31st July 2023
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31st July 2023
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31st July 2023
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31st July 2023
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31st July 2023
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31st July 2023
The Antiplanner.
A few years ago the New York Times was praising Portland as the “city that loves mass transit” (meaning it loved to spend money on mass transit, not actually ride it) and the city where people were willing to live lightly in 400-square-foot apartments. How the mighty have fallen: Last Saturday, Portland rated most of the top half of the Times front page with an article about homelessness, drug addiction, and death.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Portland Makes the New York Times
31st July 2023
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
31st July 2023
NPR.
Pakistan held funerals Monday for victims of a massive suicide bombing that targeted an election rally for a pro-Taliban cleric the previous day, as the death toll climbed to at least 54 and the government vowed to hunt down those behind the attack.
No one immediately claimed responsibility for Sunday’s bombing, which also wounded nearly 200 people. Police said their initial investigation suggested that the Islamic State group’s regional affiliate could be behind the attack.
The victims were attending a rally organized by the Jamiat Ulema Islam party, headed by hard-line cleric and politician Fazlur Rehman. He did not attend the rally, held under a large tent close to a market in Bajur, a district in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province that borders Afghanistan.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
They really don’t mind
If you’re Muslim too.
Suicide Bomber Kills at Least 50, Wounds Hundreds at Pakistan Political Rally
Blast rips through political gathering in Pakistan, killing at least 54
ISIS Claims Responsibility for Pakistan Bombing
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
Read it.
“The twin gods of Smooth Traffic and Ample Parking have turned our downtowns into places that are easy to get to, but not worth arriving at.” The quote is from urban designer Jeff Speck. It’s hard to think of a pithier one to describe the parking pandemic blighting America’s city centers — except perhaps the title of a Bloomberg article on the same topic: “Parking has eaten America’s cities”.
That article cites a 2018 study of the space and money devoted to parking in five American cities. In that year, both Seattle and Des Moines had 1.6 million parking spaces. New York City had 1.85 million, and Philadelphia 2.2 million. Tiny Jackson, Wyoming had 100,000 parking spaces, roughly one for each inhabitant.
Seattle had 30 parking spaces per acre, roughly five times the number of residential units. In Des Moines, the parking-to-housing ratio per acre was around 20 to 1. Only New York had more housing units than parking spaces per acre. That worked out to 0.6 parking spaces per household (but then again, only 45% of New York households own a car).
On average, about one-fifth of all land in city centers is dedicated to parking. But what’s the actual harm being done by all that parking space? For one, city centers that are more “parkable” become less walkable. In other words, fewer things are casually accessible.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on These Maps Provide Graphic Evidence of How Parking Lots “Eat” U.S. Cities
30th July 2023
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The United States is in big trouble militarily. That’s the upshot of a new RAND publication called “Inflection Point”:
[I]t has become increasingly clear that the U.S. defense strategy and posture have become insolvent. The tasks that the nation expects its military forces and other elements of national power to do internationally greatly exceed the means that have become available to accomplish those tasks. Reversing this erosion will call for sustained, coordinated efforts by the United States, its allies, and its key partners[.]
Basically, the report says that the U.S. military’s technological superiority has mostly eroded, and to address that, we need to shift from projecting power to defending against attacks by other powers (i.e. China). RAND then gives a large number of concrete recommendations on how to change the U.S. military in order to do that. But transforming the military costs a lot of money; even if we don’t end up with a bigger military after the shift, getting from here to there will involve a lot of research, design, testing, and equipment purchasing.
Posted in Your tax dollars at work - and play. | 2 Comments »
30th July 2023
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30th July 2023
Read it.
“One of the surprising privileges of intellectuals is that they are free to be scandalously asinine without harming their reputation.” – Thomas Sowell
Sowell’s truth has been demonstrated amply over the years, but during the current administration, it seems to be underlined, italicized, and emphasized. It does not seem to matter what an intellectual does. Even when it blows up in their faces, they walk away with their reputation unharmed and generally a promotion.
It is like watching a real-life version of a Roadrunner cartoon. Wile E. Coyote (a metaphorical intellectual) has the boulder he intended for the roadrunner land on him. He is flattened, but soon staggers away and by the next scene is intact, plotting another asinine scheme to get the roadrunner. So, too with our intellectual. No matter how staggering the setback, in the next scene our intellectual is back at it, sometimes at another job, but with no loss of prestige.
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29th July 2023
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29th July 2023
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29th July 2023
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29th July 2023
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29th July 2023
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29th July 2023
FreeThink.
In addition to blocking every virus the team has challenged it with thus far, their E. coli has also been designed so that its modified genes cannot escape into the wild, which does indeed sound like the plot of a lost Michael Crichton novel. (In fact, the parallels to Jurassic Park are there, but we’ll get to that.)
“We believe we have developed the first technology to design an organism that can’t be infected by any known virus,” genetics research fellow and study author Akos Nyerges said.
“We can’t say it’s fully virus-resistant, but so far, based on extensive laboratory experiments and computational analysis, we haven’t found a virus that can break it.”
Posted in News You Can Use. | Comments Off on Harvard Geneticists Create An Organism That Is Immune To All Viruses
29th July 2023
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Sweden has seen several protests involving the burning of the Quran over the last few years but recent burnings and desecrations of the Muslim holy book have fuelled increasing tension between Sweden and countries in the Muslim world.
The Swedish Security Police Säpo, which is responsible for counter-terrorism operations and other espionage operations, is now warning that Sweden has become a priority target for Islamic radicals looking to carry out acts of terror.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
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29th July 2023
And that will be his highest priority.
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28th July 2023
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28th July 2023
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28th July 2023
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28th July 2023
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28th July 2023
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28th July 2023
Steven Hayward at Power Line.
Back when Black Lives Matter and its adjunct cause—Defund the Police—got underway following the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in 2015 (justified, according to Obama’s Department of Justice review of the incident), critics such as Heather Mac Donald, Charles Murray, and others predicted that blacks would become the principal victims of this movement. Of course they were right, but the response was always, “Shut up, racist!” You’re not allowed to say this.
Yesterday the Oakland, CA, chapter of the NAACP released a public letter whose contents are a complete vindication of critics such as Mac Donald. It calls for declaring a “state of emergency” over rising crime, and advocates for hiring more police urgently. The letter commits one heresy after another against the progressive and Critical Race Theory catechism.
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28th July 2023
Read it.
The production of steel is a significant contributor to climate change. Direct emissions from steelmaking are around 7 percent of worldwide carbon dioxide emissions.
Iron ore, the raw material used for steelmaking, contains iron oxide, which means the iron atoms are bound to oxygen atoms. To break this bond, the standard steelmaking process in blast furnaces uses coke made from cooking coal. This process creates large amounts of carbon dioxide emissions that cannot be avoided with the existing technology.
An alternative to blast furnaces is using hydrogen in a process called direct reduction. This is often considered the most promising technology for green steel production, and many steel companies have announced investments in it.
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28th July 2023
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In a potentially game-changing breakthrough in energy harvesting, researchers have found a way to capture, store and utilize the electrical power generated by falling raindrops, which may lead to the development of rooftop, power-generating rain panels.
Previous attempts to generate power from failing rain have run into specific technical hurdles that often seemed impossible to surpass, but the researchers behind this new method say they have found a solution that may finally make such rain panels as popular, if not more so, than solar panels.
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28th July 2023
Discourse.
The interior of a Walmart looks like the street grid of a classic small town.
Downtown Chapel Hill is much bigger than a Walmart. But nonetheless, the relatively small Walmart in the city’s outskirts would fill about a third of the downtown’s busiest commercial block right off campus. In my hometown of Flemington, New Jersey—with a smaller downtown and a larger Walmart—the store would fill more than half of the old commercial core. The largest big-box superstores approach or exceed 200,000 square feet, which is about the size of a very small classic downtown.
The idea of a commercial space aping the design of a city is somewhat familiar when it comes to the suburban shopping mall. Malls were famously designed after urban downtowns or shopping districts by the European-born architect Victor Gruen, who envisioned them not as churches of consumerism but as weather-free, and traffic-free, diminutive cities.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Walmart Didn’t Kill the Small Town, It IS the Small Town
28th July 2023
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28th July 2023
Read it.
Tom Lewis is among America’s most generous philanthropists. Over more than 20 years, his T.W. Lewis Foundation has funded causes helping children and families, educational institutions, and nonprofit organizations like The Heritage Foundation.
But he’s now taking a different approach with colleges and universities after a controversy at Arizona State University. Lewis pulled his funding following the school’s mishandling of an event with Charlie Kirk and Dennis Prager in February.
The Arizona State event was hosted by the university’s T.W. Lewis Center for Personal Development. It sparked outrage from professors and accusations of censorship from the center’s former executive director.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on Why This Philanthropist Is Halting His $400,000 Gift to Arizona State University
28th July 2023
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It was a strange experience watching the House hearing in which Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. was testifying. The topic was censorship and how and to what extent federal government agencies under two administrations muscled social media companies to take down posts, ban users, and throttle content. The majority made its case.
What was strange was the minority reaction throughout. They tried to shut down RFK. They moved to go to executive session so that the public could not hear the proceedings. The effort failed. Then they shouted over his words when they were questioning him. They wildly smeared him and defamed him. They even began with an attempt to block him from speaking at all, and 8 Democrats voted to support that.
This was a hearing on censorship and they were trying to censor him. It only made the point.
Posted in Dystopia Watch | Comments Off on The ‘Free Speech’ Scare
27th July 2023
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27th July 2023
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27th July 2023
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27th July 2023
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27th July 2023
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27th July 2023
Rod Dreher.
is unlikely that Europeans will understand the controversy over Jason Aldean’s No. 1 country music hit “Try That In a Small Town,” and why it matters. But it really does matter, and you can’t really understand what’s happening in the U.S. culture war unless you take the Left’s smear of Aldean seriously.
Jason Aldean is a popular country music singer who, this past May, released a song called “Try That In a Small Town.” It’s a bog-standard country tune, undistinguished musically or lyrically. The song is a taunt to criminals and violent protesters, of the sort that flooded American cities during the Summer of George Floyd in 2020, and afterward. It tells them that if they try to get away with crime, or violently disrespecting authority, in a small town, they will be met with violence. Aldean has a line referring to the fact that small town people are armed.
…
When leftist ideologues constantly excuse criminality and other anti-social behavior, or even (as with violent and misogynistic rap lyrics) celebrate it, and at the same time damn white conservative males as bigots for writing songs defending law and order, and affirming the morality of violence to stop criminals—well, this is how Trump voters are made.
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27th July 2023
Steven Hayward at Power Line.
They story arc of the climatistas goes as follows: It started out as “global warming” in the 1980s. But that term was abandoned in favor of “climate change,” since it enabled the climate campaign to account for inconvenient things like cold weather. (Aside: initially not everyone was on board with “climate change.” I distinctly recall Robert F. Kennedy Jr. calling “climate change” “the deceptive language of anti-environmentalism” about 20 years ago. But he quickly fell in line, no doubt after getting The Memo from Climate Central.)
But “climate change” didn’t do the trick either, so now it’s being called the “climate crisis.” Ooooh, crisis! It doesn’t get any worse than crisis does it? Got do to something radical now now now.
With surveys showing declining public support for the climate crusade despite all the hot and bothered headlines about heat waves, what comes after “climate crisis”? Where is there to go after “crisis”? How do the climatistas turn the panic up to 11?
Posted in Axis of Drivel -- Adventures in Narrative Media | 1 Comment »
27th July 2023
Read it.
Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson is “extremely worried” about the consequences if more demonstrations go ahead in which the Koran is desecrated, he said on Thursday, amid growing Muslim anger at a series of attacks on Islam’s holy book.
Attacks on the Koran in Sweden and Denmark have offended many Muslim countries including Turkey, whose backing Sweden needs to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, a goal of Stockholm’s following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Kristersson told Swedish news agency TT that further requests had been filed with police for permission to hold protests where desecration of the Koran was again planned.
“If they are granted, we are going to face some days where there is a clear risk of something serious happening. I am extremely worried about what it could lead to,” he said.
What would happen if Christians reacted that way to burning a Bible? Or if patriots reacted that way to burning the American flag? The relevant point is that there is no ‘freedom of speech’ in Islam.
Wherever you go,
Whatever you do,
A Muslim waits there
To try to kill you.
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27th July 2023
Zeihan.
Every time we’ve used an asset-backed currency, it’s resulted in collapse. There’s just no asset, especially not gold, that can keep up with economic growth and expansion around the world. And when the currency becomes a brake on economic activity, you end up with a sharp crack in the system; which leads to depression and often state collapse.
Exactly right. I’m as fond of an asset-backed currency as the nest right-wing nut, but the problem is that the amount of the asset can’t keep up with economic growth in the modern world, and so sooner or later acts as a noose strangling the money supply, which cases deflation, which chokes off growth, and we all suffer. (Oh, for the 19th century, when we didn’t have that problem and could use gold and silver coins to our hearts’ content….)
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Why Fiat Currencies Will Always Beat Gold
