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Not until they can do wheat and corn.  Piss-ant vegetables like kale and fruit like strawberries aren’t going to ‘revolutionize’ anything.

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The following clip contains excerpts from an interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin that was recorded by NBC News back in 2018. As I understand it, this footage was omitted from the final broadcast version of the interview.

Before I am denounced yet again as a Putin stooge, I must say that I find Mr. Putin’s assertion that the Russians don’t interfere with American elections to be laughable. They may not go so far as to hack into Dominion servers and similar operations — I have no expertise on such matters, so I don’t know — but they plant massive disinformation all over the Internet, and have been doing so for as long as I’ve been paying attention. I personally know a vlogger who was offered money by a Russian to propagate certain material (he refused).

More to the point is that the American intelligence services often do things that are just as bad, and sometimes worse, in an attempt to interfere with Russia.

And the idea that Russia interfered with the 2016 election to help elect Donald Trump is ludicrous on the face of it. Anyone with half a brain can see that the Russians would have had every reason to prefer Hillary Clinton over Orange Man Bad.

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Throughout the pandemic, Miami was framed by liberal pundits and Democratic operatives as a city of heathens and deplorables resistant to science. But the resistance, especially in the early days of the pandemic, had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the Hispanic spirit that animates the city. Working-class Hispanics, unlike the laptop class that has taken to deriding them, are rooted in physical reality and desire face-to-face contact with their friends and family. To Hispanics, the conviviality that arises from engaging with one’s crew is the stuff of life. The Zoom “happy hours” favored by the urbane upper crust were never going to fly. Touch, banter, and hijinks are the necessary ingredients that constitute working-class Hispanic interaction. Communication that deviates from that mode is considered abnormal.

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The story goes like this: there are problems in the world that make the future a scary prospect. Fortunately, though, there are solutions to each of these problems, and the solutions have been formulated by extremely smart, tech-adjacent people. For their ideas to become realities, they merely need to be articulated and spread as widely as possible. And the best way to spread ideas is through stories — hence Gates’s opening anecdote about the barrel. In other words, in the TED episteme, the function of a story isn’t to transform via metaphor or indirection, but to actually manifest a new world. Stories about the future create the future. Or as Chris Anderson, TED’s longtime curator, puts it, “We live in an era where the best way to make a dent on the world… may be simply to stand up and say something.” And yet, TED’s archive is a graveyard of ideas. It is a seemingly endless index of stories about the future — the future of science, the future of the environment, the future of work, the future of love and sex, the future of what it means to be human — that never materialized. By this measure alone, TED, and its attendant ways of thinking, should have been abandoned.

I have always looked on TED Talks as entertainment, an actualization of the progressive fetish for talk over action. “If we all just wish really really hard, unicorns will exist and everybody will sing Kumbaya and live in peace.”

Check it out.

Products confirmed not to be produced in China.

I use CUTCO knives, and recommend them.

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While the media’s obsession with the Russian invasion of Ukraine has been front-and-center in our minds, the rest of the world is essentially being ignored. It’s not unusual to see this kind of pre-occupation with dangerous world events. But the media and the U.S. are demonstrating, once again, that we are unable to walk and chew gum at the same time, or more likely, choose not to. And the situation could actually escalate in unexpected ways, putting the entire world at risk, if we don’t wake up.

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Google is being sued by a Florida restaurant group alleging that the tech company has been setting up unauthorized pages to capture food orders rather than directing them to the restaurant’s own site.

Google uses “bait-and-switch” tactics to get customers to place takeout or pickup orders through “new, unauthorized, and deceptively branded webpages,” according to the lawsuit, filed on behalf of Left Field Holdings, a restaurant company that runs Lime Fresh Mexican Grill franchises. On those pages, customers are prompted with large buttons to order with food delivery companies like GrubHub, DoorDash, or Seamless.

“Google never bothered to obtain permission from the restaurants to sell their products online,” the lawsuit says. “Google purposefully designed its websites to appear to the user to be offered, sponsored, and approved by the restaurant, when they are not—a tactic, no doubt, employed by Google to increase orders and clicks.”

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I’m in Buenos Aires at the moment, with extremely limited Spanish, and it’s incredible to me that I can point my iPhone camera at any Spanish text and have it instantly translated into English. But there is one big limitation that requires an extremely clunky workaround …

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The name Rafaela Vasquez may not immediately be recogniseable, but the accident that ties her to the first-ever fatal self-driving car crash accident will be.

Vasquez was the driver when one of Uber’s autonomous test cars crashed into a woman walking her bike across the road at night in March 2018. Now nearly three years later, she is due to go on trial for negligent homicide and has spoken out for the first time.

“I feel betrayed in a way,” she told Wired. “At first everybody was all on my side, even the chief of police. Now it’s the opposite. It was literally, one day I’m fine and next day I’m the villain. It’s very – it’s isolating.”

Meanwhile Uber has escaped any criminal liability, whilst Vasquez is being sued by prosecutors in Arizona. The blame has been pinned squarely on the driver when videos of her showed she was distracted before the collision. Her defense team will argue she was checking Slack messages from Uber in her work phone at the time, whilst prosecutors will say she was watching an episode of reality show The Voice on her personal handset.

Whatever the outcome of the case, Vasquez’s side of the story is a tragic, personal tale of some of the risks in pursuing a high-tech, automated future.

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As I reflect on the profound impact masking has had on social life over the past two years, I can’t help but wonder how our national unmasking may prove to be more transformative than we expect. What features of our masked world are likely to carry over into the future and which will fade?

David Director Friedman.

My comment at the beginning of the invasion was that, in order for the Russians to lose, their military would have to be substantially worse than believed, the Ukrainian military substantially better. At this point both conditions have been met. While Russia might still be able to win the military conflict, it looks to me as though their strategy now depends on besieging Ukrainian cities in order to threaten to starve the population in the hope that that will force the Ukrainian government to make substantial concessions.

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Conservatives like to talk about the causes of Western Civilization’s downfall: feminism, loose morality, drug abuse, Christianity’s decline, reality TV. Blaming civilization’s downfall on lardy hagfish such as Andrea Dworkin is like a doctor diagnosing senility by an old person’s wrinkles. The fact that anyone listened to such a numskull is a symptom, not the cause, of a culture in decline. The cause of civilizational decline is dirt-simple: lack of contact with objective reality.

…

Every great civilization reaches a point of prosperity where it is possible to live your entire life as a pacifist without any serious consequences. Many civilizations have come to the state of devolution represented by modern Berkeley folkways, from wife-swapping to vegetarianism. These ideas don’t come from a hardscrabble existence in contact with nature’s elemental forces; they are the inevitable consequence of being an effete urban twit removed from meaningful contact with reality. The over-civilized will try to portray their decadence as something “highly evolved” and worthy of emulation because it can only exist in the hothouse of highly civilized urban centers, much like influenza epidemics. Somehow these twittering blockheads missed out on what the word “evolution” means. Evolution involves brutal and often violent natural selection, and these people have not been exposed to brutal evolutionary forces any more than a typical urban poodle.

Steve Sailer.

If resetting clocks twice per year is so intolerable, we ought to bite the bullet and go to Year Round Half-Hour DST, which would mitigate how terrible Year-Round DST was in January 1974 (when Congress tried it during the first Energy Crisis), and how much of a waste not having DST in July would be.

I hate compromise. I think we ought to go to Standard time all year round. If somebody has to endure the darkness when they would prefer light, well, that’s why God gave us Thomas Edison and LEDs. Suck it up.

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Someone who goes without food for three days – nine meals – will be driven to desperation. If enough people go without food for three days anarchy prevails as those without food fight those with food to survive. Those with families will become the most desperate. It is not their survival success in getting food grants. It is the survival of their families.

Many have forgotten that in this country, especially urban Americans. Food is something that comes from the grocery store. Goods are something you order from Amazon. Both just appear. Until they don’t.

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The war in Ukraine has revealed that Swedes prefer to take in Ukrainian refugees rather than the usual culture-enrichers they are forced to accommodate. This attitude is condemned by Swedish progressives, who see it as another example of right-wing hypocrisy.

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A study of the extinct Christmas Island rat suggests we cannot bring back the woolly mammoth and other lost species without important differences.

I suspect that eventually we’ll be able to do it, but just not anytime soon.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

Has the level of public discourse ever been lower? The Biden administration’s energy policies have been a disaster, as an overwhelming majority of Americans recognize. So the Democrats are flailing wildly, trying to blame exploding energy costs on Vladimir Putin, while suggesting that their own failed policies demonstrate the need to stop pumping oil altogether and shift to wind and solar power, fueling electric vehicles.

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Remember how, after 9-11, George W. Bush made a big deal out of going to a mosque? Remember how politicians from both sides (ha-ha) of the aisle lectured us not to hate on Muslims because 3,000 Americans had just been murdered by gentlemen of Arabic descent shouting “Allahu Akbar!” Remember how each subsequent Islamist terror attack — Orlando Pulse, Fort Hood, London 7-11, Little Rock, San Bernardino, the Boston Marathon bombing — were accompanied by somber editorials reminding us that “Islam is a religion of peace,” and how local and federal law enforcement were ordered to be on the lookout for “Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes.”

All right, since you remember all that, isn’t it weird that no politician has told us not to hate Russians for the actions of Vladimir Putin? No editorials have been written telling us to love our Russian neighbors. No, quite the opposite is happening.

Steve is not convinced that we have a dog in this fight.

Many Russians are much tougher than we are. Putin is much stronger than Biden, and Harris isn’t even worth discussing. I suspect we are poking the bear a little too hard, without a compelling interest.

 

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Most people you meet in everyday life — at work, in the neighborhood — are decent and normal. Even nice. But hit Twitter or watch the news, and you’d think we were all nuts and nasty.

Why it matters: The rising power and prominence of the nation’s loudest, meanest voices obscures what most of us personally experience: Most people are sane and generous — and too busy to tweet.

Reality check: It turns out, you’re right. We dug into the data and found that, in fact, most Americans are friendly, donate time or money, and would help you shovel your snow. They are busy, normal and mostly silent.

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Europe is the free-rider continent. For decades its defence has been underpinned by America—leaving it in a supporting role even as war breaks out on its own borders. Economically it has piggybacked on innovation from elsewhere, keeping up with rivals, not forging ahead. Even the feel-good environmental ambitions crafted in Brussels are made possible in part by importing from afar the products once made in carbon-spewing factories Europe shut down long ago. How clever it seems to some. All this money saved and effort outsourced has made it possible to live a fine life while working 35-hour weeks and retiring in one’s prime.

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have created a material that “is stronger and tougher than some types of bone, and harder than typical aluminum alloys,” the university announced.

The researchers hope their compound could lead to better, more sustainable plastics in the future. Currently, the material shrinks while drying, making printing anything large out of it difficult.

So, as it turns out, it’s actually a plant-based plastic, so the headline is a lie. That’s ‘journalism’ for you.

Joel Kotkin considers the long-term effects of the Pandemic Panic.

Personally, I think that the greatest achievement of the Panic was to underscore the separation between people who work with their fingers from people who work with their hands, a gap that will have serious effects on down the road. On the other hand, it demonstrated that people who work with their hands are the ones who make the rest of the machine chug along, so maybe they will be more likely to get the respect that they deserve. (No, I’m not holding my breath.)

Sarah Hoyt.

There are many descriptions for politics, one of them being that it’s what people do, instead of smashing each other’s skulls open with a club.

For the record, I’m instinctively the club (wooden, heavy) kind. Partly because I hate and despise mean girls and their cliques. I think life would be much easier if people who have trouble with other people got in a fist fight.

I’m also aware that’s not the way to run a society, unless you have a codified way to go about fist fights, and their resolution, afterwards. Which societies used to, mind you. But that too is politics.

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The February 24 Russian invasion of Ukraine is revealing to the rest of the world problems the Russian military has suffered from for over a century. It’s all about conscription and, since 1917, the Russian government not trusting their troops and Russians now going to extremes to avoid being conscripted. This widespread opposition to peacetime conscription was unique to Russia. Other European nations adopted conscription as early as the 1800s, but none had as much popular dislike of conscription and some very real reasons to avoid conscript service.

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Israeli sources say both Western coalition and Russian forces have recently bolstered their presence as proxy tensions come into renewed focus.

The Russians are now involved in two ‘conflicts’ at once. There is some doubt that they can handle it.

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A fun read, if you have any interest at all in Latin.

And of you don’t … well, the angels will weep for you.

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Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, U.S. intelligence had predicted a blistering assault by Moscow that would quickly mobilize the vast Russian air power that its military assembled in order to dominate Ukraine’s skies.

But the first six days have confounded those expectations and instead seen Moscow act far more delicately with its air power, so much so that U.S. officials can’t exactly explain what’s driving Russia’s apparent risk-averse behavior.

“They’re not necessarily willing to take high risks with their own aircraft and their own pilots,” a senior U.S. defense official said, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Vastly outmatched by Russia’s military, in terms of raw numbers and firepower, Ukraine’s own air force is still flying and its air defenses are still deemed to be viable – a fact that is baffling military experts.

UPDATE: Inside the Ring: Lack of Russian air power in Ukraine a mystery

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A core component of making great decisions is understanding the rationale behind previous decisions. If we don’t understand how we got “here,” we run the risk of making things much worse.

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The problem with current ‘vertical farms’ is that they focus on low-growing easily-managed high-value crops, like leafy green vegetables (lettuc, kale) and fruits (strawberries). When they can grow cereal grains (wheat, maize, rye, barley) and orchard crops (apples, citrus, nuts), then they’ll have something.

I’m not holding my breath.

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On the fifth day of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one of many unanswered questions is why Russia has launched a military campaign at huge cost with maximalist objectives, and then declined to use the vast majority of its fixed wing combat aircraft.

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One of the oddest commentaries about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is the boilerplate reaction that “borders can’t change in modern Europe” or “this does not happen in the 21st century.”

But why in the world should the 21st century be exempt from the pathologies of the past 20 centuries? Are we smarter than the Romans? More innovative than Florentines? Do we have more savvy leaders than Lincoln or Churchill? Are they more mellifluous than Demosthenes? Does anyone now remember that some 130,000 were slaughtered just 30 years ago in the former Yugoslavia, as NATO planes bombed Belgrade and nuclear America and Russia almost squared off?

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I recently discovered a simple step-by-step process that significantly increased my personal productivity and made me happier along the way.

I’m not sure that this works — but it might.

What he calls ‘low-filter mode’ is what I call ‘mindlessly mechanical mode’: Just pull your time horizon up to your chest and take things one minute at a time. I developed this when I was a kid, washing dishes or running a handpress–you just zone out and let your mind wander while your body goes on autopilot. It helps to make boring stuff less burdensome.

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Bibliotherapy is premised on the idea that books can be healing tools. It can occur in individual or group settings, though the main distinction is between clinical bibliotherapy, where texts, including fiction and nonfiction, are recommended by a clinical therapist, and nonclinical bibliotherapy, as practised by a facilitator such as a librarian. Though not a stand-alone clinical practice in Canada, clinical bibliotherapy is a method used by professionals who already have certification in counselling, therapy, and clinical therapy and want to help patients seeking an additional outlet. Nonclinical bibliotherapy can’t replace professional help for patients with mental illnesses; instead, it is often used in conjunction with other forms of clinical therapy.

I must confess that I have often thought that some people with problems would profit greatly by being whacked up side the head with a Funk & Wagnalls … but I’m sure that’s not what these guys have in mind.

Ah, well.

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Elon Musk now has Starlink satellites operating over Ukraine, reestablishing much-needed internet communications after damage from the Russian attack. It may not have occurred to very many people before these events, but in some ways, SpaceX is an actual military power in space. When you have close to 2,000 maneuverable satellites in low earth orbit, you’re in a position to do…very interesting things.

I’ll just bet.

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The reason I don’t buy more Ikea stuff is that going there is a full-day exercise and I just don’t have that kind of time.

Plus I sold my van so I have no way to get all of that crap home.

But I do have nine ‘Billy’ bookcases in my library.