian supply (Associated Press)

Megayachts and oligarchs: ‘We’re scared of getting close to wrong money’ (BBC) It’s all about the oligarchs.

White House braces for potential showdown between Biden and Putin at G20 (CNN)

Russian Cyber Attacks Fail To Materialize After Biden Warned ‘It’s Coming’

Russia Sanctions Add Shock Internet Censorship Twist for UK ISPs

Clash Of Christianities – Why Europe Cannot Understand Russia

Crisis Or Hiccup? Assessing The Logistics Impact Of China Lockdowns

“Masks are the MAGA hat of the Left.” –Steven Hayward

Read it.

We can blame the agricultural revolution for accelerating tooth decay in humans – if we are to believe an article by three German researchers in the journal PLOS One.

“Caries is a common oral disease in humans, and has been for about 10 000 years. The disease is linked to the shift from hunters and gatherers to farmers. Until the late Palaeolithic period, modern humans rarely had caries,” the German researchers write in their article from 2018.

When humans went from hunting and gathering to farming, we started eating completely different foods.

Be a vegetarian! Have cavities! Lose your teeth!

How this U.S.-made, $176,000 anti-tank weapon could change the war in Ukraine (CNBC)

Lawmakers fret over dwindling Javelin supply (Axios)

Russian TV Hosts Discuss Nuclear Strikes on U.K, France, Germany (Newsweek)

Statement of Orthodox Christian Laity on the Invasion of Ukraine

WARPLANES: The Urgently Bespoke Phoenix Ghost

White House Says It Would “Strongly Support” Finland & Sweden NATO Membership

1991: When America Tried To Keep Ukraine In The USSR

Russia To Pull Out Of ISS Over Western Sanctions 

To Defeat Putin, You Must Go Without

“Social media are the fidget spinners of the soul.” — L. M. Sacasas

Read it.

In the midst of unprecedented inflation, skyrocketing commodity prices and projected food shortages and supply chain issues arising as a result of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an interesting story has started to surface: food processing plants globally appear to be catching fire and burning down at a notable rate.

Read it.

Ben Avraham was an early member of one of the youngest, most surprising Jewish communities in the world. Previously, Nigeria hadn’t appeared even on the periphery of any map of the Jewish realm. There is no old text laying down a Jewish lineage for Nigerians, the way the Kebra Nagast, the 14th-century epic, purported to do for the kings of Ethiopia. No Sephardic Jews migrated here from Spain and Portugal, as they did to territories in northern Africa in the 15th century. No Jewish communities arrived as part of the colonial project and stayed after its end, as they did in South Africa.

Beginning in the 1990s, though, a number of people in southern and eastern Nigeria have become practising Jews, importing wholesale the rites of this unfamiliar faith and its foreign tongue. Seemingly, this turn has been spontaneous – which is to say, there have been no local rabbis at hand to pilot these Jews through their incipient religion, and there has certainly been no formal guidance from Israel, which refuses to recognise this as a Jewish population.

Read it.

“The big lie is just that,” President Joe Biden bellowed about crooked ballots. “A big lie!”

Election integrity expert Catherine Engelbrecht offered the perfect rejoinder to this nonsense. True the Vote’s founder said: “You don’t need a whole lot of fraud. You just need a little in the right places over time.”

Engelbrecht’s observation comes vividly to life in “2,000 Mules,” commentator and filmmaker Dinesh D’Souza’s stylish, chilling, maddening new documentary. Premiering in selected cities May 2, this film provides enough hard evidence of vote fraud to pry open the eyes of Abrams, Schumer, Biden, and other Democrats—if only they were open-minded enough to watch it.

Credit Suisse says U.S. authorities will ‘absolutely not’ find any wrongdoing amid probe into Russian oligarch record shredding (CNBC) It’s all about the oligarchs.

This Earth Day, We Could Be Helping the Environment—and Ukraine (The New Yorker)

Iran & China Declare Deepened Military Cooperation To Confront ‘US Unilateralism’

Former NATO Commander Disguises War Propaganda As Novel

Stinger Missile Production Hit With Delays, Raytheon CEO Warns

Russia’s Weakness Makes It Dangerous

NBC WEAPONS: The Battle Of Chernobyl- Lost In The Red Forest

ATTRITION: Russian Veterans Of Ukraine Cause Problems

Our Twisted Sister

Ukraine Says Russia Increasing Pace Of Attack In “Almost All Directions”

Watch Live: President Biden Explains Why Ukraine Needs Another $33 Billion Of US Taxpayer Money

Russian Fossil Fuel Revenues Double Despite Western Sanctions

German Lawmakers Vote Overwhelmingly To Send ‘Heavy & Complex Weapons’ To Ukraine

“We don’t have a border. We have a suggestion.” — Dan Bongino

Read it.

Conservative Twitter users have noticed a massive uptick in followers and engagement following Elon Musk’s Twitter buy, while leftists on the platform are experiencing the inverse, prompting some to wonder if the company is undoing evidence that it rigged the reach of people it deemed to be undesirable.

“You are never closer to nature than when you pick it or kill it.” — John Lewis-Stempl

“I am a friend to all the creatures of the earth, when I am not eating them or wearing them.” — John Hodgman

Blinken and Austin sneak into Ukraine’s capital to meet with Zelensky (CBS)

Sweden and Finland agree to submit Nato applications, say reports (The Guardian)

Austin says US wants to see Russia’s military capabilities weakened And I bet you thought it was about Ukraine.

How the Ukraine war must end  Edward Luttwak.

Europe Buys Abu Dhabi Crude To Replace Russian Barrels

Russia Expels 40 German Diplomats In Retaliation For “Unfriendly Decision”

In Major Reversal After Warning Of Nuclear War, Germany Approves Tanks For Ukraine

Russia ‘Ready To Cooperate’ With UN For Safety Of Ukraine Civilians: Guterres Makes Controversial Visit To Moscow

European Union To Cut Russian Oil And Gas Imports To Zero By 2027  And with any luck the war will not have ended by then.

Facing obsolete parts, Raytheon struggling to replace Stingers sent to Ukraine  The problem with increasingly complex weapon systems is that they require increasingly complex parts produced by increasingly complex production lines, which cannot be maintained indefinitely. This is why the Defense Department has to specify ahead of time how many, say, fighter jets of a particular type they want to buy, because once that number are produced, the production line shuts down, the facilities are repurposed, and it would be financially ruinous to restart production if you decide in five or ten years time that you really wanted more. This is why the destroyer Zumwalt’s guns don’t have any ammunition – to produce ammunition for only three ships (instead of the 32 originally planned) meant that the unit cost for the shells were unaffordable. The fancy-pants gun system, which cost $22.5 billion to develop, will be ripped out and replaced with … something else, as yet unclear. (Your tax dollars at work.)

Wimbledon Allows Unvaxxed To Play, But Not Russians

Russia Reportedly Halts Natural Gas Supplies To Poland – European Energy Prices Spike

Polish PM Says Warsaw Has Delivered Tanks To Ukraine

Wily Ukrainian Tactics and Poor Design Led to Russian Warship’s Sinking

‘NATO Expansion’ In Reality Means Placing Territories Under US Command: Lavrov  Like Democrats, Russians mostly fear what they themselves intend to do.

Pentagon Chief Admits The Real Strategic Goal In Ukraine: Quagmire For Russia Also an excellent excuse to pass off our outdated weapons for Virtue Signaling Credit and create business for the Defense Industries by ordering more. KA-CHING!

The Belarusian railway workers who helped thwart Russia’s attack on Kyiv

Truer words were never spoke.

Lloyd Austin presses hard on Ukraine — but quietly (Washington Post)

Calls grow to seize Russian assets to help pay for Ukraine’s reconstruction (Boston Globe)

The Food Sucks! We Want to Fix Our Own!

Blinken Declares Russian Operation Has “Failed” During Zelensky Meeting – Says US Diplomats Returning To Ukraine

Russia Investigating Fuel Depot Explosions & Fire Near Ukraine Border Amid ‘Pattern’ Of Incidents

Ukraine Says Austria “Indulging Putin” For Rejecting EU Membership Bid

The trouble with Russian armaments

“Pouring Fuel On The Flames”: Kremlin Condemns Blinken Visit To Ukraine & US Arms Shipments  Flames that they themselves ignited. ODF.

Russia Ramps Up Attacks On Ukraine Rail Lines To Thwart NATO Arms Shipments

Watch: Former Ukraine Ambassador Slips Up, Admits Putin Wouldn’t Have Invaded Under Trump  Who didn’t know that?

Russia bombs Ukrainian steel plant in Mariupol as Zelenskyy prepares to meet with U.S. officials  Happy Pascha.

Russian Airlines Told To Prepare For World Without GPS   I would find that entertaining.

Russian Meddling in Slovenia

China Would Support Russia Even If It Used Tactical Nuclear Weapons In Ukraine War: Former Defense Official

How Much Are We Prepared To Sacrifice To Help The US Win A Propaganda War Against Putin?

My Energy Is Your Problem – The Birth Of A New Europe

UK’s Largest Supermarket Begins Rationing Cooking Oil Amid Supply Disruption 

Nuclear Winter

Germany Borrows Another 40 Billion Euros To Cushion Fallout From War In Ukraine

Trashing The Constitution To Seize Russians’ Property