Read it.

Georgia ranks at the top among states for the strongest laws in the nation to guarantee honest elections, while Hawaii ranks at the bottom, according to a new Election Integrity Scorecard from The Heritage Foundation.

Heritage’s scorecard measures all 50 states and the District of Columbia based on a dozen election-related categories.

Read it.

Food tech startup Perfect Day has released a report claiming that its process for producing milk proteins in the lab is much more environmentally friendly than getting them the old fashioned way, from cows.

“This shows that fermentation can unlock a more efficient way to make food that humans have a huge demand for,” CEO Ryan Pandya told Axios.

Read it.

Thermo-electric generators convert heat directly into electricity, using the voltage generated at the junction of two different metals. This sounds like an excellent way to generate electric power; there are no moving parts, no working fluids, and very little to go wrong. Unfortunately the process is inefficent, and is not going to displace steam turbines. The output is DC, which is not helpful if you want to use a transformer to change the voltage. Nonetheless, thermoelectric generators were and are used where their special characteristics are needed.

 

David Cole.

Throughout my life, I’ve often been accused of lacking empathy. It’s a critique that goes back to high school, when I was a compassionless bully. And I’ll admit, I do have an empathy problem, but only when it comes to imbeciles.

I just can’t muster sympathy for the stupid. I don’t hate them; I don’t even blame them (no one’s at fault for the intelligence they inherit). But when imbeciles become an obstacle, I have zero tolerance.

Hence why I’ve been unable to summon sympathy for the 1/6 rioters.

He’s got a point.

ZMan does a deep dive.

In a rules-based society, people who break the rules should suffer consequences commensurate with the damage done by the rule breaking. A general principle of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence is that the punishment fits the crime. If the crime, however, prevents a much larger crime from occurring, the rule breaking ceases to be a crime and becomes a public service. While this theory makes sense to a sensible person, its abuse by the deranged and dangerous suggests a serious flaw.

Then there is the issue of the media. In the old analog days, it was easy to make an exception for the press. In these cases, they were treated like neutrals. Even though they knew the material they were reporting was illegally obtained, they were allowed to report on it because a free press trumps government secrecy. In the digital age where we no longer have a free press or actual reporters, this no longer makes sense. The media is just the marketing arm of the unofficial ruling party.

Read it.

The Psalmist advises us, “Put not your trust in princes, in sons of men, in whom there is no salvation.” (Ps. 146:3) The author was thinking of eternal salvation, but the sentiment is true for political salvation, too.

Read it.

lorida Gov. Ron DeSantis set $8 million in his 2022–23 budget to transport illegal immigrants out of The Sunshine State. He proposed the spending in the Freedom First Budget (pdf) to protect against harms resulting from illegal immigration. The spending may include the transportation of unauthorized aliens located within Florida to other states or the District of Columbia.

Paul Mirengoff at Power Line.

We have noted the rapid decline of the Democrats’ popularity among Latinos. A group (if it makes sense to refer to such a diverse collection of voters as such) that has strongly supported Democrats until recently now is evenly split in its backing of the two parties, according to recent polls.

Ruy Teixeira argues that the news on Latino voters is even worse than now perceived. It’s noteworthy that Teixeira says this. In 2004, he, along with John Judis, wrote The Emerging Democratic Majority. They predicted that the rise of America’s Latino population would confer clear majority status on Democrats in the coming decades.

To be fair to Teixeira, I should point out, as Kyle Smith trenchantly does, that in 2004 “the Democratic Party was not yet a cult of lunatics dedicated to explaining that men can give birth, gigantic new federal spending programs reduce inflation, the comptroller of the currency should be someone who believes in ‘ending banking as we know it,’ energy production should be re-outsourced to Saudi Arabia and Latinos should be referred to as ‘Latinx.’”

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

The show this week is on a topic that comes up here in different ways from time to time but will become more of a focus in the future. That topic is the intellectual and spiritual underpinnings of the new religion. Our side has the bad habit of judging this stuff by objective standards, which has some minor utility, but is of no use in developing suitable defenses or an alternative moral philosophy.

The first step in that process is the same as in war, which is to reconnoiter the enemy in order to understand his strengths and weaknesses. In the sense of the culture war, that means going into the enemy’s intellectual territory to understand how they think and get a grip on their code. Every subculture has its own language and the new religion is not an exception. They have their own jargon which we have to learn.

I want one.

“There’s nothing wrong with New York City that adding a million ethnic Chinese wouldn’t fix.”

— John Derbyshire

ZMan looks at drawings.

Comparisons to Rome have been popular in America for a very long time, mostly because the American republic failed in the middle of the 19th century. This is one of those things that intelligent people have known is true but agreed not to discuss outside where the peasants can hear. A major part of the ruling class ethos has been the maintenance of the republican myth. Some on the Right will still insist that America is a republic and not a liberal democracy.

That is why comparisons to Rome have been popular. Either as a self-deception or as a way to avoid discussing reality, the worry that America could follow the Roman Republic into empire has been a staple for a long time. What makes this present age unique is that many people simply accept America as an empire. Much of the ruling class now prefers the word “democracy” over republic. When was the last time a politician said, “we must defend our republic”?

“Oregon is going to make the COVID masks permanent. I’ve seen some women from Oregon, so I suppose it makes sense.”

– ZMan

When you’re surrounded by idiots, they get to make the rules.

Read it.

Of course, if the kid were black, this wouldn’t be happening. It wouldn’t even be news.

“The only people who use the term ‘workers’ are those who don’t work.”

— ZMan

ZMan’s weekly podcast. Highly recommended.

I scanned the news sites looking for material and I was struck by a couple of things. First off, the people in charge are miserable. Everything is going sideways for them and they have no idea why. Reading the news items about the economy makes clear that they are in deep denial. We have inflation, shortages and a totally screwed up labor market. This is making their Build Back Better scheme look dangerously ridiculous to the public.

It is not just the economy. These idiots not only created a new cold war with the Russians but may be on the brink of a hot war. This Ukraine fiasco is entirely the fault of official Washington. They got in bed with the Ukrainian crooks because they liked the bribes and they picked a fight with Putin because of Trump. Now the Russian army is on the doorstep of Europe. The Ukrainian people deserve better, of course, but the blame largely lies with the incompetent idiots in Washington.

Read it.

A pair of liberal Supreme Court justices say the Court should uphold Roe v. Wade because its central medical claim is sound. Experts on both sides of the abortion debate say those justices are wrong.

ZMan ponders the Great Issue of the Day.

Conservative Inc. has been abuzz with excitement over the abortion case recently argued before the Supreme Court. They think this is the big win they have been promising for more than half a century. The five “conservative” justices appear ready to overturn Roe and even Roberts seems to be leaning that way. Oral arguments seemed to center on whether they should reverse Roe entirely or try to find a piecemeal approach to begin the process of reversing it.

One of the ironies of this is that this was made possible by the man Conservative Inc. declared an enemy of their cult back in 2015. If the court does overturn Roe, you can be sure no one in the dying cult of conservatism will have the principles to both admit they were wrong and give Trump credit for the result. They will just pretend none of that happened and use the event to scam their donors one more time. Conservatives never give a sucker an even break or smarten up a chump.

This is all a tempest in a teapot. If Roe is overturned, the Blue States will immediately enact abort-any-time-you-want-to laws and the baby-killing will continue unabated; at most it will be an inconvenience for the Abortion Barbies in the redder states (although there will be perpetual handwringing from the Usual Suspects in the Narrative Media about the oppression of People Of Color, as if killing black babies is some kind of liberation). Margaret Sanger will be looking up from Hell and grinning like the Joker in any event.

If the court does overturn Roe this summer, you will see some grannies and Nth-wave feminist lesbians out making noise. The Left will do a nostalgia tour, pretending it is 1970 all over again. They will pull the old signs out of storage and reminisce about the old days when they were hip and cool. Like so much of our politics, the response to overturning Roe will be another magical mystery tour of the past. Then it will be forgotten along with the events around it.

 

John Hinderaker at Powere Line.

To whom do liberals go when they want to tell their career-threatening stories to a sympathetic listener? Well, to be fair, they have several choices, but George Stephanopoulos is perhaps the favorite. So Alec Baldwin sought out Stephanopoulos to explain how he came to shoot and kill Halyna Hutchins.

Like an SUV, a trigger can just pull itself.

Read it.

Hey, it coulda happened….,

Read it.

If it works.

These conceptual projects are fun to look but nobody ever builds them.

Steven Hayward at Power Line.

Ever since Alan Sokal hoaxed Social Text more than 20 years ago, and Peter Boghossian and his two compatriots punked several postmodern journals with total gibberish just a couple years back, you’d think academic journal editors and reviewers would be on guard against similar hoaxes. But apparently not Higher Education Quarterldy (a Wiley publication) which is just out with a howler entitled “Donor money and the academy: Perceptions of undue donor pressure in political science, economics, and philosophy.”

The study purports to demonstrate that “right wing” money is having a significant effect in pushing colleges to the right.

The first sign this is a hoax is that the article says the two authors, Sage Owens and Kal Avers-Lynde III, are on the economics faculty at UCLA, but I can find no record of their existence at UCLA or anywhere else, and no record of other publications by either author. I believe they do not exist. My suspicion is that the “authors” may be conservatives, or at least anti-leftists, who decided to see whether an article that flatters the deep biases of academia could get past peer review and into print.

Read it.

He says that like it was a bad thing….

Steve Sailer.

Well, at least, I trust Google to furnish me with all the pro-Biden talking points extant. So, rather than get down in the weeds of whether the New York Post has or has not proved that the MacBook Pro dropped off for repair was Hunter Biden’s, I went looking for recent news articles that included the phrase “Biden denied” that the computer or laptop or notebook or MacBook or whatever in question belonged to Hunter Biden.

Read it.

As the chlorophyll wanes, now is the heyday of the xanthophylls, carotenoids and anthocyanins. These contain carbon rings and chains whose electrons become delocalized… their wavefunctions resonating at different frequencies, emitting photons of yellow, orange and red!

Read it.

Maybe the driver just didn’t like camels. Hey, it could happen.

Check it out.

These chants had such long tradition — more than ten centuries — because they probably touch deep in one’s very soul and spirituality, and brought a marvellous sense of inner peace. Music knows neither area, time nor language. If you wish, allow yourself to escape your busy life for a while, and re-connect with yourself. Close your eyes, and let the ancient sounds of Monks carry you away.

There is nothing more relaxing than Gregorian chant.

Read it.

We’re here to help. First, we gathered data for thousands of towns and cities on more than 30 metrics, such as school quality, crime rates and affordability. Then we used that data to make a quiz: Select the criteria you find important, and we’ll show you places that might work for you.

Here’s how I used it, and what I learned.

Read it.

More buzzwords than you ever believed possible in one place.

If you could write like this, you could make a million.

CNN.

Yet another world crisis.

Read it.

Just in case you were wondering. I know I was.

Read it.

Days after GoFundMe tried to justify its Rittenhouse ban, the platform is under fire for allowing–and then deleting–a fundraiser for the suspect in the parade massacre.

GoFundMe tried to justify its Rittenhouse ban after his acquittal, claiming it did not allow fundraisers for defendants accused of “violent” crimes.

“GoFundMe’s Terms of Service prohibit raising money for the legal defense of an alleged violent crime,” the platform tweeted. “In light of the Kyle Rittenhouse trial, we want to clarify when and why we have removed certain fundraisers in the past.”

It seems to me that someone who has not yet been convicted of a crime deserves the benefit of the doubt.

Being retired means never having to suppress your Inner Wally.