Read it.

While it is popular to think that there are no real biological reasons for why women generally didn’t fight in history, that is not the case. In reality, differences between men and women are quite significant, and are a result of basic biological factors such as genes / chromosomes and sex hormones. Even the same genes may express themselves differently due to impact of sex hormones. Both men and women produce the sex hormones (testosterone, oestradiol and progesterone), but their quantity can vary by several orders of magnitude depending on sex and menopausal status. So can their effects: while testosterone in men may inhibit muscle degradation pathways, this effect was not observed in women. These differences have major implications for womens’ ability to perform in combat – and especially in the melee. So here I will look at the why female warriors were so rare, and finally at some historical evidence of warrior women that did exist.

And while argument could be made that fantasy does not need to keep with reality, fact is that most fantasy settings simply have normal humans living in them with some minor supernatural or simply fantasy elements surrounding them. In One Piece, where superpowers gained through Devil Fruits as well as sheer willpower (Haki) dominate combat, it is not unrealistic to have women fight as well (and it should be noted that One Piece is still realistic in that women are generally weaker than men in the setting). Same goes for other supernatural settings relying on magical combat, such as Fairy Tail, Codex Alera and similar. After all, physical limitations matter far less for people who can levitate objects with their minds. But in a historical or low-magic setting such as Lord of the Rings or A Song of Ice and Fire, female warriors are – and should be – exceptionally rare.

Women were not crafted by evolution for war, as men are. Robert Heinlein was fond of saying, “Women are what we fight for, not what we fight with.” Putting women in combat is like shooting your enemies with golden bullets–sure, you can do that, but why would you want to?

Read it.

“I was told that they discovered her father was white,” the musician said in a recent interview.

The consequences of ‘black’ being an ethnic tribal identity rather than, you know, a color.

No wonder the population growth rate is less than replacement.

CNN.

Self-service kiosks at McDonald’s and other fast-food chains have loomed as job killers since they were first rolled out 25 years ago. But nobody predicted what actually happened.

In one of the earliest mentions of kiosks in fast-food settings in 1999, now-defunct trade industry publication Business Information said that McDonald’s was working to “develop an electronic order-taking system that may eventually replace some of its human equivalents.”

Instead, touchscreen kiosks have added extra work for kitchen staff and pushed customers to order more food than they do at the cash register. The kiosks show the unintended consequences of technology in fast-food and retail settings, including self-checkout. Chains are now experimenting with artificial intelligence at drive-thru lanes, and the experience with kiosks holds lessons for them.

Today, instead of replacing workers, companies deploy kiosks to transfer labor to other tasks like handing off pickup orders, help increase sales, easily adjust prices and speed up service. (Many chains, including Subway, Chick-fil-A and Starbucks, don’t use them much or at all.)

Kiosks “guarantee that the upsell opportunities” like a milkshake or fries are suggested to customers when they order, Shake Shack CEO Robert Lynch said on an earnings call last month. “Sometimes that is not always a priority for employees when you’ve got 40 people in line. You’re trying to get through it as quick as possible.” Kiosks also shift employees from behind the cash register to maintaining the dining area, delivering food to customers or working in the kitchen, he said.

The whole ‘automation as job killer’ is a popular trope in the Narrative Media, most of whom are ignorant (sometimes willfully so) of how businesses actually operate. Shallow-minded people typically mistake the map for the territory and think of a ‘job’ as a thing that can be created, killed, shipped overseas, brought back from overseas, or I suppose thrown overboad like a cargo container.

A ‘job’ is merely a convenient expression for ‘a person performing a service’. If a machine can perform that service, then is it still a ‘job’? Not for those who think of ‘jobs’ as something pertaining to ‘workers’, who must be defended by the Forces of Progress and Enlightenment.

There are services that people can perform better than machines, and there are services that machines can perform as well as people. When machines can perform a service adequately at lower cost than hiring a person to do that job, then the machine is substituted for the person, which process is characterized by the convenient expression ‘automation’. But the service remains; it is merely performed by a machine rather than a  person–the ‘job’ itself remains, just performed by a different operator. Whether a ‘job’ can be ‘automated’ depends on the state of technology, and as technology gets better, more and more ‘jobs’ can be ‘automated’ successfully. But no ‘jobs’ are harmed by this process; each step remains and needs to be accomplished unless the process itself is changed.

Labor unions throughout history have been built on this mistake-the-map-for-the-territory brain fart. They act to protect the ‘jobs’ of their members even when those ‘jobs’ are merely make-work and actually damage the business process of which they are supposedly a part. History teaches us that areas of activity in which unions come to predominate become increasingly inefficient and incompetent. In a business that needs to deal with competitors and attract customers, unionized companies eventually lose customers to competitors who are more efficient or more competent (or both) and, if they don’t fix things, die. The auto industry is the poster child for this natural evolutionary process.

In areas where customers are not free to go elsewhere, as with government, unionization merely makes everybody suffer from the effects of inefficiency and incompetence, which is why, in the Good Old Days government employees weren’t allowed to unionize. (Democrats eventually got that changed, with results as you see them.)

Automation makes goods and services less expensive, or higher quality, or both. Anybody who knows anything about business knows this–but that excludes most ‘journalists’, which is how we get articles like the one referenced in this post.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it becomes true.

Read it.

Poor people steal bread because they are hungry.

Rich kids steal snacks and candy because they are bored.

Time to leave.

Gothamist.

The underpass near Cherry Street and Stewart Avenue in Brooklyn where police say 6 men were injured by gunfire.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Waiting for apologies from climate eco-Nazis … waiting … waiting….

UPDATE: Glacier National Park replacing signs that predicted glaciers would gone by 2020

… waiting … waiting … waiting….

ZMan:

Soldiers grumble about the commanding officers all the time. This is normal and probably healthy, but it is a different thing than trashing the reputation of your company to customers or starting a website to air the company’s dirty laundry.
That comes to mind reading this post in the New York Times by the Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine. This guy has taken to the pages of a publication that regularly slanders his party and his colleagues, in order to help them trash the standard bearer of his party in the coming election. The only thing he did not do is endorse Kamala Harris and call Trump a Nazi.
The reason he is doing this is the same reason the bad salesman trashes his company in front of a client, or the bad employee complains about his boss. That bad salesman wants the client to think he is a good guy, not like his company. The whiny employee wants everyone to think the problem is the boss and not her. DeWine. like all Republicans, wants you to know he is not like his party.

UnHerd.

arely 24 hours after an armed man was found within several hundred yards of Donald Trump on his golf course in Florida, my local newspaper ran a piece with the following headline: “Would-be assassin soured on Trump: Who did he want as presidential and VP candidates?”

Great question. What, for that matter, did the wannabe killer, Ryan Routh think of the impending match-up on Monday Night Football? What were his thoughts on electric vehicles, school choice, weight loss drugs and parenting?

More prestigious outlets hardly showed more attachment to what remains of proper American journalism. The New York Times seemed more caught up in proudly displaying the fact that it had interviewed Routh a year earlier about his experiences trying to recruit fighters in Ukraine. By the time darkness had fallen, on the very day Trump was, maybe, almost killed, you had to make your way through the coverage of the Emmy Awards, to find any mention of the assassination attempt.

If someone had tried to shoot Biden or Harris (and who could blame them?) it would have been Jan. 6 all over again, wall-to-wall news coverage 24/7 until we all had long white beards (even the women).

Gothamist.

Federal law enforcement officials served a subpoena to the director of the New York City’s Office of Asylum Seeker Operations on Friday, adding yet another twist to the ongoing investigations into Mayor Eric Adams’ administration.

The building where the director’s parents live also got a visit from law enforcement, according to surveillance footage provided to Gothamist.

The office Molly Schaeffer leads was launched in March 2023 as part of Adams’ response to the influx of migrants to the city. When the office was established, Adams said it would focus on the city’s ongoing efforts to provide “resettlement and legal services,” along with a new “24/7 arrival center for asylum-seekers.”

One of these days a government employee is going to be seized by an Attack of Honesty and call their workplace the Office of Handing Out Your Money to People Who Don’t Deserve it.

Read it.

We’ll show you how archivists package (or “house”) the most common types of physical documents for long-term storage. That is, we’ll talk boxes and files. And we’ll benefit from the experience of special contributors from the United Kingdom to compare how archivists in Canada and the UK commonly do their packaging.

Much of what we know about times past is because some people saved stuff that most of us would have thrown out. Just sayin’.

(No, I didn’t know that Archivist Barbie was a thing. Ya larn suthin new everday.)

Read it.

ICE Detains Illegal Migrant Accused Of Raping Pre-Teen In Nantucket…More Than A Month After He Walked On Bail
Each day it becomes increasingly clearer that the migrant crime the left side of the aisle wants us to believe is a figment of our imagination…isn’t.

The latest example came from, of all places, Nantucket, where 28 year old illegal migrant Bryan Daniel Aldana-Arevalo was accused of raping a pre-teen child this past July after entering the U.S. from El Salvador.

There once was a girl in Nantucket….
It did not end well.

Read it.

The Air Force finally handed over a trove of documents pertaining to its sweeping “goal” of reducing the number of white male applicants in a popular officer program after spending months stonewalling requests for their release.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman C.Q. Brown—at the time the highest-ranking member of the Air Force—issued a memorandum in 2022 that the branch was updating its racial and gender demographic goals for applicants seeking to become officers, in a bid to prioritize “diversity and inclusion.”

Internal documents obtained by the Daily Caller News Foundation include a slideshow from 2022 where the Air Force outlines racial and gender quotas and details how it hopes to “achieve” a reduced number of white males in its Reserve Officers’ Training Corps officer’s applicant program.

Read it.

TV icon Oprah Winfrey lent her star power to Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, but sadly their segment on the story of Amber Nicole Thurman shows Harris is anti-science and refuses to take responsibility for the failures of the Biden-Harris Food and Drug Administration’s lax abortion-drug policies, which harm women.

Thurman—whose case Harris also highlighted in a Georgia speech Friday—tragically died, reportedly after the abortion pill mifepristone caused sepsis infection. That’s because the Biden-Harris FDA enabled women to manage risky and traumatic chemical abortions at home alone, without mandated help from medical professionals.

Thurman would likely be alive without the Biden-Harris FDA.

Read it.

Earlier this month, we took a deep dive into Minnesota’s state checkbook. Unlike the state budget, a broad plan to allocate funds, the checkbook contains every line-by-line expenditure the state makes in a given year. By comparing the paid vendors with those who donated to Governor Tim Walz’s reelection campaign, we found interesting examples of overlap but not enough information to identify confirmed conflicts of interest.

By suing the state, a constellation of interests was able to negotiate a deal behind closed doors on the controversial topic of treating and housing transgender inmates. While taxpayers foot the bill, as always, their representatives in St. Paul were sidestepped in the policymaking process.

The bill came to $495,000, but updated policies mean Minnesotans can expect more costs in perpetuity.

Read it.

The following video features first-hand reports from homeless French people about their treatment at the hands of the local welfare office. They found out that they didn’t qualify for the same government benefits that culture-enrichers were getting, because they were ethnically French.

Read it.

Elias d’Imzalène, alias El Yess Zarelli, is a Muslim zealot who hangs with the Muslim Brotherhood. He has been honored with an “S-file” compiled by the French security services.

Read it.

Hint: Yes.

In contrast to the United States, Britain has no constitutionally entrenched protections on freedom of speech. The lack of any such guarantees has been more or less of a problem depending on the era in question. Free speech has tended to thrive perfectly well in the absence of legal reinforcement. As a customary right enjoyed by all Englishmen, in good times it has fallen among the indefinite array of things that are permitted precisely because they are not expressly forbidden.

We do not live in good times.

Today, we have citizens in prison for campaigning—not with violence, but with stickers—against replacement migration, for posting unpleasant rage rhetoric on Facebook, even for peacefully chanting “Who the f*** is Allah?” on political demonstrations. While admittedly not the most sophisticated contribution to the debate, why should it be that only theologians can take an interest in divine ontology? Alas, in our hyper-diverse society, the hurt feelings of newly imported tribal interest groups—or ‘communities,’ as we are supposed to call them—naturally take precedence over the right of native Britons to ask provocative questions.

It was violation of the traditional ‘rights of Englishmen’ that prompted the American colnists to rebel.

Tyler Cowen.

The planning documentation for the Lower Thames Crossing, a proposed tunnel under the Thames connecting Kent and Essex, runs to 360,000 pages, and the application process alone has cost £297 million. That is more than twice as much as it cost in Norway to actually build the longest road tunnel in the world.

CNN. 

Death is God’s way of telling you, ‘No, that was a bad idea.’

Think of it as evolution in action.

Times of Israel.

Of course he does. No word on the rapes and murders of civilians in the Hamas Oct. 7 attacks, of course.

Read it.

Several years ago, I was involved in a case that illuminates the difficult position many doctors today find themselves in. The patient was pregnant, close to delivery, and experiencing dangerous declines in her baby’s heart rate. She had been on a blood thinner, which kept me, the anesthesiologist, from placing an epidural in her back. She also had strange airway anatomy, which would make it a struggle to put her to sleep quickly if an emergency cesarean section became necessary. I advised the obstetrician to perform an elective cesarean section now, in advance, while we had good working conditions, and not to wait for an emergency, where time is of the essence, and where the delay needed to induce general anesthesia might seriously injure the baby.

The obstetrician grew quiet. She seemed to descend within herself, in that lonely region of stress and strife where people feel themselves to be in an untenable position. Several things worried her, she confessed. First, hospital management had already warned her that her high cesarean section rate made her an outlier among her colleagues, which put her job at risk. Second, the baby’s heart rate did not quite meet the criteria for when to perform a cesarean section. True, the current situation was unfamiliar and unforeseen; then again, she wondered, would hospital management, let alone the malpractice lawyers, accept that excuse? Third, she wondered how to persuade the patient to have an operation that her own rules seemed to advise against.

The changing work environment in which many doctors practice medicine leads to such moments of uncertainty—and all but guarantees that they will occur more frequently. As more doctors work for large companies, they have bosses they must answer to. Rules for how to practice medicine have multiplied exponentially, and their bureaucratic enforcement makes doctors afraid to violate them. With science forming the bulk of their medical and post-graduate education, doctors also feel bewildered when faced with questions that touch on the moral, the political, and the philosophical.

I hear ya.

Read it.

Podcaster Tim Pool filed a defamation lawsuit against Vice President Kamala Harris‘ presidential campaign Thursday.

Pool says he has faced an increase in death threats and that suspicious people have been monitoring his place of business, two developments he finds alarming after two assassination attempts against former President Donald Trump.

“It’s putting a target on my back for things I don’t believe and things I actually argue against,” Pool told The Daily Signal in an interview Friday.

Democrats lie. It’s what they do.

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it becomes true.

Read it.

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

Read it.

Democrats lie. It’s what they do.

The Foundry.

In Aug. 2012, a left-wing MSNBC afficionado named Floyd Lee Corkins armed himself with a handgun and extra magazines. He drove to the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the socially conservative Family Research Council, planning to shoot it up. Corkins, who later cited the Southern Poverty Law Center for the proposition that the FRC is an “anti-gay” organization, was also carrying 15 Chick-fil-A sandwiches, which he hoped to stuff in his dead victims’ mouths. Corkins, who served as a volunteer at a local LGBT community center, was stopped by an unarmed security guard.

In June 2017, a left-wing MSNBC afficionado named James Hodgkinson armed himself with a rifle and handgun. He drove to Alexandria, Virginia, in hopes of assassinating the Republican team practicing for the annual Congressional Baseball Game. He severely wounded then-House Majority Whip Steve Scalise, who thankfully survived after receiving multiple blood transfusions and surgeries. Five others were also injured. Hodgkinson was a 2016 Bernie Sanders presidential campaign volunteer who, in a Facebook post three weeks before the shooting, wrote: “Trump is a Traitor. Trump Has Destroyed Our Democracy. It’s Time to Destroy Trump & Co.”

In June 2022, a young Californian named Nicholas Roske flew to the nation’s capital. Roske attained a handgun, zip ties, a tactical knife, a hammer, a screwdriver, a crowbar, duct tape and other burglary tools. At 1:38 a.m. local time, about a half hour after a taxi dropped him off in front of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s Chevy Chase, Maryland, home, Roske had second thoughts and called 911. After his arrest, Roske told police he was angered by the leaked draft opinion in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization abortion case. Roske had written in a private chat: “Im gonna stop roe v wade from being overturned.”

Yeah, that’s a real head-scratcher, all right.

Read it.

Ever wonder why those crime statistics don’t necessarily seem to line up with what you’re bearing witness to in real life and on social media? Try this one on for size…

A black illegal immigrant, already wanted for murder in his home country of the Dominican Republic, wound up stabbing a family of four, including two toddlers in upstate New York.

Then, in the in the Monroe County Jail roster, he was recorded as “white”.

Well, he’s about as white as Beyoncé is black….

Read it.

Rules are for thee but not for me.

If we’re talking about ‘threats to democracy’….

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Yeah, I would think so.

I expected it to be United, but it wasn’t. Color me surprised.

ZMan: “The world kind of sucks right now….”

Newsbusters.

U.S. Ambassador to Hungary David Pressman went to bat for a Soros-funded, Hungarian media outlet against Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government. Pressman just happened to also have dubiously shoveled American taxpayer dollars into that outlet.

Pressman condemned Hungary, a NATO ally, for investigating the so-called independent media outlet Átlátszó which received $197,478 from Soros from 2017 through 2020. Notably, Pressman made these remarks at a Sept. 18 forum sponsored by the Soros-created Central European University’s (CEU) Democracy Institute and the Soros-funded organization Political Capital. Soros has given $1,084,390,977 (yes, over a billion) to CEU between 2016 and 2023 alone. The leftist billionaire also gave $685,123 to Political Capital from 2016 to 2023.

“In Hungary, we find an unironically named ‘Sovereignty Protection Office’ that has publicly announced three investigations,” Pressman said. He went on to mock the Orban government for looking into “the threat to Hungary’s sovereignty posed by … Átlátszó, an independent media outlet, whose name means ‘transparency,’ focused on exposing corruption.”

Gothamist.

Time to leave.

Read it.

Researchers have developed a new organic thermoelectric device that can harvest energy from ambient temperature. While thermoelectric devices have several uses today, hurdles still exist to their full utilization. By combining the unique abilities of organic materials, the team succeeded in developing a framework for thermoelectric power generation at room temperature without any temperature gradient. Their findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Read it.

Being a progressive means you can lie with impunity and the media will declare you a truth-teller. The other day on CNN, Democrat strategist Elliot Williams defended Democrat claims that Donald Trump is a “threat to democracy” because of Trump’s refusal to accept election results. Hillary Clinton, Stacey Abrams and every Democrat who thinks George W. Bush stole the 2000 election from Al Gore get a pass. But Trump is a threat to democracy. Democrats get to lie, and the media blesses their lies as truth.

Read it.

An FBI informant who shared his home with two of the 9/11 hijackers has been accused in civil court of being “co-opted” by Saudi Arabian intelligence to help carry out the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Read it.

Time to leave.

Read it.

In a fitting follow-up to the previous post, we present a video recorded by the esteemed “Dutch” culture-enricher known as Brother Rahide. Mr. Rahide wants to make sure that the ethnic Dutch understand their place in the country — or their lack of one.

Read it.

*yawn* Another day, another Muslim murder. Rinse, repeat….

Question: If throughout Europe and the world people were wandering around blowing other people up and knifing them while shouting “Viva el Christo Rey!”, what would the response be?

UPDATE: An Allahu Akhbar Moment in Rotterdam

Babylon Bee.

Satire–Read it quickly before it comes true.

New York Post.

Something caught my attention this week that revealed a deep, dark, shameful secret about single women.

Many of us — okay, let me clarify, not me (for once) — seem to be like a bull to a red rag when it comes to married men.

It appears that a wedding ring is seen as a challenge by many. Shame, shame, shameful behavior.

Don’t believe me? I have proof.

You see, it all started during my weekly Instagram Saucy Secrets confessional that I host every Monday night. A guy wrote in and said: “I’ve been married for 2.5 years and I have never had so many women approach me. When I was single I barely got noticed. I don’t like this attention, but is it normal?”

Yes, it is. In evolutionary biology, the term for this is ‘pre-selection’, and (to be clear) the single woman doesn’t want to ‘date a married man’, she wants him to get rid of his current wife (or, these days, girlfriend) and take up with her instead. Women want men than other women want, because the intersexual evaluation process is more work for a woman than for a man (“Is she hot? Is she available?) and so married men are like having a pre-approved mortgage loan when looking to buy a house–the hard work has already been mostly done for them.

This is explained in great detail in Dr. Orion Taraban’s recent book The Value of Others, which I highly recommend.

Read it.

Sharrow has redesigned the common marine propeller by replacing the usual blades with gently twisted loops that promise to eliminate efficiency-sapping tip vortices and cavitation. Put simply, less energy is wasted, leading to claimed efficiency boosts of up to 30%, not to mention smoother, quieter overall performance.

Not only has Sharrow’s 150-patent-deep design won a host of major awards from the marine and tech industries, it’s been put to the test on numerous vessels, both internally and by third-party reviewers, with some intriguing results.

The first time we took a look at Sharrow’s unique propeller design, we noted that the one big drawback seemed to be price. At about US$5,000 a pop to start, they were an estimated 10 times more than a typical propeller, a steep upfront investment that might be difficult to recoup even with a 30% efficiency boost.

CNBC.

Almost two-thirds (63%) of wealthy investors said they plan to leave the U.K. within two years or “shortly” if the Labour government moves ahead with plans to ax the colonial-era tax concession, while 67% said they would not have emigrated to Britain in the first place, according to a new study from Oxford Economics, which assesses the implications of the plans.

The U.K.’s non-dom regime is a 200-year-old tax rule, which permits people living in the U.K. but who are domiciled elsewhere to avoid paying tax on income and capital gains earnings overseas for up to 15 years. As of 2023, an estimated 74,000 people enjoyed the status, up from 68,900 the previous year.

Labour last month set out plans to abolish the status, expanding on a pledge set out in its election manifesto and stepping up earlier proposals by the previous Conservative government to phase out the regime over time.

Leave no pocket unplundered.

Read it.

Researchers at Princeton University have developed a cement paste that is 5.6 times stronger than cement, mortar, and other conventional cement-based construction materials.

The paste features a tubular architecture inspired by the structure of human cortical bone, which forms the outer layer of the femur (thigh bone).

“Cement paste deployed with a tube-like architecture can significantly increase resistance to crack propagation and improve the ability to deform without sudden failure,” according to the researchers.

We have the technology.

Read it.

Since Donald Trump amplified baseless rumors about Haitian migrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, last week, the community has been beset with bomb threats and white nationalist activity.

A leading Jewish group called the whole episode a “blood libel” — the antisemitic canard that Jews use non-Jewish blood for ritual purposes, which animated centuries of violence against Jews.

But one Jew says the Haitians are harming Springfield: the city’s only congregational rabbi.

That’s why they’re part of the Turd World, and the U.S. isn’t — yet.