Read it.

Donald Trump was the hated “Islamophobe” in 2016, and now he’s the darling of the Michigan Ummah. What in the world is going on?

Barack Hussein Obama owned the Islamic vote during his two terms, and Kamala Harris has pandered to Muslims shamelessly, yet they’re abandoning the Democrats and flocking to the Evil Orange Man. Are we living in Bizarro World, or what?

I’ll give you my take on what’s going on. Back in 2001, Osama bin Laden famously said, “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.” Arabs are shrewd about power relationships, and I think they have sized up Donald Trump and decided that he is the strong horse. A lot of other Democrats have come to the same conclusion, and are demoralized by it, but Muslims are pragmatic. They don’t have any problem abandoning previous allies and switching sides whenever doing so will serve the cause of Islam.

Once Mr. Trump has been inaugurated, they’ll cozy up to him and try to manipulate him, hoping to induce him to support their interests. We’ll see how that works out.

Read it.

Following civil unrest after Welsh-born Rwandan, Axel Rudakubana, murdered three girls and injured ten at a Taylor Swift dance class in Southport, Home Secretary Yvette Cooper promised Parliament that she would act on long-held concerns that “not enough is being done to counter extremism—including both Islamist extremism and far right extremism.” Condemning all demonstrations as “not about grievance [but] … thuggery, racism and crime,” Cooper announced she had ordered the Home Office to conduct a “rapid review” of the Prevent programme to combat “poisonous ideologies that corrode community cohesion and fray the fabric of our democracy.”

But both the priorities of the new Labour government and the conduct of the Home Office and College of Policing should cause concern. Those who value free speech, and want to ensure that the likes of the Southport massacre never happen again, will be targeted by hate crime and counter-terroism operations, all paid for by our own taxes. Here’s how the UK Home Office polices thought-crime in Britain.

Read it.

The study results indicated that gait parameters were not significantly affected by age (p?0.12), while knee and grip strength, along with several balance parameters, showed a significant decline with age. All individuals were able to maintain their bipedal balance, but their center of pressure movement increased significantly by age (p?0.028). Z-scores were calculated to compare significant age parameters. Unipedal stance time was found to be the most affected by age compared to other contributing factors (p?0.001). The duration of unipedal balance showed the most significant change per decade (non-dominant: -0.62 SDs; dominant: -0.53 SDs), while strength measures exhibited the lowest amount of change per decade (grip strength: -0.34 SDs; knee strength: -0.26 SDs). Sex differences were observed exclusively in strength parameters, with no discernible impact on the decline in balance parameters.

Most scientific studies are of one of two types: (a) studies that actually discover and exemplify the causal links between two conditions, and (b) studies that identify strong correlations between two conditions and think that this proves a causal connection.

The former is actual science, while the latter passes for science these days. The latter underlie most hand-wringing political fashions, such as racism, sexism, ‘white privilege’, and ‘climate change’, depending for their authority on ‘scientific consensus’ rather than actual I-can-point-to-it proof of causation.

Read it.

I had to work at it, and I’m the most educated person I know.

Expectations were higher then.

Wall Street Journal.

Another urgent conflict in the Middle East is playing out on the border between Syria and Jordan: a war against captagon, an amphetamine-like drug that’s taken off across the region.

The drug cuts across social class and borders. It’s used by taxi drivers handling late-night shifts, militia fighters looking to induce courage, students studying for exams, and high-powered executives wanting to work, or party, long hours.

It’s all added up to a multibillion-dollar drug trade that is fueling more conflict in the region. Money from drug smuggling has lined the pockets of Iran-backed militias, including Hezbollah, which has spent vast amounts of its proceeds on weapons to fight Israel. The drug props up Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, whose regime has become one of the world’s biggest drug syndicates, helping it offset years of punishing Western economic sanctions.

Read it.

Former Democrat Rep. Tulsi Gabbard announced her official move to the Republican Party because of Donald Trump, and now even Democratic National Convention delegates are joining a burgeoning D-exit movement.

Read it.

The head of diversity, equity, and inclusion at the University of Michigan is incensed with The New York Times and with The Heritage Foundation (something that rarely happens simultaneously). The newspaper published an article making it clear that diversity, equity, and inclusion has been a flop at Ann Arbor, and it cited Heritage. That was enough for Tabbye Chavous to throw a fit.

Chavous, University of Michigan’s vice provost for equity and inclusion and chief diversity officer, excoriated the newspaper and the foundation in a letter posted on her LinkedIn page.

The article by the newspaper’s Nicholas Confessore speaks for itself, and I urge people to read it. However, the gist was hardly novel to DEI critics who have been spotlighting the flaws with this ideology for several years now.

Basically, because it is intrinsically divisive, DEI causes grievances and more division. It’s that simple.

It was important, however, that in this instance, it was The New York Times saying it.

UnHerd.

The meaning of the leaf is the leaf, as I once heard Roger Scruton say. Perhaps it was an original coinage from the Sage of Sundey Hill Farm, but it has the slight feel of a Zen koan: a seemingly inscrutable saying that can nonetheless help the listener achieve enlightenment. Scruton meant it as a reminder of the importance of focusing on the particular object or experience that you’re faced with at any given moment.

I had this aphorism in the back of my mind all through Rod Dreher’s Living in Wonder, an argument for a more spiritually aware mode of living, and against the successful but ultimately incomplete materialism that dominates the modern world. “Enchantment” is the key word Dreher uses here. By this, he means preparing your mind to see beyond the everyday things presented to our eyes and ears, and to sense what Christians would regard as the underlying reality of existence: the grace and goodness of God, and the unity of creation.

Dreher is a devout and observant Orthodox Christian. This naturally gives him a certain appreciation of why modern life can feel so disenchanted. In his telling, the dovetailing of the everyday and the transcendent, so common in the high medieval imagination, was dealt successive blows. The first came from nominalism: the philosophical position which denied the existence of an underlying metaphysical unity behind the physical world. Then came the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the scientific revolution of the last few centuries.

Read it.

I gave up reading American literary fiction when its authors gave up writing it. The novel was born with its subject, the bourgeois individual. When it became uncool to be bourgeois and individual, literary novelists abandoned realism (the means of portraying society) and plotting (the ends of the individual’s story). What remained was character (subjective perceptions) and politics (the objective goal of social life). The vestiges of the Puritan personality disorder mean that character must always align with politics.

I exempt detective fiction and spy novels. These genres remain true to form and readership, so they retain a high degree of craft: plausible social detail, competent plotting, and coherent character motivation. Without these constraints, American literary fiction, which was world-class in the century between Mark Twain and Tom Wolfe, has devolved into pious, slackly written slop, a cynical mixture of self-help, affirmative action, and movie pitches.

Read it.

Califurnia doesn’t care; all their cars are electric.

‘Regulatory pressure’ is a great tool — rather than trying to outlaw something that it would be unconstitutional for them to outlaw, they just increase the ‘regulatory pressure’ until it’s impossible to comply without going broke, so the business closes down. It’s like a boss, rather than going through the hassle of firing you, makes your life at work miserable until you have to quit.

Read it.

Don’t you find it interesting that Trump is being accused of wanting to commit all kinds of abhorrent actions and behaviors that he has never demonstrated? That if you look at his first term, his policies were quite good? That he didn’t abuse his power or meddle with the powers of others? I continue to marvel at the number of people who are crying out about his “fascist” or “autocratic” nature.

Read it.

“If the British had not fought in 1940, Hitler would have been in London and if Democrats do not fight in 1968, Nixon will be in the White House,” Vice President Hubert Humphrey warned.

Chicago Mayor Daley had accused Nixon of “Hitler type” tactics.

Comparing any Republican presidential candidate to Hitler had been a standard Democratic political tactic for some time no matter how inappropriate it might be.

OffGuardian.

As it is, I am not allowed to be proud of my heterosexuality. In truth, it is not something to be proud of. But for the same reason, there is nothing to be proud of in being homosexual, or bi or trans, or any variety of sexual preference or orientation or identity. Nothing.

Well, a person can be proud of the advancements an identified group has accomplished (particularly if you are a member of that group). Considering the trials and tribulations gay people have faced over the centuries, the fortitude, effort, and sacrifice they have made to socially be where they are today is certainly something a person could be proud of. But that isn’t being proud of being gay. That is being proud of character, resilience, resolve and fortitude. Being gay may have been the impetus for those admirable attributes, but gayness itself is not.

Pride is actually one of the Seven Cardinal Sins. And there is good reason for it to be. “Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall” (Proverbs 16:18) and all that. Of course, common sense would say that is not what gay pride is about. However, if we see that massive movement toward gay pride (or trans pride) as a product of the agenda, we can clearly see that it is intended to cause disruption. How so?

There is no justification for pride in a group to whose accomplishments one has made no contribution. This is why I have no interest in sportsball teams.

Keanu Reeves: ‘I want my shirts laundered the way they do it at the Imperial Hotel in Tokyo.’

Me, too.

Read it.

Few areas of research have captivated scientists more than the search for room-temperature superconductivity. Finding a way to reduce energy loss as electricity travels over transmission lines and across wires would profoundly change society. It would deliver nearly unlimited energy, turbocharge compute speeds, and introduce new and better ways to use computers and other electronics.

Yet assembling the right mix of materials to achieve room temperature superconductivity has eluded researchers for more than a century. Time and time again, physicists have announced breakthroughs that were later found to be irreproducible, in error, or even fraudulent. Consequently, the challenge—getting to superconductivity at temperatures above 0 degrees Kelvin (-273.15 degrees Celsius) at ambient pressure—remains a holy grail of physics and materials science.

The Register.

A group of researchers in the UK affiliated with the BSS published a paper this week calling for the permanent abolition of Daylight Saving Time (DST) and adherence to Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), in large part because modern evidence suggests having that extra hour of sunlight in the evenings is worse for our health than we thought back in the 1970s when the concept was all the rage in Europe.

Not only does GMT more closely align with the natural day/light cycle in the UK, the boffins assert, but decades of research into sleep and circadian rhythms have been produced since DST was enacted that have yet to be considered.

The human circadian rhythm, the 24-hour cycle our bodies go through, drives a lot about our health beyond sleep. It regulates hormone release, gene expression, metabolism, mood (who isn’t grumpier when waking up in January?), and the like. In short, it’s important. Messing with that rhythm by forcing ourselves out of bed earlier for several months out of the year can have lasting effects, the researchers said.

Speed the day.

Paul Graham.

I’m usually reluctant to make predictions about technology, but I feel fairly confident about this one: in a couple decades there won’t be many people who can write.

And their vote will count equally to yours.

Read it.

It was announced today that the UK will transfer sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory to Mauritius. Assuming this happens before March, this means when the sun sets on the Pitcairn Islands (18:50 Local time: UTC-8, 02:50 London time: UTC), the sun will have set on all British territory for the first time in over 200 years.

Read it.

Six former Bay Area Rapid Transit District Employees who lost their jobs for refusing COVID-19 vaccinations will each receive more than $1 million after a federal jury sided with them in a discrimination lawsuit.

Read it.

In a surprising yet overdue move, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has released its Final Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) for the New York Bight. This document, despite its extensive layers of technical jargon and cautious language, marks a pivotal shift. It appears to be a rare admission from BOEM that offshore wind farms are indeed capable of causing harm—biologically, socioeconomically, physically, and culturally.

Read it.

This article recounts the history of the diet-heart hypothesis from the late 1950s up to the current day, with revelations that have never before been published in the scientific literature. Insights include the role of authorities in launching the diet-hypothesis, including a potential conflict of interest for the American Heart Association; a number of crucial details regarding studies considered influential to the hypothesis; irregularities in the scientific reviews on saturated fats, for both the 2015 and 2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans; and possible conflicts of interest on the relevant subcommittee reviewing saturated fats for the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Information obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) on emails from the 2015 process is published here for the first time. These findings are highly relevant to the 2025–2030 Dietary Guidelines process, now underway, which has plans for a new review on saturated fats.

A reminder, to those of us who would profit by it, that scientific consensus is no guarantee of truth.

Read it.

The Israeli ‘retaliation’ attack against Iran, which occurred in the overnight and early morning hours, appears to be complete, with Israel’s military (IDF) having declared the response “concluded” after locations in three provinces of the Islamic Republic were hit.

Some 100 Israeli warplanes were sent, primarily across Jordanian airspace, for the unprecedented attack which reportedly included strikes on key missile, drone, and other military sites – including air defense installations. However, Iranians are mocking it as if it didn’t even happen, and there’s an emerging consensus among Western pundits that this was remarkably limited in scale. The attack did not involve Iranian nuclear or oil sites, according to Israeli military officials.

This was obviously a practice run for the later strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. This run allowed Israel to determine (a) what Jordan’s response (and Iraq’s response) would be to Israeli aircraft overflying their airspace, (b) where Iranian antiaircraft defenses were located, and (c) what the response times of those antiaircraft defenses would be. This is all vital intelligence.

Plus it allowed them to take out a lot of the trash.

Read it.

The Kamala Harris rally in Houston last night was billed as a Beyoncé concert. Everyone, including the media, believed the singer would perform after the announcement was made earlier in the week, but all she did was walk out and make a barely audible speech for a few minutes. Then the rally descended into complete chaos.

Bait-and-switch: Thy name is ‘Democrat’. (Hey, that’s how Kamala got the nomination in the first place….)

Read it.

Police in the 2024 battleground state of Pennsylvania are investigating some 2,500 voter registration forms that were submitted in two massive batches — and investigators say that 60% of the forms they’ve checked so far are fraudulent. All of the ballots were submitted in Lancaster County, but two other counties are scrutinizing similarly suspect batches. While officials say it’s the work of a “large-scale canvassing operation,” they’re not yet saying who’s behind it.

The roughly 2,500 applications landed at or near Pennsylvania’s Oct 21 registration deadline; some observers are speculating that the timing may have been tactical, with the intent of exploiting time-pressure administrators would be under ahead of the Nov. 5 Election Day. However, as they examined the massive heap of forms, application processors were immediately alarmed by what they saw:

• Multiple applications with the same handwriting and signatures

• Many forms filled out on the same day

• Applications for previously-registered voters whose signatures on the forms did not match the ones on file

Read it.

Shaquille O’Neal, commonly referred to as “Shaq” is among the greatest NBA players of all time, at least at the center position. During his playing days, Shaq was a force alongside Kobe Bryant, bringing home four championship titles in his 19-year career.

His list of accolades is as long as it is impressive. In addition to these four rings, Shaq was also put on the All-Star team 15 times and won three Finals MVP awards. His career was certainly very profitable, but as is a rarity in the world of professional sports, Shaq has actually made much more money off the court and invested the capital he did earn very well.

Let’s dive into Shaquille O’Neal’s business empire, much of which was built after his retirement in 2011, and what to make of this man’s success.

The Other McCain.

Failure in politics requires scapegoats, and Harris herself is exempt from blame because (according to the rules that Democrats impose) anyone who criticizes her is a racist and a sexist and, perhaps, literally Hitler. Forbidden to blame the candidate who led them to defeat, therefore, Democrats will point the finger of blame at each other, and we will witness a Carnival of Recriminations — if, as I say, Kamala loses. The fact that the Washington Post is imploding now, less than 10 days before Election Day, is a sort of signal of which way the winds are blowing. Robert Kagan wouldn’t be resigning his job if he didn’t think a Trump victory was highly probable.

What’s going on here? Professor Glenn Reynolds floats the theory — relevant to Bill Clinton throwing shade on Harris — that there’s an internecine combat between the Clinton clique and the Obama clique, with the Clintons aiming to get a measure of revenge. Team Clinton wants to make sure that they get none of the blame for an expected Harris defeat. But what about this thing at the Washington Post? Certainly it strikes me as an omen of a Harris defeat — Bezos wouldn’t have held back the Post‘s endorsement if he thought Harris was on her way to the White House. And, in examining this — again, hat-tip to Professor Reynolds — Ann Althouse mentions the similar non-endorsement by the Los Angeles Times.

LifeHacker.

Idealist nerds have a long history of giving terribly confusing names to potentially revolutionary technology. So it goes with Fediverse, a portmanteau of “Federation” and “Universe,” and the potential future of the social internet. But what does that mean?

Put simply, the Fediverse is the collective name for a bunch of different social networks and platforms that are connected to one another. Users on any of these services can follow users on any other one and respond to, like, and share posts.

There are a lot of articles and websites that explain this concept in detail, but most of them get bogged down in technical language pretty quickly. I’d like to avoid that, so here’s my good faith attempt to explain what the Fediverse is in plain English.

Read it.

Regenerative agriculture starts with the soil. The health of farm ground is connected to the financial viability and resiliency of the farm, said Chuck Rice, a professor at Kansas State University.

“We’ve lost 50% of our soil organic matter with 100 plus years of cultivation in the United States,” Rice said. “So we aren’t taking care of our soils.”

Methods like those Josh Payne has implemented on the Concordia farm revive — or regenerate — the soil and by extension the ecosystem. Regenerative agriculture methods aim to not only restore farmland to its prechemical and industrial state, but to help the land withstand the severe weather threats from climate change.

Climate change! Climate change! Climate change!

Read it.

The demand for food production is intensifying with a rapidly growing population, yet farmers around the world face unprecedented challenges owing to shifting climatic conditions. Controlled environment and vertical farming have emerged as a potential solution to boost resource use efficiency and food output per unit of land while allowing for cultivation in urban and arid regions, but widespread adoption has been hindered by substantial energy requirements. Recent developments in CO2/CO electrolysis as well as advances in genetic engineering and selective breeding have laid the groundwork for the emergence of electro-ag to substantially reduce the energy needs of vertical farming. Fueled by acetate derived from CO2 using renewable electricity, electro-ag enables the heterotrophic growth of food crops. Unlike traditional controlled environments or conventional farming, electro-ag is not constrained by the same efficiency limitations of photosynthesis. Instead, the efficient metabolic pathways of acetate utilization are harnessed to allow for at least a 4-fold improvement in solar-to-food efficiency, with future efforts potentially leading to an order of magnitude improvement in energy solar-to-food efficiency. If the United States food supply was produced via electro-ag, land usage could be decreased by 88% while substantially streamlining food supply chains by decentralizing food production.

There are many advantages of an electro-ag-based global food system. By improving efficiency and decreasing land usage, a large portion of Earth’s land could be rewilded to restore ecosystems supporting natural carbon sequestration. Additionally, electro-ag systems can be deployed in extreme environments such as deserts, cities, or even on Mars where it is otherwise difficult to grow food. Electro-ag can also help avoid devastating food price spikes by reducing the impact of extreme weather and localizing food production. Electro-ag is poised to revolutionize the realm of food production by offering a sustainable pathway toward a more resilient and equitable food system. Future efforts should seek to further improve the energy efficiency of electro-ag while working toward the production of calorie-dense staple crops to help combat global hunger.

The Economist.

Every day seems to bring more exciting news. First the drugs tackled diabetes. Then, with just an injection a week, they took on obesity. Now they are being found to treat cardiovascular and kidney disease, and are being tested for Alzheimer’s and addiction. It is early days yet, but glp-1 receptor agonists have all the makings of one of the most successful classes of drugs in history. As they become cheaper and easier to use, they promise to dramatically improve the lives of more than a billion people—with profound consequences for industry, the economy and society.

If, of course, they can make their way through the government gatekeepers on behalf of Big Pharma.

Washington Poop.

A federal appeals court Friday ruled invalid a Mississippi law that allows election officials to count mail ballots that arrive after Election Day as long as they are postmarked by then.

The ruling came less than two weeks before the Nov. 5 presidential election and could have implications for other states with similar laws. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit did not rule on how the state should handle ballots for this election, saying that matter should be addressed later by a trial court judge.

The reason a Voice of the Crust is hand-wringing over this is that ‘late-arriving ballots’ are a standard tool in the Democrat election-stealing toolbox.

“Federal law requires voters to take timely steps to vote by Election Day,” Judge Andrew S. Oldham wrote for the unanimous panel. “And federal law does not permit the State of Mississippi to extend the period for voting by one day, five days, or 100 days.”

Indeed.

Read it.

Now I want to be clear what we’re doing here. I am not asking if the Republican Party is fascist (I think, broadly speaking, it isn’t) and certainly not if you are fascist (I certainly hope not). But I want to employ the concept of fascism as an ideology with more precision than its normal use (‘thing I don’t like’) and in that context ask if Donald Trump fits the definition of a fascist based on his own statements and if so, what does that mean. And I want to do it in a long-form context where we can get beyond slogans or tweet-length arguments and into some detail.

…

Mussolini and Hitler have become such bywords for evil in general conversation, peers to the Dark Lord Sauron or Frieza, that they need to be demystified to a significant degree to be useful for understanding human affairs and our momentum because these men did not appear suddenly as the villains we now know them to be. There were plenty of signs of what these men might do once in power, before they had it, but they did not stride on to the stage dressed in spikes and black robes. These were men, not wizards with mind control powers, so it is worth asking why people were so foolish to entrust them with power – to the near universal ruin of everyone involved.

This author makes the usual mistake of interpreting Trumpian hyperbole (which he has used all his life) for serious political talk, as if Trump were your standard Establishmentarian apparatchik. The actions of both Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and the public statements of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, make a much better case of them fitting this author’s definition of fascist (but of course he doesn’t go through that exercise because It’s All About Trump.

I think it’s rather plain that the American Federal government is effectively fascist and has been on course to be so since the administration of Woodrow Wilson, with a big boost from Franklin Roosevelt. Most of Trump’s ‘fascist’ statements are merely pointing out that he would do what most Democrat administrations have blatantly failed to do, their job in enforcing the law, such as acting to stop illegal immigration (rather than encouraging it) and pursuing a non-belligerent and pro-American foreign policy (remember how North Korea wasn’t a problem when Trump was President?). If you’re looking for censorship and violence against opponents, it would be hard for Trump to achieve what Obama and Biden have regularly done, whether against the January 6th demonstrators or against Trump himself.

ABC News, a Voice of the Crust.

In Woke-speak, ‘misinfornation’ is anything that disagrees with the Narrative.

In Woke-speak, ‘drive Americans apart’ means anything that persuades people not to like Big Brother.

Read it.

Even though it is.

Read it.

The long-anticipated Israeli retaliation strike on Iran appears to be underway. U.S. and Iranian media is reporting that Tehran is under attack as videos emerging on social media show explosions in the Iranian capital. The attack is in retaliation for Iran’s massive Oct. 1 missile barrage on Israel.

Read it.

A small but growing number of American schools are reducing or delaying access to advanced courses. Most often, these changes have been enacted in the name of reducing achievement gaps between demographic groups. However, rather than helping marginalized students, these policies deny educational opportunities for gifted students of all backgrounds.

“Detracking” is an increasingly popular proposal among educators that attempts to reduce the degree to which students are separated by academic ability. It typically takes the form of removing advanced course offerings or delaying the introduction of these offerings. Supporters claim that marginalized students are often wrongly placed—or place themselves—in less advanced courses and that these students often stay on a less advanced curricular path.

In San Francisco, public schools have eliminated accelerated math courses in middle and high school since 2014, and several Seattle schools had rolled out detracking efforts by 2016. Earlier this year, a Detroit-area school district eliminated middle school honors math classes, while schools in Cambridge, Massachusetts, began phasing out advanced middle school math in 2017—though the district announced it would reverse course in August. Outrage erupted in February when one Los Angeles–area school eliminated honors English courses for ninth- and 10th-grade students.

Harrison Bergeron, by Kurt Vonnegut.

Watch it.

If I ever win the lottery, I’m going to build a castle — out of stone. (With windows of transparent aluminum).

Read it.

Want to read Kamala’s ‘resumé’? Here it is.

Read it.

Both Italy and Poland are grappling with organised networks of smugglers who make their money by smuggling convoys of migrants into the European Union.

At a time when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni is trying to impose a new model for managing illegal migratory flows and is encountering hostility from her country’s courts, the Italian police have revealed the existence of a gang active on the Calabrian coast, whose aim was to redirect migrants to various European Union countries.

An investigation carried out in southern Italy in coordination with anti-mafia units led to the arrest of 13 smugglers from Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan in Catanzaro, Calabria.

The backdoor invasion of Europe by Muslims proceeds apace.

Tyler Cowen.

Over-regulation was the enemy at many presentations, but this wasn’t a libertarian conference. Everyone agreed that safety, quality, the environment, etc, were important and should be regulated for. They just thought existing regulations were colossally stupid, so much so that they made everything worse including safety, the environment, etc. With enough political will, it would be easy to draft regulations that improved innovation, price, safety, the environment, and everything else.

For example, consider supersonic flight. Supersonic aircraft create “sonic booms”, minor explosions that rattle windows and disturb people underneath their path. Annoyed with these booms, Congress banned supersonic flight over land in 1973. Now we’ve invented better aircraft whose booms are barely noticeable, or not noticeable at all. But because Congress banned supersonic flight – rather than sonic booms themselves – we’re stuck with normal boring 6-hour coast-to-coast flights. If aircraft progress had continued at the same rate it was going before the supersonic ban, we’d be up to 2,500 mph now (coast-to-coast in ~2 hours). Can Congress change the regulation so it bans booms and not speed? Yes, but Congress is busy, and doing it through the FAA and other agencies would take 10-15 years of environmental impact reports.

Gee, government regulations screw everything up? Hooda thunkit?

New York Times.

The leader of the long-running study said that the drugs did not improve mental health in children with gender distress and that the finding might be weaponized by opponents of the care.

WokeSpeak “weaponized”: Using facts to argue that Woke ideology harms rather than helps. (Can’t have that…)

Read it.

Italy will strengthen its digital services tax as part of plans to raise more revenues in the 2025 budget, Deputy Economy Minister Maurizio Leo said on Wednesday, in a move that could trigger retaliation from the United States.

Washington has threatened tariffs over unilateral digital taxes in Europe such as the Italian levy, which applies to Meta Platforms Inc (META.O), opens new tab, Google (GOOGL.O), opens new tab and Amazon (AMZN.O), opens new tab and has so far raised 400 million euros ($436 million).

A senior Italian official, who declined to be named, said the government had authorised the tax increase without receiving any tacit approval from Washington.

“Our politicians have decided to take a risk,” the official said.

Italy in 2019 introduced a 3% levy on revenue from internet transactions for digital companies with sales of at least 750 million euros ($817.13 million), at least 5.5 million of which are made in Italy.
The government will remove these minimum conditions necessary for the tax to be applied, Leo said, confirming an earlier Reuters report.

They see the U.S. government sticking their hands in to Mark Zuckerberg et al.’s pockets and want to get a piece of the action.

Read it.

he old adage that there is no smoke without fire has taken on a sinister meaning in Australia after a series of arson attacks on tobacconists. The word “series” barely does it justice. “Endless succession” is closer to the mark. When a shop selling illegal tobacco was firebombed in Adelaide last Tuesday, it was the 16th such incident in South Australia and the 130th nationwide since the “tobacco turf wars” began last year. It was followed by another firebombing in Adelaide on Saturday, an arson attack on a gym in Melbourne on Sunday, two tobacconists set ablaze in Melbourne on Tuesday and a smoke shop in New South Wales being ram-raided and blown up yesterday.

With drive-by shootings and murders in broad daylight, Australia’s black market in tobacco and vapes should be a cautionary tale, but it has received little attention in the Northern hemisphere. The root of the problem is obvious. Australia has the highest tobacco taxes in the world and has banned e-cigarettes entirely. The market for both products is now largely in the hands of criminal gangs who encourage shopkeepers to sell their products by telling them to “earn or burn”.

Read it.

For most of the 20th century, IQ scores steadily climbed, a phenomenon so consistent it was named the “Flynn effect” after the psychologist James Flynn, who first documented it. Generations across the globe were getting smarter, or at least, their scores on intelligence tests were improving. Explanations ranged from better nutrition and healthcare to more complex societies that required sharper minds. But now, as we move further into the 21st century, the Flynn effect seems to be crumbling. In some countries, the rise has plateaued; in others, it has reversed. What is going on? Are we getting dumber, or is something else at play?

A timely study by Sandra Oberleiter and her colleagues has provided an answer that is both unsettling and enlightening. Published in Intelligence, their research suggests that the Flynn effect is faltering because the nature of intelligence itself is shifting. The problem isn’t that we’re getting dumber. It’s that we’re getting more specialized, and that, in turn, is weakening the ties that bind our cognitive abilities together. In short, modern life is forcing us to become experts at the expense of being generalists.

Nature.

DNA has been humanity’s go-to data repository for millennia. Tough and compact, it is so information-dense that just one gram of it can hold enough data for 10 million hours of high-definition video.

But there is always room for improvement.

An innovative method now allows DNA to store information as a binary code — the same strings of 0s and 1s used by standard computers. That could one day be cheaper and faster than encoding information in the sequence of the building blocks that make up DNA, which is the method used by cells and by most efforts to harness DNA for storing artificially generated data.

The method is so straightforward that 60 volunteers from a variety of backgrounds were able to use it to store the text of their choice. Many of them initially didn’t think the technique would work, says Long Qian, a computational synthetic biologist at Peking University in Beijing and an author of the study1 describing the technique.

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The Houthis began attacking shipping in October of 2023 in support of Gaza and “eventually began using Russian satellite data as they expanded their strikes,” The Wall Street Journal reported on Thursday. The publication cited “a person familiar with the matter and two European defense officials.”

The data “was passed through members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), who were embedded with the Houthis in Yemen,” one of the people told the Journal.