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
ZMan looks at a world turned upside down.
With some obvious exceptions, the people who use the term “white nationalist” use it to mean “people they do not like.” These are people who imbue their language with emotional meaning, rather than descriptive meaning. Just as Eskimos supposedly have a long list of ways to describe snow, the people fond of using the term “white nationalist” have a long list of words for people outside of their cult. The term has no meaning other than “danger! danger!” to the rest of the cult.
Before the term became a cult signal, it used to have meaning. A white nationalist is an American term for a white person who wants to live in communities free of nonwhites, especially black people. Having lost the fight over “civil rights” in the middle of the last century, and not understanding the implications of it, these people organized around the idea of separate lands for people of European descent. They want intentional communities organized around race.
Of course, the people who use the term “white nationalist” as a slur acknowledge that the people calling themselves white nationalists primarily want a white homeland exclusively for white people, but they also claim the reason for this desire is an irrational hatred of nonwhites, especially blacks and Jews. In this way, the term “white nationalists” is shorthand for people who hate nonwhites. It is why you can be a nonwhite white nationalist now.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on The Antiracist White Nationalist
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
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on The Death Toll in the Pakistan Suicide Bombing Rises as Families Hold Funerals
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
Read it.
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
Posted in Think about it. | 2 Comments »
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.
Posted in You can't make this stuff up. | Comments Off on Intellectual Privilege
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
Read it.
Have you heard about the latest food trend sweeping the nation? It’s called “whimpering over your grocery bill.” In the early days of 2023, Americans are spending 70 percent more on eggs than one year ago. Chicken, dairy and bread prices outpaced inflation as well, increasing by double-digit percentages. What’s an adventurous home cook to do?
The answer is Budget Bytes, a website I first turned to as a broke twenty-two-year-old with a galley kitchen in Queens. I didn’t know, before an acquaintance tweeted a link to a coconut vegetable curry, that you could make a tasty, filling meal, complete with leftovers, using almost entirely canned or frozen goods. Budget Bytes taught me to cook.
Though my income has mercifully increased in the past decade, I’m now paying off a wedding, and my student loans shadow me like the Grim Reaper. And that was before inflation decreased my real wages and the avian flu drove egg and poultry prices into the stratosphere. Now, Budget Bytes comes to my rescue again.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Cost-Cutting in the Kitchen With Budget Bytes
29th July 2023
Read it.
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.
Posted in Living with Islam. | Comments Off on Sweden Is Now a ‘Priority’ Target for Islamist Terrorists
29th July 2023
And that will be his highest priority.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Thought for the Day
29th July 2023
The Spectator.
Thanks to a panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, firing faculty members for “lack of collegiality” is suddenly a bright prospect for college administrators eager to rid themselves of gadflies, diversiphobes, conservatives and other riffraff. The case involved Stephen Porter, a tenured professor in the school of education at North Carolina State University, who had had the bad grace to object to various forms of mandatory diversity saluting. Some details to follow, but let’s first roll around in the hay of “collegiality.”
The two members (out of three) on the Fourth Circuit who invoked the term were not entirely breaking new ground. The woker sort of faculty and college administrators have been fondling the idea for a while. They like it because it suggests an easy way to win arguments without the bother of actually arguing or producing evidence. It comes down to: we cannot work with Professor Von Grimstone because he is mean. He makes us feel bad about ourselves. He harms our students by failing to affirm them. His lack of “collegiality” makes him unfit for our happy community.
If collegiality were gauged on a scale of one (low) to ten (high), I have known several faculty members who would probably rate in the negative numbers. I’d give a minus three to the faculty member who knowingly spread false stories about a colleague he envied; a minus five to the faculty member who blackballed a highly qualified candidate over a quibble about the proper interpretation of one word in a text; and a minus ten to the professor who made a sport of seeing if could derail the careers of young untenured faculty members with whom he had no personal dealings at all.
Posted in The Hunt for Heretics and Sinners | Comments Off on In Defense of Cranky Professors
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
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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.
Posted in Whose turn is it to be the victim? | Comments Off on Maybe Black Lives Matter After All
28th July 2023
Read it.
Like many other Americans, I’ve been following the strange (with a factor of 10) odyssey of Army Private Travis King. In case you’re not familiar with that name, this is the young man who voluntarily left his unit and ran to the benevolent arms of the North Koreans.
…
To me, it seems as if the ball was dropped by several sets of hands. Assuming that he really did graduate from BCT and AIT with no problems, did he believe that everything was going to be roses from there? Did he not understand that at each juncture of his Army career, he would be required to prove his fitness all over again? Where were his Training NCOs, First Shirts, and other assorted personnel who were supposed to be overseeing his development as a Soldier? When Pvt. King again and again proved his unfitness as a Soldier, why wasn’t he cashiered earlier? And, finally, why was this dud trusted to simply fly back to CONUS on his own?
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Let’s Face It, Sometimes There Is One Man Who Should Be Left Behind
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.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Making Steel With Electricity
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.
Posted in Think about it. | Comments Off on Forget Solar Panels. Here Come Rain Panels
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
