Read it.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams told a local radio station it might be time to remove the face masks, suggesting it would prevent robberies and other crimes.

My, what a surprise. Aren’t you surprised? I’m sure surprised.

Read it.

I wrote a few months ago about a surprising finding with some food sweeteners. Sucralose and saccharin (but not aspartame or stevia) seemed to bring on impaired glucose tolerance, which is not something that you would have expected from molecules with none of sugar’s metabolic and nutritional effects. That was certainly worth thinking about, but now there are more disturbing results to add to it.

This new paper reports that another widely used non-nutritional sweetener (erythritol) appears to be associated with cardiovascular problems. That’s quite a surprise, because erythritol itself has been considered very safe indeed. It’s been used for decades as a sweetener, and is approved for that use in over sixty countries. To the tongue, it’s about 60% as sweet as sucrose (table sugar), which makes it easier to substitute than some of the far-sweeter alternatives, which then need to be bulked up to keep recipes from being thrown off (and those fillers themselves often cause the recipes to be adjusted). But it has basically no caloric value for the human diet.

Yet another study that attempts to pretend that correlation implies causation. The key term here is ‘predictor’.

Read it.

Many young women and girls cross the southern border carrying “morning after” pills, also known as Plan B, because “they know they’re going to be raped,” Tom Homan says.

“Some young ladies are being raped as you and I are talking,” Homan, who was acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement under President Donald Trump, told The Daily Signal during a recent interview.

Homan says he has “talked to young girls, as young as 10, that were raped multiple times” by members of criminal cartels.

Read it.

Islam has been reduced to one of the identities that constitute a ‘hierarchy of victimhood.’ Joined with race, sexuality, and gender, it has been forced into a ‘woke’ framework wherein any community or group that stands outside the West’s traditional boundaries is structurally disadvantaged. The Leftist activists who preach this narrative have been joined in an uneasy alliance by Islamic fundamentalists, bonded with one another by a deep hatred for the Western world. Both regularly decry any critique of Islam as pure acts of bigoted ‘Islamophobia,’ proof positive of the West’s supremacist posture. This is characterized as an attempt to protect a beleaguered religion from malicious discrimination. However, the push to classify Islam as pure ‘victim’ essentially strips it of its civilizational tradition—one which has allowed for challenge, disagreement, and dialogue—infantilizing it to indulge in a resentful rejection of the West.

CNN.

This is Congresswoman McClellan:

This is a picture of an actual black woman:

Read it.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has dispatched 25 more agents to a sector of the Canadian border that’s seeing a large increase in Mexican migrants using the northern frontier to do an end run that bypasses the southern border.

Read it.

A German program ostensibly designed to evacuate threatened members of the Afghan judiciary is being exploited to import sharia-imposing ulema instead. The peculiar thing is that the entire process seems to have been instituted with the connivance of Annalena Baerbock and the German government.

Joel Kotkin.

In his drive to conquer China, Mao Zedong and his most famous general, Lin Biao, stoked “a peasant revolution” that eventually overwhelmed the cities. In those days, most Chinese toiled on the land, a vast manpower reservoir for the Communist insurgency. Today, in a world where a majority lives in urban settlements, such a strategy would be doomed to failure.

The small percentage of rural and small-town residents in most advanced countries — generally under 20 percent — lack the numbers to overwhelm the rest of society. Political and economic elites feel free to ignore the countryside, but they may find they do so at their peril. Although now a mere slice of the population, rural areas remain critical suppliers of food, fiber (like cotton), and energy to the rest of the economy.

Residents in agricultural areas have good reason to feel put upon. Their industries are often targeted by regulators and disdained by the metropolitan cognoscenti. They may not be hiding in the caves of Yan’an, but farming communities from the Netherlands to North America are rebelling against extreme government regulations, such as banning or restricting critical fertilizers or the enforced culling of herds. Meat and dairy producers are assaulted in a hysterical article in the New York Times that predicts imminent “mass extinction” caused by humans and suggests that to keep the planet from “frying” we will need to reduce meat and dairy consumption in short order.

Read it.

Sophie Lehman departed her job as Contra Costa County’s manager of elections operations last June. Several months later, Lehman was the point of contact for what eventually would be a $2 million election grant for the California county going into the 2024 election cycle.

Today, Lehman is associate director of the Center for Tech and Civic Life, which became well known in 2020 for doling out $350 million in election administration grants funded by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife.

The nonprofit Center for Tech and Civic Life went on to establish the U.S. Alliance for Election Excellence, which includes a partner organization funded last April by liberal donor Arabella Advisors.

Zuckerberg no longer is funding election administration through donations, after almost half the states enacted bans or restrictions on such private money and members of Congress introduced legislation to restrict private money from paying for election administration.

The Economist.

A country that likes to think of itself as a model of phlegmatic common sense and good-humoured stability has become an international laughing stock: three prime ministers in as many months, four chancellors of the exchequer and a carousel of resigning ministers, some of them repeat offenders. “The programme of the Conservative Party,” declared Benjamin Disraeli in 1872, “is to maintain the constitution of the country.” The latest bunch of party leaders have broken their own laws, sidelined official watchdogs, disrespected Parliament and dishonoured treaties.

Babylon Bee.

Local man Todd Longwood, 40, was shocked to discover that the list of side effects from the new drug Relievitol perfectly described a typical day in his life.

Read it.

These guys have different priorities than I do. The only reason I take a shower is I’m too impatient to wait for a tub to fill up. I want hot water on my body, not ‘mist’.

Check it out.

I was, in my youth, enamored of geodesic domes. Then I grew up and figured out why we build our buildings out of boxes.

Read it.

Room-temperature sodium-sulfur (RT Na-S) batteries are a promising alternative for renewable energy storage. They rely on chemical reactions between a sulfur cathode and a sodium anode to store and deploy electrical energy, and they use low-cost materials, which can even be easily extracted from saltwater.

 

Read it.

There’s no pleasing some people.

Read it.

TMC the metals company Inc. (Nasdaq: TMC) (“TMC” or the “Company”), an explorer of the world’s largest estimated undeveloped source of critical battery metals, today announced that its subsidiary NORI and offshore partner Allseas have successfully concluded the first integrated system test in the Clarion Clipperton Zone of the Pacific Ocean since the 1970s, achieving all significant pilot milestones while collecting approximately 4,500 tonnes of seafloor polymetallic nodules. Over 3,000 tonnes were transported up a 4.3km-long riser system to the surface production vessel, Hidden Gem, while the additional 1,500 tonnes of nodules were purposely left behind on the seafloor as part of the trials.

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The mean age was 56 years (SD, 10), and 58% were women. Compared with the HCLF diet, participants on the LCHF diet had greater improvements in hemoglobin A_1c (mean difference in change, ?6.1 mmol/mol [95% CI, ?9.2 to ?3.0 mmol/mol] or ?0.59% [CI, ?0.87% to ?0.30%]) and lost more weight (mean difference in change, ?3.8 kg [CI, ?6.2 to ?1.4 kg]). Both groups had higher high-density lipoprotein cholesterol and lower triglycerides at 6 months.

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This is a somewhat rickety pile of in-principle-separate ideas that really does seem vulnerable to technological disruption. On its face, the relevant disruptive technology should have been the printing press, and the disruption should have happened three or four hundred years ago. But not only did the basic structure of the university persist, but most of the world’s leading universities are also much newer than the printing press. Harvard and Yale are really old by the standards of American institutions, but they’re not older than printing — and many other prestigious American universities date from the second half of the nineteenth century. By the time Stanford and the University of Texas were founded, it was already extremely clear that people could study books at home (or in libraries) and then take exams administered by certifying bodies that had nothing to do with teaching or research.

Read it.

The pattern is clear: If your PhD doesn’t come from one of the very top schools, the odds that you will be hired to the faculty at any university become small. The bottom 308 (79.5%) of the universities produce merely 20% of all professors. If your PhD is from a department outside of the top 20%, you can practically kiss your faculty dreams goodbye.

Read it.

Read it.

We are losing our sense of wonder about capitalism. We take the miracles of infrastructure for granted. We are not sufficiently in awe of the man made marvels of our daily lives. To remedy this, let us start by praising elevators.

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Unfortunately, no mention of The Big Lebowski.

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The EU gives reduced tariffs to 49 developing countries, including Mali, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan: major sources of illegal migration to Europe. Under the new system proposed by the EU Council, these tariffs would only be given if these nations helped in the deportation of their citizens who are in Europe illegally.

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Conjuring up the wrath of a progressive digital swarm is analogous to launching a war. As such, doxxing, if done without reference to a set of moral principles, can be a fundamentally unjust act.

…

The severe consequences of a dox demand that a rigorous set of moral principles be employed before the dox is initiated. The rubric used for evaluating a just war is a natural place to start. A doxxing should have a just cause—i.e., there should be sufficient evidence to substantiate the public initiation of the dox. Harsh and predictable consequences make doxxing akin to a criminal sentence, and therefore an evidentiary standard comparable to “beyond a reasonable doubt” seems appropriate. The person initiating the dox needs to have legitimate authority to do so, and this must involve something more than individual judgment or taste. Otherwise, the tremendous powers and consequences that follow from a dox will be wielded as a vigilante power. Finally, a dox should not be done publicly if less destructive means are available, as in raising concerning information privately with churches, employers, or other parties to whom the target is accountable.

Read it.

The best case for memorisation is not pedagogical. Rather, it is about what it means to be fully human, and how we can make ourselves members of a continuing civilisation rather than a load of individual units who happen to briefly be in the same place at the same time.

…

If you don’t furnish your own mind, someone else will do it for you, probably without your even noticing. Nature abhors a vacuum. If your mind is not full of fragments of poetry, passages from plays and the melodies of the great composers, it will be filled with the half-witted slogans of contemporary politics, the canting jargon of frauds and grifters, and the banal pop music of your youth.

 

New York Post.

“Dates feel more like job interviews now. Much more like ‘What can you do for me and where is this going?’” said Ian Breslow, a 28-year-old high school teacher who lives in Astoria.

Sounds about right to me. I have always considered a ‘date’ to be a species of ‘job interview’.

Babylon Bee.

Which is why I never go to the gym. (To be fair, the gym never goes to me either.)

Read it.

The retirement of Gore-Tex Shakedry is just the tip of the iceberg.

Read it.

I was devastated when Google Reader shut down. I loved it as much as I love Microsoft Excel, and for the same reason: it gave me a superpower. With Reader, I could discover and stay on top of the latest information across the internet, no matter how frequently or infrequently a person posted.

I’ve watched many beloved Google products get shut down: Wave, Inbox, My Maps, Stadia. The list goes on and on. It’s gotten bad enough that people widely believe the shutdowns damage Google’s brand.

So why do they keep doing it?

Read it.

Every four years, the Beltway media establishment anoints a favorite Republican. The New Hampshire governor is doing everything right.

The ghost of John McCain stalks the night. (Wondering when Mitt Romney will do the right thing and JUST FUCKING DIE ALREADY.)

Joel Kotkin.

Discriminated against while being held up as models of success, these two groups have long followed a common road. Now their accomplishments lead to cries of ‘unearned privilege.’ What does this mean for America and its minorities?

The Long Now.

This problem of long-term digital storage seemed a crucial hurdle for any civilization trying to act generationally. How could a society think in terms of centuries unless there was a reliable way to transmit and store its knowledge over centuries? This puzzle was the focus of a conference hosted by Long Now in 01998, dedicated to technical solutions for Managing Digital Continuity. At this meeting Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive suggested a new technology developed by Los Alamos labs, and commercialized by Norsam Technologies, as a solution for long term digital storage. Norsam promised to micro-etch 350,000 pages of information onto a 3-inch nickel disk with an estimated lifespan of 2,000 -10,000 years.

Read it.

Gone or significantly reduced: tanks, artillery, mortars, snipers. The Marines are being systematically eliminated as a fighting force. It would be impossible for a Chinese agent to do more harm to the Marine Corps than the Commandant is doing.

Read it.

Sanctions have failed to break Putin, and the West is running out of missiles and bullets.

Read it.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Tyler Cowen.

CHIPs details to raise costs:
1) Mandated daycare
2) Davis Bacon pay regulations
3) Buy American
4) Consult, engage, coordinate with unions
5) NEPA compliance
6) Source materials from small, minority, and women owned business

The Ideological Pork Barrel in action.

Joel Kotkin.

The populist conspiracy theorists mistake showmanship for reality. Cambridge legal professor Antara Haldar notes that Davos is not really a place where important decisions are taken. It represents a symbolic “avatar” for the elites. If the Davos crowd has demonstrated anything, it is the futility of their posturing. They lack the ability to influence the leaders of countries like India and China, much less places like Iran, Russia, and Saudi Arabia. Some of the leaders of these countries may speak and consort with the Davos crowd, but they clearly do not listen to them. Nor do the West’s middle classes, who are proving reluctant to embrace an environmental agenda that threatens immiseration.

 

Read it.

Churchill was an incredible war leader and a great international statesman. Economic policy was not his strong point, however. Churchill had led Britain back to the Gold Standard with disastrous results. He was also an unrepentant free trader, despite the fact the whole world had put up protectionist tariffs against imports, leaving Britain dangerously out of line with global trading conditions. Fundamentally, on the economy, Churchill was an orthodox liberal. It is his outlook which has shaped the Conservative Party’s economic philosophy ever since.

Churchill was also responsible for delivering Eastern Europe into the hands of Stalin.

Read it.

We’ll miss it, now that it’s gone.

20 October 2022 is a date I shall not forget. It’s the day when Liz Truss stood outside Downing Street to announce her resignation — the fourth Conservative prime minister to be hounded from office by their own party in six years. It was also the day when I was to lecture at the Danube Institute in Budapest on “British Conservatism post-Boris Johnson”.

If I had stuck to my original title, my lecture — on the future of a Party which seems to have decided that it doesn’t want one — would have been almost as short as Liz Truss’s statement. Instead, I decided to take refuge in its past.

Invoking Hegel’s dictum that “the owl of Minerva flies only at dusk”, I declared that the current death spiral of the Party was the perfect opportunity to retrieve its history. And indeed that the crisis demands it, since the Party’s almost total loss of its historical tradition is the principal reason for its present plight.

Read it.

Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a preeminent source of ancient myth. The escapades of men, gods, dryads, nymphs, and centaurs hold within their fantastical plots “story that incarnates great values and eternal truths.” This enchanted world, far removed from our own technological frenzy, holds insight into human joys and agonies today. An exploration of this poet’s myth often reveals that the personal and cultural crises we face are not new, although they are expressed in uniquely modern ways.

Ann Coulter.

It made news this week when The Lancet, a once-respected medical journal, finally admitted that there’s such a thing as “natural immunity” with COVID. (Is it too much to hope that, in another three years, The Lancet will cease referring to women as “bodies with vaginas”?)

Several months into “15 days to flatten the curve,” actual experts, like the Great Barrington Declaration scientists, began screaming from the rooftops about natural immunity. They argued — correctly, as it turns out — that we should protect the vulnerable while allowing those not at risk to go about their lives, get COVID and acquire immunity.

Millions upon millions of wrecked lives later (including 170,000 excess non-COVID deaths), the people who lied to us for their own selfish motives — getting on TV, high ratings for their panic porn, the joys of bossing other people around — are quietly admitting the truth.

Veronique de Rugy.

Let’s call it the “Biden way”: When our president can’t get his policies through Congress, he tries to impose them in other ways. Just look at his student loan forgiveness plan, which faced a stiff Supreme Court challenge this week, and his imposition of stricter “Buy American” provisions to the infrastructure-spending bill. Now, he wants to reshape corporate America by attaching the big string of “high-quality” child care to, of all things, semiconductor subsidies.

This strategy, while popular with other presidents, has only one redeeming aspect: It beautifully illustrates how politics diverts industrial policy and similar attempts to direct the economy away from their stated goals. See, politicians say they want to subsidize this and that to improve manufacturing or bolster national security, but invariably sabotage themselves by weighing the policies down with rules and requirements that have nothing to do with the plans.

It is certainly true with last year’s “bipartisan” CHIPS Act, which provides $52 billion to revive American microchip manufacturing. Now, Biden’s Commerce Department has announced that companies getting the subsidies will have to do (and not do) a bunch of other things if they want the money.

Call it the Ideological Pork Barrel.

Read it.

Similar in approach to the Russian Ekranoplan.

Wall Street Journal.

Learn to code!  Learn to wire!