24th March 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
24th March 2022
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
24th March 2022
Read it.
I had always thought that if a left-wing revolution were to undo the American Experiment, it would be about some charismatic, competent leader taking advantage of a serious economic disaster; like an economic collapse followed by a movement led by an American version of Mao, Castro, Lenin, or Ho Chi Minh. It never occurred to me that we could be undone by grossly incompetent experts, third-rate journalists, self-satirizing academics, and by the deformed sensibilities of a majority wealthy enough to survive on Amazon, DoorDash, and Uber Eats for two years. Marx and Engels never contemplated a role for narcissism, intellectual lethargy, idle comforts, and an appetite for media-distorted fear.
In what bizarro world can a ridiculous cupcake like Justin Trudeau mutate into a lawless tyrant? How can milquetoast western governments suddenly, lawlessly arrest peaceful persons and even erect internment camps to enforce mandates that we know don’t work to combat a disease which presents a minuscule risk to all but a small, identifiable subset of the population?
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on I Can’t Believe We’re Losing to These Guys
24th March 2022
Freeberg nails it.
Obama said the question of when life begins, is above His pay grade.
Judge Jackson said she can’t define the word “woman” because she’s “not a biologist.”
Weird that liberals know so much that the rest of us don’t know, until a question emerges with some clear practical ramifications to it. Then suddenly, they can’t answer the basics.
Posted in Think about it. | 1 Comment »
24th March 2022
Read it.
fter receiving a medical treatment that included a round of antibiotics and an X-ray scan, Californian Will Osman thought he got stuck with a $69,000 hospital bill. Luckily, Osman’s insurance covered most of the bill, but that still left him on the hook for $2,500.
“I avoided surgery, but they still billed nearly $70,000,” Osman tells Popular Mechanics, adding that the bill included an abdominal CT scan, medication, and two nights in a hospital room. Annoyed with the exorbitant cost of hospital treatments and procedures, Osman, a YouTuber and engineer, decided to build his own fully-functional homemade X-ray machine.
We have the technology.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on YouTuber Builds His Own X-Ray Machine After Getting Hit With a $69K Hospital Bill
24th March 2022
Read it.
The New York Times supports the efforts of the government to get James O’Keefe and Project Veritas in the case of Ashley Biden’s diary. Reporters including Michael Schmidt and Adam Goldman are working as the public relations arm of the Biden administration and the national security establishment to nail them.
It turns out that the FBI and SDNY prosecutors have been working the case for a long time. They have had Project Veritas under incredibly intrusive surveillance for over a year. No charges have yet emerged. If Project Veritas crossed over the line between lawful and unlawful activity in its work on the diary, the line must be a little blurry. The Times gleefully supports the national security establishment in its treatment of Project Veritas. I find the treatment chilling.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Down memory lane with the Times
24th March 2022
Read it.
Methanotrophic bacteria consume 30 million metric tons of methane per year and have captivated researchers for their natural ability to convert the potent greenhouse gas into usable fuel. Yet we know very little about how the complex reaction occurs, limiting our ability to use the double benefit to our advantage.
By studying the enzyme the bacteria use to catalyze the reaction, a team at Northwestern University now has discovered key structures that may drive the process.
Posted in Dystopia Watch, News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Methane-Eating Bacteria Convert Potent Greenhouse Gas Into Usable Fuel
24th March 2022
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
24th March 2022
Joel Kotkin.
The depression-era comedian Will Rogers once famously said he did not belong to an organised political party because he was a Democrat. Yet today the traditional factiousness of the Democratic coalition has been engulfed by an almost Stalinist attitude that brooks no dissent on its most treasured policies – even though these do not resonate well with the bulk of the electorate.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Coming Bloodbath of the Democrats
24th March 2022
Read it.
It is no accident that virtually every claim that is consistently labelled as disinformation is one that threatens the policy agenda of the Democratic party (or parts of their agenda that they are too embarrassed to state publicly). “Disinformation” is no longer a concept used to separate truth from falsehood. In the past few years, it has been rhetorically intensified to circumvent the question of truth entirely. It is a means to annex the public’s role in assessing the validity of reporting, placing this authority solely in the hands of “experts” who have the exclusive right to say what is “true.” Understanding the differences between “misinformation” and “disinformation” and observing the ways these concepts are arbitrarily applied is crucial to grasping how our media and other institutions undermine genuine public deliberation—a prerequisite for any functioning democracy.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Why Do You Know That?
23rd March 2022
Read it.
Is it really too much to ask those who struggle to define the word “woman” to refrain from running for public office? Ketanji Brown Jackson, Joe’s Biden’s nominee for the Supreme Court, was asked to provide the dreaded definition during her confirmation hearing on Tuesday. “No I can’t,” she replied. “I’m not a biologist.”
Jackson hadn’t been asked to explain how blood is deoxygenated, or to offer an intricate overview of the molecular mechanisms by which protein function is regulated in cells. The question “what is a woman?” is hardly the riddle of the sphinx; a reasonably intelligent six-year-old would be able to give an adequate answer.
Well, when your primary qualifications are your gender and skin color….
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Have We Reached Peak Trans?
23rd March 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
23rd March 2022
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
23rd March 2022
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
23rd March 2022
Check it out.
Evergreen notes are written and organized to evolve, contribute, and accumulate over time, across projects. This is an unusual way to think about writing notes: Most people take only transient notes. That’s because these practices aren’t about writing notes; they’re about effectively developing insight: “Better note-taking” misses the point; what matters is “better thinking”. When done well, these notes can be quite valuable: Evergreen note-writing as fundamental unit of knowledge work.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Evergreen Notes
23rd March 2022
Read it.
A Somali culture-enricher got down to some serious stabbing yesterday in the German city of Mainz. The big question: jihad or not jihad? Based on what the police say, it was probably just an ordinary culturally enriched knife fight, and not jihad.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Another Somali Success Story in Germany
23rd March 2022
Read it.
My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.
Telling the truth and keeping agreements is not a Muslim value.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Taliban Breaks Promise, Keeps Girls’ High Schools Closed
23rd March 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
23rd March 2022
Read it.
On March 16, the Times published a report on the junior Biden’s messy tax affairs in which, a full twenty-four paragraphs in, they acknowledged the authenticity of the emails and files contained on the now-infamous laptop. It is worth recalling that when the New York Post first reported on the laptop and its tawdry contents — which included, among other things, indications of kickback schemes and influence-peddling involving Hunter and his father — fifty-one former high ranking members of the US intelligence community published a letter dismissing the story as having “the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Twitter and Facebook, essentially acting as surrogates for the Biden campaign, also banned the dissemination of the Post report in the run-up to the 2020 election.
Most of the fifty-one signatories of that letter, which included former CIA directors Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden and John Brennan, had no comment when reached by the Post last week. But one of the most prominent signatories, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, told the Post there would be no apology coming from him: “Yes, I stand by the statement made AT THE TIME, and would call attention to its 5th paragraph. I think sounding such a cautionary note AT THE TIME was appropriate.”
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on James Clapper Is Still a Shameless Liar
23rd March 2022
Read it.
President Joe Biden has lashed out at fossil fuel companies, accusing them of using high gas prices to “pad their profits at the expense of hardworking Americans.” These are the same fossil fuel companies, by the way, that two years ago were charging a measly average of $1.84 a gallon. They’re also the same fossil fuel companies that in 2020 donated $1.6 million to Biden’s presidential campaign.
As Willey Brown once famously said, ‘If you can’t screw a major donor, you don’t belong in politics.’
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Old Man Yells at Gas Prices
22nd March 2022
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on Today in Witch-Hunt Culture
22nd March 2022
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Black Privilege
22nd March 2022
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Today in Progressive Totalitarianism
22nd March 2022
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Today in Global Warming Hysteria
22nd March 2022
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Pandemic Panic – It’s Titanic
22nd March 2022
Read it.
A regular loaf of leavened bread has four key ingredients: flour, water, salt and yeast. But reading the wrapper on the shop-bought bread that replaced my failed loaf, I discovered not four ingredients but 27. Why?
It struck me, while rinsing off-white gunk down the sink, that the reason for this is that bread has a fifth essential ingredient: time. And the difference between my home-made ingredient list and the longer shop-bought one is mostly additives that reduce the need to treat time as an ingredient.
But this goes well beyond just bread. Much of what’s distinctively modern about modern life can also be understood as the consequence of waging war on time in the name of productivity. And if this drive for time-saving seems at first to have no downsides, the costs are growing increasingly apparent.
The reason I buy commercial bread rather than make my own is because Real Bread goes bad after about three days, and my wife and I won’t use up a whole loaf (not even a baguette) in that time; I depend on the additives to keep it viable for as long as it can.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The Curse of Sliced Bread
22nd March 2022
Joel Kotkin.
With the seeming deconstruction of the Biden Administration proceeding at a rapid clip, many on the right hope for an end to the conscious stoking of class resentments that has characterized progressive politics. Yet despite the political meltdown, America’s class divides have become so wide, and so bitter, that Biden’s presidency may prove more a prelude than a denouement for the future of class warfare.
Under both parties, American society, traditionally egalitarian, at least in theory, has become ever more divided by financial class. Today, the Federal Reserve demonstrates that the top one percent have more assets than the 60 percent who occupy the middle rungs. The remarkable rise of the tech oligarchy has paced this change, creating a gusher of wealth for the chosen few, including youthful, unproven start-up CEOs turned instant billionaires—as well as an unprecedented boom on Wall Street. The pandemic has accelerated this trend, vastly enriching the elites, and raising executive salaries to the highest ever. Meanwhile much of the working and middle classes may become increasingly dependent on what Marx called “the proletarian alms bag.”
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Class War is Just Beginning
22nd March 2022
Read it.
Meet the new economic wreckers, same as the old economic wreckers. Putin is now being blamed for the shortage of petroleum by the Biden administration. Josef Stalin used the phrase economic wreckers to assign blame for the failure of any number of Five-Year Plans to increase production.
With the stroke of a pen, President Biden’s executive order to kill the Keystone pipeline turned the United States into a nation that has to beg Venezuela, Russia, Saudia Arabia, and Iran to increase their oil production. This decision was a strategic blunder. The Keystone pipeline was not the only project affected; new oil and natural gas production has also been stifled.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Meet the New Economic Wreckers
22nd March 2022
Read it.
It goes without saying that leftists have perfected the art of situational ethics. The basic operating rule for the left is: “‘Democracy’ means getting what we want; if any institution doesn’t give us what we want, that institution must be destroyed,” though they will always call it “reform.”
…
From “democracy in crisis” to rule by decree faster than Vin Diesel in Fast & Furious 10. (Shouldn’t Vin Diesel change his last name in this time of the climate crisis? Maybe some other time. . .)
We now see this in the case of the Supreme Court, which is infuriating liberals because it no longer serves as a policy-making body for the left to use as an end-run around the branches of government accountable to voters.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on The Greenhouse Effect at the Supreme Court
22nd March 2022
Read it.
I infer from yesterday’s New York Times story that the FBI is working with prosecutors in in the Office of the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York to nail James O’Keefe and Project Veritas. Given the bylines of Michael Schmidt and Adam Goldman on the Times’s coverage, I see the Times as the public relations arm of the operation.
The SDNY first obtained a warrant and grand jury subpoena for documents from Microsoft in November 2020, some two weeks after the election. The FBI has had Project Veritas under some form of surveillance since January 2021. The surveillance has been conducted under previously sealed search warrants and court orders prohibiting Microsoft from disclosing it to Project Veritas. Eight Project Veritas journalists (and the organization’s human resources officer) have been subject to the surveillance.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on The O’Keefe Project: Surveillance edition
22nd March 2022
Read it.
Australian Defense Minister Peter Dutton today announced the formal creation of the country’s Defense Space Command, the formal launch of a new Space Strategy, and millions of dollars of investment in an aging military base — the next wave in a flurry of announcements from the incumbent Liberal party as it gets closer to election day.
Dutton made the announcement at the Royal Australian Air Force’s Air Force and Space Power Conference in Canberra. “It works in close collaboration with the [civilian] Australian Space Agency, industry partners, and our research and scientific institutions,“ Dutton said.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Ausssies Launch Space Command, Space Strategy; Upgrade Northern Base
22nd March 2022
Check it out.
Swords and Ravens is a online adaptation of the excellent board game A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (Second Edition) edited by Fantasy Flight Games. You can play with players from around the world either in live or via email, for free.
Posted in Is this a great country, or what? | Comments Off on Swords and Ravens
22nd March 2022
Read it.
For most Americans, tax season is accompanied by a soundtrack of wailing and gnashing of teeth. According to Pew Research Center, 56 percent of Americans hate or dislike doing their taxes, and 31 percent of those respondents say the process is too complicated. Filing your taxes is expensive, in both time and money: ProPublica reported in 2019 that “Americans spend an estimated 1.7 billion hours and $31 billion doing their taxes each year.”
When you’re elbow-deep in documents and receipts, poring over tiny boxes filled with numbers and second-guessing whether you did, in fact, get married last year, you might ask yourself: does it really have to be this hard?
The answer is no. Many other countries, like Germany, Japan, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, have “exact-withholding” systems. For the most part, the government alerts taxpayers of their estimated income for the previous year and how much was withheld in taxes. Most taxpayers’ part in the process begins and ends with checking the government’s math and disputing any discrepancies.
You might ask: what’s stopping the United States from adopting this system? After all, the IRS already has the vast majority of taxpayers’ information on file. The agency’s duties could easily be expanded to simply sending most Americans a refund or a bill, depending on their income and taxes already paid.
There’s a simple explanation: tax prep companies such as H&R Block and Intuit spend millions of dollars each year lobbying Congress to keep the current system in place. And they have good reason to do so: according to IBISWorld, tax prep services is an $11 billion industry in the US. No wonder both firms were able to afford lucrative $6.5 million ad slots during this weekend’s Super Bowl broadcast.
When I first encountered tax law in law school, the professor put a two-foot-high stack of documents on his desk and said, “This is the Internal Revenue Code.” He picked up the top page and said, “This tells you what you pay tax on.” He then pointed to the rest of the stack and said, “And these tell you how to avoid paying that tax. That is what we teach here.”
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on How Crony Capitalism Makes Tax Season Hell
22nd March 2022
Scott Johnson at Power Line.
Vice President Harris meditated on “the significance of the passage of time” four times in less than 30 seconds during her remarks following an event in Louisiana yesterday. Harris was promoting the federal gusher of money to support high-speed Internet access in small town America. To adapt Oscar Wilde’s adage about the death of Little Nell, one must have a heart of stone to listen to Harris’s meditations without cackling. She is a walking parody of herself.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | Comments Off on Veep Thoughts by Kamala Harris
22nd March 2022
Read it.
Like a hunter/gatherer stashing their prey, the ideas and the links we stumble upon feel valuable, rare, something worth saving. We ascribe value to the time we spend discovering things online. Surely that time wasn’t in vain.
Then we’re burdened with our findings. It’s tough to focus on something new when you’re still holding the old in your mind.
So we write things down. Bookmark them. Add them to our reading list. Highlight our findings. Make long lists and check them twice. We need a cave, a storehouse, somewhere to stash our findings.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Notes Apps Are Where Ideas Go to Die. And That’s Good.
22nd March 2022
Read it.
There are now two main ways of reading the phenomenon of early modern witchcraft. One is the dogged academic research of scholars like Peter Maxwell-Stuart, Ronald Hutton and Keith Thomas. The other is an attempt to bend the reality of history to fit a modish exploration of feminine identity and the tyranny of the patriarchy down the ages. I Am Witch: Tales from the Roundhouse, recently staged in Lancaster, falls firmly into the second category.
The exhibition sets out its stall early on. It refers to “The Burning Times”, the title of a 1990 Canadian documentary which presented an unapologetically feminist reading of witchcraft in the early modern period and certainly one of the most laughably poor and ahistorical films of its generation. It goes on to state its purpose as explaining “how epigenetically inherited trauma from those times continues to affect us today, and how creativity, ceremony and sisterhood offer all of us a pathway to healing.”
Every ‘modern witch’ (and believer in astrology) I’ve ever met was a Democrat (or to the left thereof).
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Storm in a Cauldron
22nd March 2022
Read it.
he institutionalisation of gender-neutral language is designed to change how we think, feel and act.
The Ministry of Truth has a substation in every public school, every Woke newspaper, and every activist bullpen.
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | Comments Off on Danger: Semantic Engineers at Work
22nd March 2022
Read it.
Traditionally, we think of chemistry being done in a lab with test tubes, flasks, and gas burners. But it has also benefited from developments in computing and quantum mechanics, both of which rose to prominence in the early-mid 20th century. Early applications included using computers to help solve physics-based calculations; by blending theoretical chemistry with computer programming, we were able to simulate (albeit far from perfect) chemical systems. Eventually, this vein of work grew into a subfield now called computational chemistry. The subfield started to gain momentum in the 1970s and was featured in the Nobel Prizes of 1998 and 2013. Even so, while computational chemistry has gained more and more recognition over the past few decades, its importance has been largely overshadowed by that of lab experiments – the cornerstone of chemical discovery.
However, with current advancements in AI, data-centric techniques, and ever-growing amounts of data, we might be witnessing a change where computational approaches are used not just to assist lab experiments but to guide them.
The number of possible chemical compounds is as vast as the number of possible English sentences.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on How AI is Changing Chemical Discovery
22nd March 2022
Read it.
Instead of injecting themselves with a medication to prevent bone loss, astronauts on Mars may be able to eat their way to a stronger skeleton, thanks to lettuce that’s been genetically engineered to make a bone-stimulating hormone.
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Space Lettuce Engineered to Stimulate Bone Growth
22nd March 2022
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
22nd March 2022
Read it.
A group of women and children fled the war in Ukraine for Sweden, where they have been subjected to close encounters with Somali culture-enrichers. Now they want to go back to Ukraine — compared with Africans, the bombs don’t seem so bad.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Somalis in Sweden Consider Ukrainian Women Fair Game
22nd March 2022
Read it.
According to the grandmother, they have opted to name their child “Stormy-Water” while the baby has also been given the middle name “Cloud.” She said what makes it worse is the story behind why they have given him such an unusual name.
“Stormy represents their life before they met, water is the continuity (infinity) of their love for each other and cloud was the ‘silver lining’ when they realized they were expecting,” she explained.
Call him ‘Drip’ for short.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Woman Refusing to Use Grandson’s ‘Awful Pretentious’ Name Divides Internet
