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Reporting their findings today in the journal Nature Catalysis, the team say the results could revolutionise water disinfection technologies and present an unprecedented opportunity to provide clean water to communities that need it most.

Their new method works by using a catalyst made from gold and palladium that takes in hydrogen and oxygen to form hydrogen peroxide – a commonly used disinfectant that is currently produced on an industrial scale.

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The available evidence certainly suggests so.

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Noncitizens will be able to vote in two Vermont cities as part of a growing national trend, unless lawsuits prevent new laws from taking effect.

The cities of Montpelier, with about 7,375 residents, and Winooski, with about 7,335, both will allow noncitizens to vote in local elections for offices such as mayor, city council, and school board.

Related changes to the two city charters required the approval of voters as well as the state’s Democrat-controlled Legislature, which in June overrode a veto by Vermont Gov. Phil Scott, a Republican.

“These are very liberal cities with progressive Democrats,” Rob Roper, president of the Ethan Allen Institute, a free-market think tank based in Montpelier, told The Daily Signal.

“Throughout much of the state, there is a general distaste for allowing anyone other than citizens over the age of 18 to vote,” Roper said. “Many oppose the idea [of noncitizen voting] and worry about the precedent.”

Babylon Bee.

A chilling prospect.

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A Democratic legislator said he will propose a bill to force men to get vasectomies if they have more than three children.

Rep. Chris Rabb of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives tweeted Saturday that his bill would require “all inseminators” to get vasectomies after having their third child or 40th birthday, whichever comes first. The bill, he said, would allow women to take civil action against men who “wrongfully conceive a child with them” and would reward $10,000 to those who report violations of the law.

“As long as legislators continue to restrict the #ReproductiveRights of cis women, trans men & non-binary folx, there should be laws to address the responsibility of men who impregnate them!” Rabb tweeted.

I’ll bet he ‘identifies’ as African-American.

Read it.

In 2004, Thomas Frank published a widely-discussed book called What’s the Matter with Kansas? I didn’t read the book, but my understanding of Frank’s smug thesis is that Kansans, and by extension Americans (the title of the book overseas was What’s the Matter with America?), were voting against their interests, as Frank saw them, because they were distracted by cultural issues.

These days, Democrats are asking, “what’s the matter with Florida?” As they see it, Florida twice voted for the devil incarnate for president. It also elected Ron DeSantis, someone almost as bad as Donald Trump, to be governor. And now, despite ruinous governance (as the Dems see it), they seem likely to reelect DeSantis.

That would be a great title for a book: What’s The Matter With Thomas Frank?

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A service that post offices in Europe and Asia have offered for decades.

USPS: Always on the bleeding edge of yesteryear.

God does not subtract from our allotted lifespan the time spent petting a cat.

Read it.

One-third of inmates freed by Democratic Kentucky governor Andy Beshear during the pandemic were later charged with a felony, according to a state report.

Read it.

When was the last time you stated a thought like, “At least we haven’t completely lost our republic,” and followed that with a quickly stated, “Knock on wood,” looking for a wooden object or knocking your forehead as an easy substitute? Or made a wish when blowing out candles on your birthday cake? Or carried a rabbit’s foot or other favored item for good luck? Many of us follow these practices and sometimes even realize that we do them playfully, without an expectation for results. Mostly. These wishes and desires are a form of “magical thinking” and are relatively harmless in most situations. But I propose that in this time of COVID-19, magical thinking has infected the worldwide population.

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The stalking of Senator Kyrsten Sinema into a bathroom stall during her return to Arizona over the weekend (video below) is disgusting. I would like to say it is disgusting beyond comment, but there is much that might be learned or inferred from it. Here are 10 notes and queries that occur to me this morning.

Read it.

Any chance they will leave him there?

ZMan speaks what we all know.

A feature of the ongoing crisis in America is people realizing that things they assumed to be true are not what they had always assumed. The so-called red-pilling or awakening is usually related to the egalitarian issues, but it can also be about general politics, as we saw in 2016. Many rank-and-file conservatives discovered that professional conservatives were not what they claimed. Their attacks on Trump and populism were an awakening for many normal people.

Another part of the great awakening is the realization that things make much more sense if you start from the assumption that the people in charge are motivated by a hatred for normal people. The pointless and punitive measures with regards to Covid has opened a lot of eyes. The people in charge seem to be sitting around dreaming up ways to hassle people, using Covid as an excuse. The pandemic has been a two year party for the sadists among the ruling class.

Read it.

Israel accused Iran on Monday of orchestrating an attempted attack on Israelis in Cyprus after police on the Mediterranean island said an armed individual had been arrested.
“This was a terrorist incident directed by Iran against Israeli businesspeople living in Cyprus,” Matan Sidi, spokesman for Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, said in a statement.

Reminder: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible

Read it.

Singapore will thus have air filtration and UV sanitization in the airport before we have it in the hospitals.

Is the future slipping away from the United States? It seems that way sometimes. Only the high-tech sector is keeping us afloat and, of course, that is under attack by the elites.

Read it.

Researchers at Université de Montréal and McGill University have discovered a new multi-enzyme complex that reprograms metabolism and overcomes “cellular senescence,” when aging cells stop dividing.

In their study published on September 16, 2021, in Molecular Cell, the researchers show that an enzyme complex named HTC (hydride transfer complex) can inhibit cells from aging.

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If there is a terrorist attack committed by a British Muslim, we are not allowed to make generalisations about Muslims. For instance, if I wrote a sign saying “End Muslim violence” this would be considered to be Islamophobic and racist. If there were a murder committed by someone who had arrived in Britain from Turkey, it would likewise be considered xenophobic and racist if I wrote a sign which said “End Turkish violence” or if I linked the murder to immigration. But if a murder is a committed by a man, it is considered perfectly permissible to write a sign saying “End male violence”.

Why is it wrong to make generalisations about some groups but not others? All prejudices are wrong except those about men so long as they are white of course.

Read it.

Every human culture has believed in the existence of other beings, monstrous humanoids, sapient but inhuman. They have gone by different names: boogeymen, bugbear, cyclopes, giant, jotun, ogre, oni, troll, yeti, and more. But they are always feared, lurkers in the shadows, threats to the clan, tribe, or hearth. Dungeons & Dragons didn’t create these monsters, and (despite ongoing controversies) they don’t represent anything modern. Humanity’s legendary heroes have been fighting these monsters since time immemorial.

The real question is why — why does every civilization have similar myths? Why does every culture have legends of monstrous humanoids, and why are they are always depicted as fearsome and dangerous?

Because the legends were real. The orcs were real.

That is, at least, the argument offered by Danny Vendramini in his book Them and Us: How Neanderthal Predation Created Modern Humans.

‘False choice’: is deep-sea mining required for an electric vehicle revolution? (The Guardian)

The price of living near the shore is already high. It’s about to go through the roof. (Washington Post) Still waiting for property values to drop in Malibu because of rising sea levels.

A $26 Billion Plan to Save the Houston Area From Rising Seas  Which nobody has demonstrated are actually rising. (And, really, who would miss Houston?)

South Pole Sees Record Cold Winter, Smashing 1976 Record …WaPo Admits “Chill Was Exceptional”

‘SNL’ returns with a new Joe Biden, looking to unite Democrats (CNN) Good to know that SNL is all about Democrat propaganda rather than attempting to maintain a pretense of being entertainment.

Is Meritocracy Making Everyone Miserable? (The New Yorker)

MSNBC, CNN Plug Matthew Dowd as Democrat Candidate for Texas Lt. Governor

Cleveland Plays Final Game as ‘Indians’ in Finale at Texas

Trump Calls for ’18 Pulitzer Prizes to Be Stripped for Being Fake News

Facebook whistleblower to claim company contributed to Capitol attack (The Guardian)

Joe Biden Accused of Tax Policy for ‘Pink-haired Wokers’ With ‘Ziploc Bags of Kale’

NBC Reporter Goes Into Damage Control After NASCAR Fans Chant “F**K Joe Biden”

I’ll Take Your Questions Now review: Stephanie Grisham’s tawdry Trump tell-all  (The Guardian)

Why billionaires love to park their wealth in places like South Dakota (Salon) Apparently proglodyte ‘journalists’ feel entitled to determine who pays taxes and how much they pay.

The absolute grossest example of the Trump-ing of the Republican Party (CNN)

White terror: Millions of Americans say they’d support violence to restore Trump to power (Sal0n) Of course, as we all know, only white terrorists support Trump.

Clogged Heart Ready to Die: Stelter Decries Fox News Celebrating 25 Years

Delta Tearing Through Some States Despite High Vaccine Rates

Twitter Labels Obituary ‘Misleading’ Because of COVID Claims  The Narrative, the Whole Narrative, and nothing but the Narrative.

CDC Director Says Vaccines ‘Can’t Prevent Transmission’; Fauci Says ‘Too Early To Tell’ On Holiday Gatherings  My, what a effective vaccine. Gotta run right out and get it….

Read it.

A scientist has invented a material that reflects the sun’s rays off rooftops, and even absorbs heat from homes and buildings and radiates it away. And — get this — it is made from recyclable paper.

…

Yi Zheng, an associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering at Northeastern University, calls his material “cooling paper.”

He hopes that people everywhere will wrap their houses in the cooling paper one day, reports Good News Network. In addition to the cooling benefits, the paper doesn’t require any electricity, and it is 100% recyclable.

The paper can reduce a room’s temperature by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit, making it a radical but effective alternative to today’s air conditioners, which consume a lot of power.

Ten degrees doesn’t help much with a Texas summer. Perhaps this will be useful in Florida or California.

Read it.

Plywood frames use thin sheets of plywood [0] as the material for the entire structural system. Sheets of plywood are run through a CNC router, which cuts the plywood into specially designed shapes. The shapes are then attached together using slots and tabs (helped into place with large mallets) to form a variety of structural elements – walls, box beams, portal frames, columns – which then get assembled (using more slots, tabs, clips, and wedges) to form the superstructure of the building. The tight tolerances of the machined plywood mean that everything fits snugly together, which allows simple friction connections to do a great deal of the work (though in practice most of the folks using the system are throwing in some mechanical fasteners as well).

The problem is that most building codes are written by people in the building trades and are written to provide people in the building trades with guaranteed employment.

Check it out.

With over 60 unique, high-quality wooden mechanical model kits, UGEARS has been connecting generations of family members with each other since 2014. With a 3D puzzle or model kit, we give kids and adults of all ages a hands-on experience of creating and assembling mechanisms that actually work without batteries or other external power sources.

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The following clip is an excerpt from a panel discussion about the vax on Spanish TV. When the talk turns to the dangers of the experimental mRNA treatment for the Wuhan Coronavirus, half the panelists are unable to bear any further conversation and walk off the set.

The Narrative, the whole Narrative, and nothing but the Narrative.

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Combining elements of the space and arms races of the Cold War, the drone race will be a flurry of innovation and acquisition efforts. Different, however, is the wide array of competitors. Arms transfers from rogue regimes make drone technology accessible to jihadists such as ISIS and Boko Haram, while the shrinking cost of production will catapult China into the lead. While the technology comes in all kinds of shapes and sizes—from the aptly named high-flying “Global Hawk” to compact suicide drones—winning the drone wars will likely come down to finding a common platform versatile enough to carry an array of weapons and surveillance capabilities.

As Frantzman reveals, the use of drones has gone beyond its deployment in the war on terror. A September 2019 attack on a Saudi oil field by Iranian drones revealed the lethal effectiveness of a “drone swarm,” in which hundreds of devices bomb a facility in unison and are difficult to strike down all t once. Future swarm attacks could be even more devastating with the inclusion of artificial intelligence technology, which better allows drones to communicate with each other. In their book 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, former NATO supreme allied commander James Stavridis and veteran Elliot Ackerman envision Chinese drones swarming U.S. ships in the South China Sea. That future may be closer than you think.

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The white sailboat outside of Michelin Group’s Swiss office doesn’t have a sail at all. Instead, it has a wing. The puffy, inflatable structure towers over the vessel, resembling an enormous meringue with a spine of stiff peaks. At sea, it cuts through the wind like an airplane wing, sending the sailboat flying across the water. Now Michelin wants to fit the technology onto cargo ships. The goal is to harness wind energy to reduce the use of diesel fuel—and thus curb greenhouse gas emissions.

The question, of course, whether the additional expense is justified by the transportation cost saving.

I’d love to watch the cost accountants wrestle with what monetary value to give to Virtue Signaling.

Read it.

The Israeli government on Sunday said it was enlisting the military and the Shin Bet internal security agency as it tries to rein in a wave of violence in the country’s Arab sector.

The Arab minority, which makes up around 20% of Israel’s population, has been convulsed by violent crime in recent years, with a murder rate that far exceeds its share of the population. The wave is driven by criminal gangs and family disputes.

No surprises here. Mohammed himself was the leader of a criminal gang for most of his life, making his living off of stealing from anybody who wasn’t Muslim and enshrining that attitude in the purported religion that he founded.

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rom moral panics about readers’ ability to discern between fake news and mad opinion to legal crackdowns on protest and freedom of speech, the idea that individuals can interpret the world around them without the guiding hand of moral policemen has been called into question. Despite all today’s “awareness raising”, a belief in agency, and individual’s ability to wield it, has been maligned as either mythical or misinformed.

This feverish uncertainty about trusting others’ instincts runs parallel with the move towards the safer, more easily controlled life of the interior. Identity politics, which encourages individuals to negotiate the rocky terrain of modern society using only the lens of their own personal desires and preferences, is deeply mistrustful of other people. The feminist begins every interaction with “as a woman” in a bid to safeguard criticism of the rest of her sentence; the trans activist uses allegations of “harm” to police what discussion can take place.

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“Meritocracy” was coined as a pejorative, has enjoyed a few decades as an aspiration, and is now returning to its original status, as progressives denounce the notion that attention to “merit” is anything more than camouflage for racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism and what new isms and phobias have been discovered since three o’clock yesterday. Part I of this series examined the “soft” anti-meritocratic argument, the one advanced by the term’s originator, Baron Michael Young, and carried on today by Charles Murray, ideologically a very different figure.

The Hill tells The Truth for a change.

A recent Internal Revenue Service (IRS) survey found that 95 percent of Americans believe it is everyone’s civic duty to pay their fair share of taxes. They also believe the current system is unfair, largely benefitting big business and rich people. But the truth is American business pays 93 percent of the nation’s taxes, and the top 1 percent pay over one-third of income taxes.

In actuality, corporate taxes are paid by shareholders, workers and consumers, with a substantial share passed on through retail prices or lower wages. As economist Scott Lincicome points out, this can result in lower investment and economic growth, thus reducing wages and living standards, less innovation and lower productivity. An OECD study of major taxes and their impact on economic growth and real wages found that corporate taxes were the most harmful.

But what about tax loopholes and the fact that many big companies do not pay corporate federal taxes? The truth is that the current tax code allows carryforward losses, tax credits for investments in research and development (R&D), investment in equipment and machinery and stock-based employee compensation. These constitute tax avoidance — not tax evasion.

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“Under the proposal, starting in 2023, employers with five or more employees would have to offer a retirement plan and automatically enroll employees, diverting 6% of their pay to a retirement account. An automatic escalation clause would increase the automatic contribution to 10% of pay by year five. The default plan would be a Roth IRA invested in a target-date fund, a mix of investments based on your expected retirement year.

“For employers, it’s a mandate. They would have to offer the plans. Employees would be able to opt out.”

…

In the first place, under the new federal mandate, employers would be obliged to select a specific IRA in which to enroll their employees, rather than merely forwarding payroll deductions to the state. It appears that they would choose from a list of approved providers. Second, the various state programs have had extended phase-ins; the federal mandate applies to all employers with 5 or more employees from day one, and there appears to be no analysis of how it would be for these small employers to do so. Third, the program requires employers must choose, not just any IRA, but only those in which there is an option to convert the account balance into an annuity at retirement.

It also continues to be the case that workers are being “nudged” into 10%-of-pay contributions without any useful guidance as to what the right saving level is for their personal circumstances; given the progressive level of Social Security benefits, which replace a far greater percentage of pay for lower-earners than middle- or upper-earners, there is no one-size-fits-all answer here, and, indeed, some lower-earners may be better off with no savings at all.

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The picture is confusing: California is closing its last operating nuclear power plant, which is a source of clean power, as it faces an energy emergency and a mandate to eliminate carbon emissions.

Why?

The explanations vary depending on which of the stakeholders you ask. But underlying the statewide diplomatic chess is a deeply held anti-nuclear agenda in the state.

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But you will still need to use mosquito repellent because if you don’t you’re a danger to everyone else.

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Apparently nobody tried holding a candle to their butt and ripping off a huge fart.

I hate to think that scientists are less inventive than high school boys.

‘Ideas are elusive, slippery things. Best to keep a pad of paper and a pencil at your bedside, so you can stab them during the night before they get away.’

– Earl Nightingale

Read it.

Just in case.

Read it.

Today I want to start from SimCity because it’s the game that forced people to look into the issue of ideology and bias in games for the first time. It wasn’t a serious game but it was a game that begged to be taken seriously.
The other reason is that there are many urban planners here and like it or not, SimCity is the most well known representation of your profession so you can’t quite ignore it. In fact many planners of this generation mention SimCity as their first introduction to the topic.

The map is not the territory, and a simulation isn’t reality.

Tucker Carlson: The latest case of mass hysteria – the belief men can get pregnant

France rejects American ‘woke’ culture that is ‘racializing’ country

School Boards Group Asks Feds to Invoke Patriot Act, FBI Against Protesters

Biden Rule Would Hand Caregiver Funds to Unions

Andrea Mitchell Lauds Democrat Politician as ‘Pioneer’ for Recalling Her Abortion  We ought to encourage all Democrat politicians not to reproduce. Think of it as evolution in action.

Judge Hands Down Probation In Capitol Case, Questions Prosecutors’ “Credibility” Over Leniency Toward BLM.

‘All Things Considered’ Promotes Abortion March, Spiked ‘March for Life’ in January  All Progressive Things Considered.

Klain Coaches Progressives On Playing Chicken With Manchin, Sinema; Biden Handlers Quash Another Q&A

After Defunding Police, Portland To Give Firefighters Bulletproof Vests Amid Surging Gun Violence

After a family member died of Covid-19, a man took aim at Florida’s top health official in sarcastic letter (CNN) Wow, a sarcastic letter! That’ll teach ’em!

Fauci pressed if he should ‘step aside’ as an ‘impediment to public health’: ‘People won’t listen to you’

Alabama Lawmakers OK Plan to Build Prisons With COVID Relief Funds

Stanford students are more likely to wear masks on bicycles than helmets  Helmets don’t Signal Virtue, but masks do.

“We’ve Been Locked Up For Almost 50 Days” – 1000s Rally Against Auckland Lockdown As Public Opposition Grows

Time for Fauci To Go

Earth Is Dimming – It’s Due to Climate Change Climate change! Is there anything it cant’ do?

California faces water issues amid drought, climate change – Los Angeles Times (L.A. Times) Well, actually, it’s dim-witted government.

Aussie Treasurer: Climate Change is Not Just an Issue for Affluent Liberals

Heil Greta

German Wind Turbine Mysteriously Collapses One Day Before It Was Supposed To Officially Be Inaugurated  Climate change! Is there anything it can’t do?

Here’s Why Climate Alarmists Are Ignoring All-Time Record Crop Production in India  It’s India — who cares what backward brown people do? Certainly not the Crust.

Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change?  The New York Times seems to think so, and of course they’re always right.

The Controversial Quest to Make Cow Burps Less Noxious

MSNBC: White Pro-Life ‘Saviors’ Are Racist Hypocrites

From the NYT: “Violent Crime Spikes Among Arabs” vs. Not from the NYT: “Violent Crime Spikes Among Blacks”,

Who Is Killing 10,000 Black Americans Every Year?

Read it.

Reminder: Islam is an oppressive totalitarian ideology with which no co-existence is possible.

Read it.

Call it the liberal media “one word” game. All it takes is one word – one word ever so subtly and carefully placed in a news story. And with that the liberal media sets the liberal narrative about the topic of the moment.

…

Here’s the liberal media word game at work, this time over in The Hill. The headline: “Manchin says reconciliation bill must include controversial Hyde Amendment”

Note the word game at play: The Hyde Amendment, four and a half decades on the books, passed overwhelmingly, is suddenly labeled “controversial.” All manner of conservative critics called out the game.

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But none of that money goes to you, of course.

Many firms promise that privacy is at the center of their businesses and that they’re careful to never sell information that can be traced back to a person. But researchers studying anonymized location data have shown just how misleading that claim can be.

The truth is, it’s hard to know all the ways in which your movements are being tracked and traded. Companies often reveal little about what apps serve as the sources of data they collect, what exactly that data consists of, and how far it travels. To piece together a picture of the ecosystem, The Markup reviewed the websites and marketing language of each of the 47 companies we identified as operating in the location data industry, as well as any information they revealed about how the data got to them.

The Other McCain does a deep dive.

Of course, it is entirely natural and understandable that, for example, farmers care about how government policy may affect agricultural interests, while auto factory workers are concerned with how legislation might help or harm the automobile industry. Likewise, we can understand that women will take a particular interest in issues relating their lives, that racial minorities are focused on issues that affect them, etc. Anyone who has read Federalist No. 10 knows that our system of government was established with the idea of balancing out the various interests of different factions, and far be it from me to deny to anyone the basic right to judge their own interests and to advocate for policies favorable to their interests. That’s just normal politics.

What we call identity politics, however, is something else entirely, involving activism and propaganda intended to incite collective resentment — the victimhood mentality — and to demonize others as perpetrators of oppression. Identity politics is simply organized hatred, and it follows a distinctly destructive pattern of logic.