Read it.

How long before this is what, say, California looks like? Or New York City?

(American solution: “Don Vincenzo, I have a stone in my shoe.”)

Read it.

Three months after the end of its May conflict with Israel, Hamas has returned to its familiar ways of constant attrition, violent extortion, and “controlled escalation” tactics. Hamas has launched violent border disturbances again and authorized the release of arson balloons designed to harass and damage southern Israeli communities located close to the Strip. Recent years have shown that these measures, designed to ‘pressure’ Israel into concessions, can quickly spiral out of control and result in war.

Hamas’s escalation ostensibly stems from its objective of forcing Israel into a broader post-conflict arrangement, which would include allowing greater quantities of goods into the Strip, reconstruction of damaged areas in Gaza, and additional measures.

Read it.

At the University of Texas at Austin, where professors have repeatedly and unsuccessfully pushed for an indoor mask mandate, vaccine requirement and regular testing, one policy adds insult to injury: the university says that faculty members and programs may offer nonacademic incentives of up to $50 each to students to get them to wear masks in class, but it’s not footing the bill for any of these rewards.

OF COURSE the Professors want to put the burden of keeping themselves safe on the students. Don’ they know who we are?

Read it.

New research from the Boston Fed argues that the racial wealth gap may be smaller and more stable than thought.

Read it.

“The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion,” Albert Einstein wrote. Perhaps this is nowhere more evident than in protein evolution, where past and present versions of the same enzyme exist in different species today, with implications for future enzyme design. Now, researchers have used evolutionary “time travel” to learn how an enzyme evolved over time, from one of Earth’s most ancient organisms to modern-day humans.

CNN.

Apparently they skipped the mandatory Diversity & Inclusion classes that the Taliban, like all Right Thinking People, mandate for their personnel.

Joel Kotkin.

The very idea of a recall vote seemed absurd at first in California, this bluest of US states. Yet Californians’ surprisingly strong support for the removal of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom has resulted in precisely that, with the vote scheduled for 14 September. This reflects a stunning rejection of modern progressivism in a state thought to epitomise its promise.

Some, like the University of California’s Laura Tyson and former Newsom adviser Lenny Mendonca, may see California as creating ‘the way forward’ for a more enlightened ‘market capitalism’, but that reality is hard to see on the ground. Even before the pandemic, California already had the highest poverty rate and the widest gap between middle and upper-middle income earners of any state in the US. It now suffers from the second-highest unemployment rate in the US after Nevada.

Today, class drives Californian politics, and Newsom is peculiarly ill-suited to deal with it. He is financed by what the Los Angeles Times describes as ‘a coterie of San Francisco’s wealthiest families’. Newsom’s backers have aided his business ventures and helped him live in luxury – first in his native Marin, where he just sold his estate for over $6million, and now in Sacramento.

The Washington Post Wants to Censor Real News

Et Tu, Brute? Leftist Journalists Turn On Facebook

Victims’ Family Calls Cuomo’s Brink’s Heist Killer Clemency an ‘Atrocity’

Latino lawmakers push for renaming Fort Hood after first Hispanic four-star general

Inmates run wild on Rikers Island, answer phones, destroy equipment

“Puzzle Pieces All Laid Out” – How ATF Has Plan To Classify Semi-Automatic Rifles As “Machine Guns” 

Disney+ Tween Show Pushes Feminism, Attacks ‘Heteronormative Rituals’

Dowd: Biden Should Be ‘Congratulated’ for ‘Yeoman’s Work’ in Afghanistan

NY Times Hides Spike Lee’s 9-11 Trutherism in His New HBO Doc: Fire Didn’t Melt Steel

‘RIP Aztecs:’ Woke ‘Stargirl’ Mourns End of Human-Sacrificing Tribe at Hands of Europeans

Instagram Fuels 70% Rise In Online Grooming Of Children: UK Charity

Nike’s End of Men

Miranda Du, Hassan Kanu, Ahilan Arulanantham, Benjamin Gonzalez O’Brien, and Kelly Lytle Hernandez Explain Why It’s Bad for American Citizens Named Smith and Jones to Have a Say in Immigration Policy

As Public Pushback Mounts, McAuliffe Buries ‘Equity’ Agenda

Billionaire Progressives Fund Weather Underground Terrorist’s Ivy League Think Tank

Canada’s Trudeau Is Proposing “Fixing” His Country’s Housing Bubble With Even More Government Intervention

Wisconsin Parents on a Mission To Recall Board Members Who Opposed Reopening

Judge freezes UC Berkeley’s student enrollment at 2020-21 levels

Extinction Rebellion Co-founder Drives a Diesel

Claim: Climate change threatens seal hunting by Indigenous Alaskans

The Taliban Says It Will Fight Climate Change  By returning life to the seventh century? Yeah, that would do it.

Climate Doomed by Coal… Again  Just like the last fifty times.

Science quietly wins one of the right’s longstanding culture wars (Salon)

F.D.A. Withdraws Approval from “Whatever Drug Rand Paul Is On” (The New Yorker)

Kayleigh McEnany, With a Straight Face, Says We ‘Didn’t See Crisis After Crisis’ Under Trump (Daily Beast) And we didn’t — except for the ones ginned up by the Narrative Media … like the Daily Beast.

Twilight of the Satyrs

Nirvana sued by the baby from Nevermind’s album cover

Democrat-Controlled House Panel Probing Capitol Attack Targets Trump White House  Of course they are.

Kandahar Joy Reid Insists U.S. Is Doing a ‘Thorough Job,’ Dismisses Critics as Bad-Faith  Leg’s drop her in Bagram and see how long she lasts.

Anti-Cop CW Drama: White Supremacist Harassment ‘Happening All Across Country,’ ‘System We Live In’

Ex-Candidate Kimberly Klacik Sues Commentator Candace Owens for $20M  She’s got straight hair so she’s not Really Black.

Sergeant Convicted of Defending Neighborhood Women from Brain-Damaged Baby-Snatcher

The Performative Antiracism of Black Students at the U. of Wisconsin

Charleston Church Shooter’s Death Sentence Upheld  If he were black, though,  he’d be stuck in prison until some bleeding-hard NGO managed to spring him — as Cuomo did with the Weathermen guy.

New York’s New Lieutenant Governor Supports Movement to Defund Police  Of course he does.

FBI Raids Detroit City Hall in Corruption Probe  Detroit is sort of ground zero for black political corruption.

Elder Abuse at the LA Times  We can’t let the Wrong Negro win.

LA’s ‘Summer of Delta COVID Variant’ Hits Vaxxed and Unvaxxed, Study Finds

Biden receives inconclusive intelligence report on covid origins (Washington Post)

Kansas Supreme Court Leaves Limits on Governor’s Emergency Powers in Place

Spain’s Supreme Court Rules Against Using Vaccine Passports To Restrict Access To Public Spaces

Study: Vaccine Protection Wanes Within 6 Months

Pentagon: Pfizer CVOD-19 Vaccine Mandatory for All Active-Duty Troops

Oregon to Require Masks Outdoors

UK Drops Mask Mandates for Schools

The Bizarre Refusal to Apply Cost-Benefit Analysis to COVID Debates  Glenn Greenwald.

Delta Hits Unvaccinated Staff With $200-a-Month Health Insurance Surcharge

Gaslighting, a Covid Love Story

“We Don’t Understand What’s Really Happening” – The CDC Is Under-Counting ‘Breakthrough’ COVID Cases

New York’s New Governor Just Threw Cuomo Under The Bus – Admits To 12,000 More COVID Deaths  And under a bus is exactly where he belongs.

Welcome to the Forever Pandemic

Australian Citizens Ask Taliban To Liberate Their Country  Babylon Bee.

US Data Show Rising ‘Breakthrough’ Infections Among Fully Vaccinated  Yeah, gonna run right out and get that vaccine.

YouTube Yanks Over 1 Million COVID-19 Videos It Deemed ‘Dangerous’

Overrun Hospitals Unable To Combat Dual Threat Of COVID, Milk Crate Challenge  Babylon Bee.

Comparing SARS-CoV-2 natural immunity to vaccine-induced immunity

Biden Turns His Back on America

Supreme Court Orders ‘Remain in Mexico’ Policy Reinstated

CIA Director William Burns held secret meeting in Kabul with Taliban leader Abdul Ghani Baradar

Fury and disgust at CIA, Pentagon, in Congress that thousands of Afghans will be left behind

State Dept Issued Warning That Americans Left In Afghanistan Will Be “Without Assistance”, Then Deleted It

“We Won’t Get Everyone Out, Even By Sept. 11” – Congressmen Share Dire Warning After Secret Fact-Finding Mission To Kabul

Biden’s Guest Hosting Of ‘Jeopardy!’ A Disaster As He Flees Every Time A Contestant Puts An Answer In Form Of A Question  Babylon Bee.

For Brits, Biden’s Afghanistan Debacle Is a Betrayal  Not that Biden gives a shit.

As Afghan Women Face Brutal Subjugation Under Taliban Rule, Biden Admin To Host 5K Run for ‘Women’s Equality’

Lawmakers Push Biden To Rescue Americans, Afghan Translators From Taliban  Good luck with that.

America’s $800 Million Kabul Embassy To Be Abandoned – No Troops Will Guard It

Taliban Opens Chain Of U.S. Army Surplus Stores  Babylon Bee.

Read it.

The United States believes that a branch of ISIS intends to cause mayhem at Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul as evacuation efforts remain underway, a defense official told CNN.

Read it.

“Never forget class struggle!” proclaimed Mao in Fall 1962 at the Chinese Communist Party’s annual retreat. This maxim quickly became the fevered chant of the day, paving the way for the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 and continued until Mao’s death in 1976. This slogan defied reality and logic: How could class struggle persist when there was no private ownership left in China? But the slogan appealed to sentiment, not logic, and thus persisted.

If modified into “Never forget race struggle,” the command has the same appeal in today’s woke America, and serves the same purposes, even though there is no evidence that race is a barrier impeding individual effort in America today, or that it is decisive in distributing outcomes.

Read it.

Freedom of the press is not a Muslim virtue. (Check any majority-Muslim country in the world.)

Read it.

The United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) held its 31st special session this week to address the ‘serious human rights concerns and situation in Afghanistan’. This discussion was led by the Taliban-friendly Pakistan and a copy of the draft resolution was shared on Twitter by the brilliant Hillel Neuer, international lawyer and executive director of United Nations Watch.

These documents make for an interesting but rather revealing read. On the current refugee problem, the draft refers to, ‘the generous hospitality demonstrated by Afghanistan’s neighbors’ and goes on to urge ‘the international community to assist Iran and Pakistan as the major host countries to address the refugee problem’. A thumbs up for Pakistan and Iran there then. Quite remarkably, the resolution goes on to blame the current humanitarian crisis not on its engineers, the Taliban, but rather on ‘prolonged conflicts and military interventions in Afghanistan’ — pointing implicitly to the US and its Western allies. In fact, the document is so farcical, that the Taliban are not even mentioned a single time in the resolution.

Read it.

In the rarified atmosphere of Washington, the debacle unfolding in Afghanistan has led as much to questions of how China might exploit this as it has analysis and discussion of what is ongoing in Kabul.

One regularly asked question is whether Beijing will feel emboldened to invade Taiwan, either because the U.S. is preoccupied with evacuating Americans from Afghanistan or because the U.S. military’s vaunted reputation has taken a beating.

The New York Times is not afraid to tackle the hard issues.

You can get cotton bags pretty much everywhere. How did an environmental solution become part of the problem?

Sarah Hoyt.

This brings to mind what is creating this big movement — the so called elites who would plan our lives have no clue, by the way. They are actually trying to ignore all the moves because it confuses them — which is the fact that if you take control of even a state’s government by crooked means (Colorado, if the elections were fair, the asshats would be eager to have them examined, not try to hide them. Also, I’m sorry, there’s no way the elections are fair) you can control people’s lives with dictator-like powers and make the state unlivable, in pursuit of the little twinkling sounds in your brain, or something.

You can for instance decide that you’re resettling refugees, when you’re turning the state into a vast illegal camp; or you can decide that the expensive convention center in the capital is now a homeless shelter; or you can allow homeless to camp all over Denver after the people defeat that in the polls; or you can make it impossible to earn a living in a state; or–

The possibilities are endless.

Read it.

For one thing, you can subtract the expense of commuting, plus the non-monetary value of the wear and tear on your psyche.

Read it.

The probabilities are increasing that China will try and seize Taiwan by force amid America’s disorganized exit from Afghanistan has tarnished U.S. prestige. Allies of the West, such as Japan and Taiwan, are set to hold a meeting about an increasingly aggressive China.

The Financial Times spoke with Masahisa Sato, a parliamentarian who manages foreign affairs for Japan’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP), on Tuesday, said discussions are needed about the implications of a China invasion of Taiwan because it would have “a serious impact” on Japan’s security and economy.

Read it.

Taliban flags are already flying in Islamabad. Among those hoisting the white flag of the group is the women’s madrassa Jamia Hafsa, affiliated with the adjoining Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), which has also released a song celebrating the Taliban as ‘the symbol of Islam’. Lal Masjid, a few miles from Pakistan’s military headquarters and parliament, has been an emblem of terror and factory of jihad in Pakistan since its formation in the 1960s.

The Lal Masjid cleric Abdul Aziz has in the past pledged allegiance to Isis and appeared to defend the 2014 Peshawar school attack which killed 141, mostly schoolchildren. When the army moved against Lal Masjid in 2007 it led to a nationwide explosion of terror attacks. When the Taliban took over the shrine of the freedom fighter Haji Sahib Turangzai near the Afghan border, they renamed it ‘Lal Masjid’ as a hat-tip to the Islamabad mosque’s jihad against the Pakistani state.

Reminder Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology, posing as a religion, with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

The Post lays it on thick with the headline: ‘Conservative Bill Kristol endorses McAuliffe in race for Virginia governor.’ See, a conservative is endorsing a Democrat! That shows just how insane the Republican party has gone!

Of course, the Post had to stick ‘conservative’ before Kristol’s name or everybody would forget that he’s supposed to be one. Is anybody fooled by this? Certainly nobody right-of-center on Twitter.

Read it.

I’m talking about the “reader mode”. When available for a website, it is displayed as an icon at the end of the url bar in Firefox. The same is true for Chrome, but you first need to enable it at chrome://flags/#enable-reader-mode. Safari on iOS includes it in the menu at the left of the url bar.

I use it habitually. It often gets around paywalls, as well.

Read it.

We have vaccine abundance in the United States but not test abundance. Germany has test abundance. Tests are easily available at the supermarket or the corner store and they are cheap, five tests for 3.75 euro or less than a dollar each. Billiger! In Great Britain you can get a 14 pack for free. The Canadians are also distributing packs of tests to small businesses for free to test their employees.

Severian continues his nlysis.

Even those putatively dedicated to Good aren’t often able to even perceive The Good, much less act on it. Same thing with Evil. The true Hero, capital-H, can both see it and embrace Good, despite his flaws; the true Villain, capital-V, also sees it, but can’t overcome himself enough to choose it, which means he ends up embracing — and, crucially, loving — Evil. Most people, being mere people, only dimly perceive Good and Evil. They muddle through. They often end up serving one or the other unwittingly (Good as often as Evil, though being mere people ourselves, we tend to notice the latter almost exclusively).

Severian is delightfully dyspeptic today.

Lord knows I have my issues with the guy, but The Smartest Genius in the History of the World (and the “Game” guys in general) have done yeoman’s work on what they call the “gamma,” aka the Secret King. This is the humble farmboy who is of course the rightful heir to the kingdom, who has powers far beyond mortal ken — the standard-issue protagonist of what I-forget-who called GEFP, Generic Extruded Fantasy Product. Luke Skywalker, basically, but even more secret, even more powerful, and much, much whinier.

I know the feeling.

Freeberg nails it yet again.

“Just wait ’til” arguments are emotion, not reason.

This may not be evident to the people who need to know; the people who go around using them, with varying degrees of frequency. It is abundantly apparent to those of us who have been continually on the receiving end of them for the last sixteen to nineteen months. “Just wait ’til you catch the ‘vid.” “Just wait ’til you’re on a ventilator.” “Just wait ’til you suffer permanent lung or organ damage.” “Just wait ’til it’s your family members who have it, and they caught it from you.”

These are not rational arguments. They feel like they are, to the person who is making them. That’s the problem. Feel.

Steve Sailer.

What happens when an Afghan refugee arrives in America for “processing” and it’s discovered that, uh-oh, this one is a notorious pederast war criminal who skimmed $7 million off the USAID budget and committed an honor killing of his sister?

Are they going to send him back?

Sure. And push him out the door about halfway.

Fun with Find-and-Replace

Bad News For South African Looters As Samsung Moves To Block Their Stolen TVs

9 Black People Who Are Really White Supremacists  Babylon Bee.

Reversing ocean acidification with aggressive CO2 removal will take 700+ years

Germany Schnitzels Itself After Ditching Nuclear, Coal Power For Green Pipe Dreams

After Environmentalist Opposition, City Stops Southern Dallas Renewable Energy Project

Sea Levels Near B.C. Canada Were 90 Meters Higher Than Today 14,500 Years Ago

Here’s Why Climate Alarmists Are Ignoring All-Time Record Crop Production in India

California: Curtailing Solar Power & Building Natural Gas Plants… Because…

Cuomo Commutes Sentence of Chesa Boudin’s Weather Underground Dad, Four Others (New York Magazine) The Crust takes care of its own.

California man found with over 300 stolen recall election ballots

Pelosi Rule Vote Gambit Could Make or Break Dem Agenda

That $56,000 Drug? Blame Medicare

HR 4 ‘Gives Federal Bureaucrats Control’ Over State Election Laws, Expert Says

STUDY: Actual News Is Hard to Find on Today’s Cable ‘News’

STUDY: The ‘News’ on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS

CNN Horrified by ‘GOP Stunt’ Election in CA: ‘Doom’ for Democrats!  Republicans can be candidates in elections? What’s up with that?

Cuomo Commutes Sentences for Four Convicted Murderers

Leftist CBS Hosts Demand Felons Have Right to Vote

DCCC Chairman Partied Maskless at Billionaire’s Estate in France After State Dept. Issued ‘Do Not Travel’ Warning

Iowa Dem Scrubs Left-Wing Views From Campaign Site To Kick Off Moderate Congressional Campaign

YouTube Exec Brags His Platform Censors Wrongthink, Promotes ‘Authoritative’ Sources

New Zealand’s Zero Covid delusion

Jordan Klepper Embarrasses Anti-Vax Protesters in NYC (Daily Beast)

Time to say it: We’re done with the vaccine refusers (Washington Post) Screw your freedom!

Antibody Discovered That Protects Against Broad Range of COVID-19 Virus Variants

Florida doctors stage walk out to protest surge of unvaccinated patients

Australian Truck Drivers Vow To Block Every Major Highway In Radical Anti-Lockdown Strike  The sheep push back.

NEA Opposes Vaccines for Teachers, But Mandates for Kids

US Review of COVID Origins Due Tuesday, But Public Must Wait for Unclassified Version

Demonstrators Occupy London News Headquarters Over Pandemic Coverage

“The Time Has Come. Enough Is Enough” – Fauci Dismisses “Freedom” In Call For Vaccine Mandates  Getting in touch with his inner Mussolini.

Australia’s Covid crisis

Pfizer Just Got ‘Full FDA Approval’ For Its COVID Vaccine. There’s Just One Thing…

‘Require It’: Biden Tells Private Companies to Mandate COVID-19 Vaccinations

AMA Urges Private, Public Sectors to Mandate Vaccinations

Study: Delta Variant Has Viral Load 300 Times Greater Than Original Strain

‘All But One Turned Out To Be Negative’: Rice University Retests Dozens Of Students After COVID False-Positives  Follow the Science, Igor! Follow the Science!

Jen Psaki Claims There Are No Americans Stranded In Kabul During Testy Exchange With Reporter

Quantifying The “Staggering Costs” Of US Military Equipment Left Behind In Afghanistan

How Biden’s American Families Plan Could “Destroy” Iowa Farmers

Biden Was the Biggest Supporter of Sending More Troops to Afghanistan

Panjshir valley and the last resistance to the Taliban

Americans Trapped By Taliban With No Rescue Plan Happy To Hear They Are Not Stranded  Babylon Bee.

Biden Job Approval Craters To 41% After Afghanistan Quagmire  What I find depressing is that it’s still that high.

Taliban Appoints Former Gitmo Detainee As Afghanistan’s New Defense Minister

Hey Mr. President, What’s the Counterterrorism Strategy for Afghanistan?  First let’s get everybody vaccinated, then we can worry about all that over stuff.

Not even Donald Trump can control the monster he created (CNN) A find generic Trump Derangement Syndrome headline.

Lame Showtime Comedy Goes Back to ’80s to Bash Reagan as ‘Dummy’

No Mercy: Navratilova Celebrated COVID-19 Death Of Conservative Talk Show Host

Read it.

John Bolton calls attention to one aspect of Joe Biden’s decision to choose defeat in Afghanistan — the implications for Pakistan. Bolton argues that “the Taliban’s takeover next door immediately poses the sharply higher risk that Pakistani extremists will increase their already sizable influence in Islamabad, threatening at some point to seize full control.”

By the way, Pakistan has nuclear weapons.

Although I suspect that we could fix that.

Not undre Biden, however.

Read it.

The U.S. Supreme Court said in 2008, when it upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, “that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.” It seems we have a perfect example of this in Compton City, California, where felony voter fraud charges have been filed against six defendants, including a member of the Compton City Council, Isaac Galvan, by the Los Angeles County district attorney.

Talk about a close election! Galvan won his city council race in 2021 by only one vote, 855 to 854. Not only have all of the defendants been charged with conspiracy to commit election fraud, but Galvan is also accused of attempting to bribe an election official with concert tickets to “influence” the outcome of the election.

Read it.

The choices by Vyas and other members of the millennial generation of where to live have reshaped the country’s political geography over the past decade. They’ve left New York and California and settled in places less likely to be settings for TV sitcoms about 20-something urbanites, including Denver, Houston and Orlando, Florida. Drawn by jobs and overlooked cultural amenities, they’ve helped add new craft breweries, condominiums and liberal voters to these once more-conservative places.

Note the assumption that young people are liberal voters, as if that were a law of nature.

Read it.

Recent descriptive work suggests the type of college education (field or institution) is an important but neglected pathway through which individuals sort into homogeneous marriages. These descriptive studies raise the question of why college graduates are so likely to marry someone within their own institution or field of study. One possible explanation is that individuals match on traits correlated with the choice of education, such as innate ability, tastes or family environment. Another possible explanation is that the choice of college education causally impacts whether and whom one marries, either because of search frictions or preferences for spousal education. The goal of this paper is to sort out these explanations and, by doing so, examine the role of colleges as marriage markets. Using data from Norway to address key identification and measurement challenges, we find that colleges are local marriage markets, mattering greatly for whom one marries, not because of the pre-determined traits of the admitted students but as a direct result of attending a particular institution at a given time.

Read it.

Plans to build an innovative new nuclear power plant—and thus revitalize the struggling U.S. nuclear industry—have taken a hit as in recent weeks: Eight of the 36 public utilities that had signed on to help build the plant have backed out of the deal. The withdrawals come just months after the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), which intends to buy the plant containing 12 small modular reactors from NuScale Power, announced that completion of the project would be delayed by 3 years to 2030. It also estimates the cost would climb from $4.2 billion to $6.1 billion.

Read it.

Days after the invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was initially sold as a necessary pre-emptive effort to secure deadly weapons of mass destruction that Saddam Hussein planned to use against the American people, National Review ran an op-ed by former George W. Bush speechwriter David Frum attacking everyone on the Right who opposed the war as “unpatriotic conservatives.”

In the nearly two decades since it was published, the column has become something of a Rosetta Stone for deciphering the underlying motivations and mindset of the most ardent proponents of the idea that stable democracies can be imposed by military force from the top down. Like an insect captured in amber, Frum’s essay is a near-perfect specimen of the neoconservative id, equal parts delusion and sanctimony.

Matt Ridley.

Near Fukushima, ten years after the nuclear accident that followed the tsunami, wild boar have colonised the suburbs. Near Chernobyl, bison and wolves wander abandoned streets. There is no doubt that if humans vanished, indigenous wildlife would return in abundance, minus the mammoths and sabre-tooths that our ancestors extinguished.

Rewilding is all the rage, and it is coming soon to a hillside near you. But what form should it take and how should it be done? In practice, rewilding began quite a long time ago. A recent study found that, contrary to what most people believe, the world now has more trees than 35 years ago and much of the regrowth is natural regeneration: Europe alone has gained an area of tree cover greater than France.

If the Apocalypse comes, there will be plenty of pig to eat. Although it won’t be easy….

Read it.

Two armies are gathering to fight a great spiritual war for the future of civilization. On one side stands everyone who treasures tradition, nature, and the family. On the other stand those who have fallen prey to hysteria and fear, who oppose normalcy and excellence. The Coronavirus panic of the last year and a half threw this conflict into sharp relief.

It is time to fight. Do not be naïve: This isn’t going away. No amount of homeschooling or self-segregation, religious or political, is going to save you. Our enemies have accomplished enormous victories, and they will not stop pressing for more. The first step to winning a war is to realize that you’re in one. The second is to know yourself. The third is to understand the enemy.

Severian reveals some inconvenient truth.

Since it’s impossible that blacks could fail tests at a higher rate than Whites for any reason other than Teh Rayciss, companies like Duke Power had to find some other way to weed out grossly unqualified morons from the interview process. Their ad hoc solution was to require college degrees for any meaningful job, because the SAT at that time was basically a jumped-up Wonderlic test — that is to say, functionally an IQ test, lightly disguised as a “scholastic achievement” test.

The inevitable happened. College degrees were suddenly much more valuable, so more people signed up for college. Which led to Bakke v. Regents (1978). And so the corporate gatekeeping had to keep intensifying in order to keep the morons out, such that by the late 1990s you needed a college degree to work as a shoeshine boy, because having the gumption to pay enough fees to the “college” to get the piece of paper at least demonstrates minimal sticktoitiveness….

Read it.

Brad Day and his wife Holly Kulak were first introduced to Pacaso in May, after a romantic sunset dinner in their yard. “And we just saw this drone, coming up and over our backyard,” Brad says. “And we’re like, what is that?”

Pacaso denies directing or paying a drone operator to film the neighborhood. But its website does have drone photos of the house in question, located at 1405 Old Winery Court. It says it bought the photos after the fact.

Nonetheless, after the drone incident, Brad and Holly got suspicious about what was going on in their neighborhood. About a week later, their neighbors told them they were moving and selling their house to a Limited Liability Corporation, or “LLC.” But they were super vague about it.

…

If you buy a share in a house, you’re able to stay in it 44 nights per year, in increments that can’t exceed 14 consecutive days per visit. You can also “gift” these stays to friends or family. Pacaso offers an app to handle the logistics of booking stays. It oversees management, maintenance, and cleaning of the property. In exchange for all this, it charges 12% of the home’s purchase price upfront and monthly fees going forward. If you buy a share in a house, you have to hold on to it for a year. After that, you can sell it and profit from any appreciation in the home’s value (or be on the hook for any depreciation).

Sort of like a time-share.

Read it.

The historic national humiliation of the United States continues in Afghanistan. Several administration officials addressed it in press briefings yesterday, each trying to conceal the scope of the disaster. It is difficult to conceal the scope of the disaster, but in that respect they are doing the best that they can.

Animatronic Joe Biden also delivered two sets of remarks, neither addressing the disaster. In one set (text here, video below), Biden stared vacantly into the teleprompter to deliver “Remarks on the COVID-?19 Response and the Vaccination Program.”