Quillette.

By now, you probably know that plastic recycling is a scam. If not, this white paper lays out the case in devastating detail. To summarise, amid calls to reduce plastic garbage in the 1970s and ’80s, the petrochemical industry put forth recycling as a red herring to create the appearance of a solution while it continued to make as much plastic as it pleased. Multiple paper trails indicate that industry leaders knew from the start that recycling could never work at scale. And indeed, it hasn’t. Only about nine percent of plastic worldwide gets recycled, and the US manages only about six percent.

Read it.

The development of totalitarian governments always coincides with sweeping efforts to socially engineer the population to adhere to less rebellious behaviors. Specific groups that present a threat to the regime are usually identified and targeted with propaganda or indoctrination. In tandem, the rest of the population is also conditioned to fear those groups and treat them with suspicion. In this way the establishment elites mold the more submissive public into a shield that protects them from the revolutionaries that might dethrone them.

But what happens when the social engineers want to create tyranny on a global scale? The list of possible rebels grows exponentially larger and effort to control them all or demonize them all becomes far more complex. How can the elites simplify their agenda and suppress the public with more efficiency?

The only answer is to attack and cripple the largest subset of the population that is most likely to give them problems in the future. Which monolithic group is more likely to fight back against the system? Obviously, the answer is masculine men. Therefore, this new global regime seeks to undermine and sabotage men, labeling masculinity an existential danger to society, like nuclear weapons or global warming.

Time to leave.

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Slow news day, I guess.

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This week, Attorney General Merrick Garland took to the pages of the Washington Post to lash out at critics who are spreading what he considers “conspiracy theories crafted and spread for the purpose of undermining public trust in the judicial process itself.” His column, titled “Unfounded attacks on the Justice Department must end,” missed the point.

I thank God every day that this partisan hack didn’t wind up on the Supreme Court.

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No, because (a) they won’t do any good–people still smoke, despite the fact that labels have been on tobacco products for fifty years; (b) Social Media political donations are more influential in Congress than some diversity-hire in the public health bureaucracy; and (c) politicians are too busy using the existing Social Media situation to harvest votes.

This is just another government employee who wants a line on his resumé that says See I Did Something.

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The mass exodus of Californians fleeing the Golden State “could get even worse,” according to Newsweek, while San Diego ascends as the top entry point for illegal migrants to the United States.

Read it.

More than one-third of primary school children in Vienna are Muslims, representing the largest religious group among elementary schools in the Austrian capital.

Read it.

In another step toward complete and total lawlessness on the West Coast, Los Angeles is reportedly studying the idea of removing police from traffic enforcement altogether as a way to reform policing.

A new report from the LA Times says that this week, the City Council approved a study aimed at determining how to implement additional speed bumps, roundabouts, and other modifications to streets to curb speeding and improve driving safety.

This would come in the place of traffic enforcement by officers after reform advocates argued for “the city to limit how often police pull people over for low-level offenses and to start imagining a future in which unarmed city workers would take over most traffic duties”.

Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson commented: “I think the city of Los Angeles can lead the nation.”

In what, is the real question.

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When you absolutely, positively must have it destroyed overnight.

Tyler Cowen.

In this conversation, Tyler and David discuss ways in which Orthodox Christianity is not so millenarian, how theological patience shapes the polities of Orthodox Christian nations, how Heidegger deepened his understanding of Christian Orthodoxy, who played left field for the Baltimore Orioles in 1970, the simplest way to explain how Orthodoxy diverges from Catholicism, the future of the American Orthodox Church, what he thinks of the Book of Mormon, whether theological arguments are ultimately based on reason or faith, what he makes of reincarnation and near-death experiences, gnosticism in movies and TV, why he dislikes Sarah Ruden’s translation of the New Testament, the most difficult word to translate, a tally of the 15+ languages he knows, what he’ll work on next, and more.

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If your shoes, when tied, have the “bow” of your shoelaces tilt to one side and refuse to stay horizontally across your shoes, there’s an extremely good chance that you’ve been tying your shoes all wrong your entire life. There’s a mathematical reason for it, and a straightforward way to fix it.

Or you can avoid the whole problem by not buying shoes that need laces. I haven’t worn shoes with laces in thirty years, and never missed them.

Read it.

A new measurement of the strong nuclear force, which binds protons and neutrons together, confirms previous hints of an uncomfortable truth: We still don’t have a solid theoretical grasp of even the simplest nuclear systems.

To test the strong nuclear force, physicists turned to the helium-4 nucleus, which has two protons and two neutrons. When helium nuclei are excited, they grow like an inflating balloon until one of the protons pops off. Surprisingly, in a recent experiment, helium nuclei didn’t swell according to plan: They ballooned more than expected before they burst. A measurement describing that expansion, called the form factor, is twice as large as theoretical predictions.

“The theory should work,” said Sonia Bacca, a theoretical physicist at the Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz and an author of the paper describing the discrepancy, which was published in Physical Review Letters. “We’re puzzled.”

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Mental illness has been an enigma and point of confusion for many researchers and scientists. Despite medical advances, the root cause of mental illness has remained unknown.

However, a recent breakthrough in psychiatry may be the missing piece to this mysterious puzzle.

Dr. Christopher Palmer, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, has been connecting the dots of thousands of research articles regarding the relationship between mental illness and mitochondrial dysfunction.

According to Palmer, this collective research raises concerns about the current treatments used for mental disorders.

Read it. Or watch the video.

Desalination, or the removal of salt from seawater, is one of those technologies that has always seemed right on the horizon. It might surprise you to learn that there are more than 18,000 desalination plants operating across the globe. But, those plants provide less than a percent of global water needs even though they consume a quarter of all the energy used by the water industry.

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“The air contains an enormous amount of electricity,” says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper’s senior author. “Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt—but we don’t know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we’ve done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it.”

The Economist.

Inflation is the result of economic policy mistakes and war, not corporate avarice

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An imam in Bologna doesn’t mince words: in Islam, “extremism means following the fundamentals”. Extremism means slitting infidel throats, raping infidel women, and bombing infidel places of worship. And that’s just basic Islam, following the example of the prophet as recorded in the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunna.

It’s all there in black and white.

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“He who increaseth knowledge increaseth misery.”

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Some U.S. senators have famously kept a pocket Constitution handy to use as a prop at political rallies; a few may have even read it. But at this point in American history it no longer matters whether they, or anyone else, can read the words of the Constitution because the words no longer mean what they say.

Read it.

Iron is one of the most abundant metals on Earth, and the most produced. It has an energy density of about 11.3 kilowatt-hours per liter—better than gasoline. Burning iron powder produces heat that can be used directly or converted into electricity by a steam turbine, leaving behind iron oxide, or rust. This can later be reduced—that is, the oxygen can be stripped away—back into iron powder. “You can think of iron fuel as a clean, recyclable coal,” says Bergthorson.

Iron oxide can also be reduced to iron using hydrogen. Hydrogen is already a carbon-free green fuel if produced by splitting water using renewable electricity. But it is also an ultralight, voluminous gas, so it must be converted using high pressures and extreme cold into liquid, which then has to be stored and transported in special containers. Iron, by contrast, is already moved in dry containers for a lower cost.

Read it.

And it will serve you right.

The Foundry.

The Department of Justice is targeting a Texas whistleblower who exposed Texas Children’s Hospital secretly performing attempted gender transition procedures on children.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas announced Monday that it had indicted 34-year-old Eithan Haim for “obtaining protected individual health information for patients that were not under his care and without authorization.”

If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison and a $250,000 maximum possible fine.

Texas Children’s had publicly said in March 2022 that it would no longer perform attempted gender transition procedures on kids. In May 2023, Haim provided journalist Christopher Rufo with documents showing that Texas Children’s was “lying to the public about the existence of its transgender-medicine program,” as Haim later revealed in an explosive January 2024 piece.

Read it.

Nothing encourages you to spend more on guns than thugs killing and raping your next-door neighbor. Concentrates the mind.

Associated Press.

Translation: “The IRS is going to try to re-write the tax code so that they can steal more of people’s money; since it’s just “rich people”, stealing from them is okay.’

Just as ‘price gouging’ is charging more than the speaker thinks is proper, ‘loophole’ is using the existing tax code to avoid paying the amount of tax that the speaker thinks is your ‘fair share’.

Nature.

For most of the history of life on Earth, genetic information has been carried in a code that specifies just 20 amino acids. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins, which do most of the heavy lifting in the cell; their side-chains govern protein folding, interactions and chemical activities. By limiting the available side chains, nature effectively restricts the kinds of reaction that proteins can perform.

As a doctoral student in the 1980s, Peter Schultz found himself wondering why nature had restricted itself in this way — and set about trying to circumvent this limitation. Several years later, as a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, Schultz and his team managed to do so by tinkering with the machinery of protein synthesis. Although confined to a test tube, the work marked a key early success in efforts to hack the genetic code.

Since then, many researchers have followed in Schultz’s footsteps, tweaking the cellular apparatus for building proteins both to alter existing macromolecules and to create polymers from entirely new building blocks. The resulting molecules can be used in research and for the development of therapeutics and materials. But it’s been a hard slog, because protein synthesis is a crucial cellular function that cannot easily be changed.

Read it.

If you’re unbanked and the fees and onerous terms of check cashing and other non-bank services are killing you, you might be able to get some relief from a surprising place: Your local post office. The Postal Service actually offers some limited banking services, and there are a lot of folks who are pushing to expand those services dramatically.

Read it.

A new navigation system that tracks subatomic particles constantly bombarding Earth could help us get around indoors, underground, and underwater — all the places GPS fails.

Read it.

Know your enemy.

Read it.

New research has shed light on the effects of protein-rich diets on the gut microbiome and overall health. Despite the increasing protein intake in Western diets, especially among athletes and individuals with obesity, the fate of undigested protein and its impact on human health remains largely unknown. A new study, presented at ASM Microbe, explores how excess undigested protein in the colon can be fermented to produce beneficial metabolites, such as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), or lead to the production of harmful metabolites like ammonia and sulfides, which are linked to gastrointestinal disorders and other health issues.

The research team conducted a series of experiments on mice, discovering that a switch to a protein-rich diet resulted in significant weight loss, reduced body fat and induced immediate changes to the gut microbiome. The study also compared different protein diets to examine the effects of individual amino acids on the gut microbiome’s composition and activity. Notably, the mice consuming aromatic amino-acid-rich proteins experienced the greatest weight and fat mass loss compared to those on standard protein and branched-chain amino-acid-rich protein diets.

UPDATE: 5 Best High-Protein Foods for Gut Health, According to Dietitians

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If, of course, that’s what you want to do.

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The Biden Administration’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) just issued a proposal to ban medical debt from factoring into your credit score. But for free-money socialists and their Keynesian bedfellows, this doesn’t go nearly far enough: short of canceling medical debt entirely, nothing else is acceptable.

Quillette.

We are witnessing the transition from “college is for everybody” to “college is unnecessary and often useless.” Going to college “to be able to get a better job” is likely to fade away as the primary reason students attend. And the institutions themselves—universities and colleges of various types—will have to accept a much less prominent role in our social and economic systems. They are in danger of becoming cultural relics.

To be sure, a large majority of American parents still believe that their children must attain a college degree for their welfare and happiness. Almost always, those parents are applying both their understanding of how the world works and their recollection of their own time in college. College as they knew it was the on-ramp to prosperous adulthood. But that outcome is steadily becoming less likely.

Read it.

A federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s new Title IX rule expanding protections for LGBTQ+ students in six additional states, dealing another setback for a policy that has been under legal attack by Republican attorneys general.

This is the rule that includes ‘gender identity’ as a protected class, which is of course not in the statute.

The American Mind.

No one stops you when driving across the border from Nogales, Arizona, into Nogales, Mexico; crossing the other way is a different story. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers often interrogate drivers and search vehicles inside and out, using drug-sniffing dogs, x-ray scanners, handheld chemical analyzers, and trained detectives. One reason is that Nogales, Mexico, is now the world’s epicenter of illegal fentanyl trafficking, and Arizona’s southern border is the primary point of entry for illegal fentanyl entering the U.S.

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Brendan Carr, Republican member of the FCC, has been criticizing Joe Biden, alleging that since the passage of the Infrastructure and Jobs Act of 2021, wherein $42 billion was appropriated to connect rural America with high-speed fiber optic cable internet, not a single internet connection has been achieved. A truly stunning record. Three years, no connections.

Newsbusters.

Over the weekend, three communities across the United States were victims of gun violence as parties and gatherings came to sudden ends when scumbags decided to kill people. NBC’s Today looked to exploit the tragedies on Monday by having correspondent Erin McLaughlin blame the murders on the U.S. Supreme Court, citing their decision to strike down the Trump-era bump stock ban. But none of the shootings involved bump stocks.

“A mass shooting at a splash pad in Michigan, another at a Juneteenth celebration in Texas, and yet another at a gathering in Massachusetts, all just days after Friday’s Supreme Court ruling that rejects a ban on bump stocks,” she announced at the top of the segment.

McLaughlin delivered very glancing explanations of what allegedly happened at each of the shootings but never disclosed what kind of firearms were used.

Read it.

Gee, I wonder why?

Financial Times.

Buy those votes! Buy those votes!

Wall Street Journal.

To repeat what everybody ought to know already: CORPORATIONS DO NOT PAY TAXES. CORPORATIONS MERELY COLLECT TAXES. Any tax that they ‘pay’ is, from an accounting standpoint, a business expense and is folded into the price that they charge their customers. IT IS THE CUSTOMERS OF CORPORATIONS WHO PAY THE TAX.

In any population, half of that population are below average in intelligence (by definition), as this persistent fable of ‘taxing corporations’ makes clear.

I would be in favor of making an IQ test mandatory in order to be able to vote.

Read it.

Another day, another Democrat hate crime hoax – this time allegedly by a former Biden White House appointee and current candidate for a county commissioner seat in Texas.

Taral Patel, 30, was arrested for online impersonation last week following an investigation initiated by his opponent, incumbent Andy Meyers, the NY Post reports.

The investigation was launched in October, after a September post Patel made on Facebook in which he suggested that he and his family had been victims of race-based verbal attacks perpetrated by Meyers supporters.

Read it.

As they do.

New York Post.

And yet there are people who will vote for this vegetable. Unbelievable.

Read it.

A math geek reviews a math geek book. Both are worth reading.

The Guardian.

ince the sequencing of the human genome in 2003, genetics has become one of the key frameworks for how we all think about ourselves. From fretting about our health to debating how schools can accommodate non-neurotypical pupils, we reach for the idea that genes deliver answers to intimate questions about people’s outcomes and identities.

Recent research backs this up, showing that complex traits such as temperament, longevity, resilience to mental ill-health and even ideological leanings are all, to some extent, “hardwired”. Environment matters too for these qualities, of course. Our education and life experiences interact with genetic factors to create a fantastically complex matrix of influence.

But what if the question of genetic inheritance were even more nuanced? What if the old polarised debate about the competing influences of nature and nurture was due a 21st-century upgrade?

Read it.

The European Union is ready to punish France if Marine Le Pen’s nationalist-sovereigntist National Rally (Rassemblement National) wins the upcoming French parliamentary elections, writes establishment media outlet Politico. According to the article, the European Commission may not let a right-wing government “off the hook” with regards to France’s overspending, unlike their leniency with the current and previous cabinets. This is clearly a sign that the EU institutions use their ‘power of the purse’ to penalise only those member states they politically disagree with.

Read it.

During the pandemic it was common for many Americans to discount or even disparage the Chinese vaccines. In fact, the Chinese vaccines such as Coronavac/Sinovac were made quickly and in large quantities and they were effective. The Chinese vaccines saved millions of lives. The vaccine portfolio model that the AHT team produced, as well as common sense, suggested the value of having a diversified portfolio. That’s why we recommended and I advocated for including a deactivated vaccine in the Operation Warp Speed mix or barring that for making an advance deal on vaccine capacity with China. At the time, I assumed that the disparaging of Chinese vaccines was simply an issue of national pride or bravado during a time of fear. But it turns out that in other countries, the Pentagon ran a disinformation campaign against the Chinese vaccines.

Navy Matters.

Here’s a time line of the pier:

• Mar 7 – Biden announces Gaza pier plan
• Mar 9 – U.S. Army support ship General Frank S. Besson leaves to begin construction
• May 17 –  pier opens
• May 28 – pier ops suspended after piece breaks off
• Jun 8 – operations resume after repairs
• Jun 15 – Pentagon announces pier will be torn down

So, what can we learn from the Gaza pier effort?

Read it.

How many Americans have been assaulted, raped, maimed or murdered by illegals who have streamed into our country at the invitation of Joe Biden’s open border policies? No one knows, but it is safe to say that Rachel Morin is one among many.

Morin, a 37 year old mother of five, went for a run in Harford County, Maryland. She was waylaid by Victor Martinez Hernandez, who raped, viciously beat, and murdered her. Hernandez is an illegal alien. He reportedly is associated with the MS-13 gang and was wanted for murder in El Salvador, so he fled to the U.S.

A sane country would take every reasonable measure to prevent escaping murderers and gang members from crossing its borders, but we are not a sane country. We elected Joe Biden president. It has been reported that Hernandez entered the country in February 2023, but I am not sure how we know that. Did he use Joe Biden’s app to facilitate his illegal entry? Was he given a free cell phone? I don’t know.