Online book.

The Swiss have put the most thought (and preparation) into being the hedgehog of international relations.

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In recent weeks, even in states that have long insisted on the necessity of strict COVID mitigation strategies, the masking regime is crumbling. Following the lead of red states such as Texas and Florida, officials in heavily Democratic areas of California, New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere are finally acknowledging that it’s time to return to normal and rescind many mandates.

The transition won’t be easy, particularly regarding masks, which for many people now serve as talismanic objects signaling one’s public health virtue. It’s difficult for many people to recall that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, even the experts were inconsistent and lackadaisical about recommending that people wear them. “There’s no reason to be walking around with masks,” Dr. Anthony Fauci told 60 Minutes in early March 2020.

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An interesting analysis. Of course, it’s twenty years old.

Babylon Bee.

Works for me.

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Those were the days.

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So much is being written about the Russian invasion of Ukraine that more on the situation on the ground is unnecessary. Certainly, it is premature for a post-mortem on causes and responsibilities of a conflict that came on so quickly and unexpectedly. But it is not a bad time to think about medium- and long-term consequences of Putin’s dramatic action, and how the West can recover its equilibrium and face up to a new global challenge.

John Hinderaker at Power Line.

I guessed wrong on this one. I thought Putin would bluff and bluster, and then cash in his chips. I thought the weak Western powers would agree to a partition of Ukraine, with the largely Russian-speaking Eastern provinces going to Russia, along with other considerations, unrelated to Ukraine, that would be more or less secret. But Putin invaded instead, and seems bent on conquering all of Ukraine and perhaps more besides.

What made Putin so bold? A key factor no doubt was the weakness of Western leaders, pre-eminently the doddering Joe Biden. But the West’s weakness is not a function of a few individuals. You likely have seen tweets that contrast recruiting ads for the U.S. Army, featuring cartoons and lesbians, with recruiting ads for the Russian and Chinese armies. The contrast is painful.

‘You live in a city for culture, for sex, and to marry well. If those don’t apply to you, don’t live in a city.’

— Tyler Cowen

And that about sums it up.

Steve Sailer.

Swedish prime minister Magdalena Andersson announces Sweden won’t take in as many Ukrainian blonde women refugees as it took in Muslim military age men in 2015.

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While most people are fast asleep, some ultra-introverts are going about their lives, reveling in the quiet and solitude. They challenge a core assumption of psychology: that all humans need social connection.

I must admit that it sounds attractive. Not quite a post-apocalyptic world, but as close as we can reasonably come in this life.

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Countries all over the world signed agreements with the pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the experimental mRNA treatments intended to mitigate the effects of infection with the Wuhan Coronavirus. Those agreements were kept secret, although they were known to indemnify the manufacturers from any liability for harm caused by their “vaccines”.

Various details of the agreements have leaked, and the entire unredacted contract between the European Union and Moderna has now been exposed.

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America is more like Texas than it is California or New York, whether Democrats admit it or not.

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Novels are powerful teaching tools because they’re more fun than textbooks, and fun is good. Educational and entertaining are treated like foils, but they’re actually complimentary. If something is entertaining, it holds your attention; if it holds your attention, you will be able to engage; if you engage you can learn something. If something is boring or tedious you will go look at twitter or pick your nose instead. Sh?gun doesn’t teach you quite as much Japanese as you would get from a Japanese 101 course at the local university, but we guarantee it’s twice as fun and two hundred times easier to read Sh?gun than it is to take all those quizzes.

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The Dominican government on Sunday began building a wall that will cover almost half of the 392-kilometre (244 miles) border with Haiti, its only land neighbor, to stop irregular migration and the smuggling of goods, weapons and drugs.

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Maybe he had something on Hillary….

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If I were worth $100 billion, I don’t think I’d mind much.

ZMan does a critique.

One of the striking things about the Canadian trucker protest is that we have been able to get a good look at Justin Trudeau. To this point no one outside of Canada has had a reason to care about him. Sure, he is a ridiculous person who likes wearing funny outfits in public, but that is democracy. Until now few people outside of the great white north have grasped the depth of this man’s ridiculousness. The whole world now sees that Canada is ruled by a feckless airhead.

In fairness, Canadians can point out that while Trudeau is a ridiculous person, he is not wearing diapers and unsure of his own name. In the theater of the absurd that is western liberal democracy, Joe Biden has to be the headliner. The Global American Empire has a dementia patient in charge. Not only that, when Joe Biden was at his peak fifty years ago, he was considered one of the dumbest men in Washington, so he is a dunce with dementia now.

The Antiplanner takes a stand.

The usually sensible Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post that “Downtown is in deep trouble.” Where she becomes insensible is that she thinks that is a bad thing, arguing that city governments need to take action to lure businesses back into downtowns.

When otherwise sensible people think of a city, they imagine a dense, job-filled downtown surrounded by lower-density residential areas. Yet, as Washington Post writer Joel Garreau wrote more than 30 years ago, downtowns “are relics of a time past.” In fact, he said, downtown-centered cities were the “nineteenth-century version” of a city, and that “We built cities like that for less than a century.”

The basic point is that ‘downtown’ was a solution to a problem that cities no longer have, and carries with it disadvantages that we no longer need to tolerate. Read The Whole Thing.

ZMan looks at the weather.

If you are over a certain age, something you will remember is that the economy used to be a central part of the daily news feed. People talked about the economy because it was always in the mass media. Of course, you had lots of news about finance, especially the stock market. This dovetailed with the stories about the federal budget and the resulting deficits. People used to talk about the federal debt because it was a number that was easy to conceptualize.

All of this has been pushed aside in favor of other topics now. Look at the front page of the New York Times on any day and the one thing you are not going to see is news about the debt or even the economy. Instead it is foreign affairs or perhaps a long story on the fight against Trumpism. The Washington Post is pretty much just a copy and paste operation, relying on press releases from government agencies. It is as if the economy and related topics no longer exist.

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In some ways Japan and South Korea might be at least partially to blame for the multiyear long obsession with masking in most of the Western world.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

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A simple technology that enables 911 livestreaming is proving invaluable in letting emergency services see for themselves the nature of an emergency when someone calls them …

When you use your smartphone to make an emergency call, operators can text you a link. When you tap on that, you will grant access to your phone’s cameras, so that they can see the emergency situation for themselves.

This allows emergency services to instantly assess everything from the size of a fire to the severity of a car crash.

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Here’s something Californians can look forward to as urban planners force higher densities on existing neighborhoods and urban areas: buses for sleeping. A company in Hong Kong, one of the densest cities in the world, is offering “bus sleeping tours” of the city, 51-mile trips aimed at allowing residents to get a little shut-eye.

Hong Kong is one of the most sleep-deprived cities in the world, with 70 percent of residents saying they have trouble sleeping. Obstacles to sleep include light pollution, noise pollution, and the presence of so many attractive bars and restaurants within walking distance of everyone’s homes. That’s exactly what planners want for California cities, and anyone who objects is called a racist.

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You can’t tell the players without a Score Card.

On the Hugh Hewitt radio broadcast not long ago, I heard a guest summing up his plans to save the West which aligned so nicely with the goals of the Last Crusade, that I regret being unable to recall his name or find him by looking up the published guest lists of the show. Would that I could give credit where credit is due.

Allow me, nonetheless, to summarize his remarks:

He started, first, by saying it was the duty of every man to recognize that we were at war, and to rouse both public and political leaders to that fact.

At war with whom? He color coded the enemy for ease of discussion: Green is the Jihad of Islam, their traditional hue; Blue is the color of the United Nations flag and helmet, and stands for the Globalists; White, the flag of surrender, stands for Isolationists and Uniparty GOP; Red are the Socialists.

The Narrative Media, of course, are Black & White & Red All Over. Rather appropriate.

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If you google the words “Great Replacement,” your first hit will likely be a Wikipedia article which identifies the term as “a white nationalist conspiracy theory.” The article is part of two series, one on Islamophobia and one on discrimination. According to Wikipedia, the theory, “disseminated by French author Renaud Camus…states that, with the complicity or cooperation of ‘replacist’ elites, the ethnic French population—as well as white European populations at large—is being demographically and culturally replaced with non-European peoples.”

U.S. outlets repeat this account of Camus’s theory when they raise concerns that Great Replacement talk is being transposed into an American context. A CNN politics report claims that “far right White supremacist groups, conservative media personalities and some Republicans in Congress are trying to inflame nativist feelings among conservative Whites by warning that liberals want immigrants to ‘replace’ native-born Americans.” The Anti-Defamation League published a Great Replacement explainer which announced that “the racist conspiracy theory has well and truly arrived.” Other examples abound.

…

The outlets which publish this kind of analysis are extremely diverse in tone and character, so it is striking that they all present almost exactly the same account of things, sometimes in identical language. From Wikipedia to ADL to Teen Vogue, the story is the same: a dangerous white supremacist conspiracy theory has made its way from the ugly chat rooms of the far Right to the very center of conservative punditry and political leadership. The elision between fringe anti-Semites and popular media personalities serves to underscore the theme that all conservatives, however ostensibly “mainstream,” have succumbed to radical extremism.

Happy Valentine’s Day.

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But what really bothered me was Ms. Wolf’s reflex to spend her career arguing that humans can create a heaven on earth through leftism, but once we achieve leftism, it’s so horrible that it must be God’s fault. A God which she doesn’t believe in. That makes no sense to me, and I’m sure it makes no sense to Ms. Wolf.

Consistency has never been a proglodyte virtue.

Freeberg nails it.

Perhaps if we could thaw out someone who got frozen a century or two ago, this change in prevailing zeitgeist would become more apparent. “It’s a good thing he’s in charge, otherwise something worse would have happened…” has fallen off the table. We have a President of the United States who has done nothing good — and yet, he’s the right guy for the times. He speaks with great force, and creepy whispers, and if he knew where he was he’d be like a Terminator robot — can’t be reasoned with, won’t show pity, remorse or fear. That’s today’s “leader” for you, there’s no point discussing anything with him. There’s an impulse to just knuckle under and do what he says, like in times of old. But back then you did what the leader said because that was your best hope of coming through the battle in one piece. Nowadays, it’s more like a depressed sort of resignation. “Oh well, one year down, three to go.” And this is what we have accepted as leadership.

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f you’re rethinking your education these days, rest assured: You are not alone. Through a global pandemic, all-time high student debt, a “Great Resignation,” and a less-than-certain economic outlook –– more people than ever are questioning their career path, and the education required to get there.

Amid all of this uncertainty, a question emerges: Is a college degree really worth it?

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Giulianotti is a pioneer in robotic surgery, his Italian accent and well-tailored suits giving him the air of an orchestra conductor, even when he’s not behind a console. It is his mission to create a world in which the “dream surgery” — one enhanced by digital technology and robotics — is a reality. This reality, according to Guilianotti, would provide for safer, faster, and better surgical procedures.

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My life has changed substantially over the last 2 years, and the biggest change has been where I live, and how I use my time.

I moved out of Austin to a ranch 45 minutes away (in a town called Dripping Springs), and now spend most of my time with my family, working on the ranch and building my immediate community.

The easiest way to describe it would be to call me a “Doomer Optimist.”

What is Doomer Optimism? My favorite way to describe it:

The shit’s gonna hit the fan, but if I do my work, it’ll be OK.

Seriously, read the whole thing.

Paul Graham.

Writing about something, even something you know well, usually shows you that you didn’t know it as well as you thought. Putting ideas into words is a severe test. The first words you choose are usually wrong; you have to rewrite sentences over and over if you want to get them exactly right. And your ideas won’t just be imprecise, but incomplete too. Half the ideas that end up in an essay will be ones you thought of while you were writing it. Indeed, that’s why I write them.

Words of wisdom.

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As expected, there has been a brisk traffic in bogus “vaccination” certificates wherever vax passes and mandates have been imposed. In the following case from Germany, it’s not clear whether the doctor who was busted acted out of pecuniary motives, or because he believes that the mandates are morally and ethically wrong.

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Using the Find My Friends feature of our iPhones, I can watch my wife’s car move along the streets between her workplace and our home. I know exactly when to put supper on so that it will be hot when she walks in the door. So far she hasn’t complained.

We have the technology.