Read it.

Few liquids are more precious than printer ink, but that’s not because ink is expensive to make. How can HP— and its handful of competitors in the highly concentrated printer market—get away with charging these kinds of markups?

Simple: It’s a combination of monopoly power, wacky laws, and consumer-hostile tech.

Read it.

How forensic linguists use grammar, syntax and vocabulary to help crack cold cases.

You learn something new every day.

A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry.

A question to which I dare say you haven’t given a lot of thought.

AND a reminder that there is no notion so trivial or eccentric that some group of people haven’t made an area of deep concern.

Scientific American, a Voice of the Crust.

Archaeological and genetic discoveries topple long-standing ideas about the domestication of equines.

BBC, a Voice of the Crust.

Wearable tech – currently dominated by smart watches – is a multi-billion dollar industry with a sharp focus on health tracking.

Many premium products claim to accurately track exercise routines, body temperature, heart rate, menstrual cycle and sleep patterns, among others.

…

But many doctors – and tech experts – remain cautious about using health data captured by wearables.

Read it.

Why is it that, after politicians, bankers and lawyers, architects have such a bad reputation among the general public?

From the Left, architects are held in suspicion or outright hostility as the tools of global finance, willing collaborators with corrupt municipal authorities, apologists for the predations of capital. From the Right, if anything, the contempt is even greater, with architects denounced as the avant-garde of a brutalist, hubristic modernism that has stripped our cities and towns of the layers of history and the particularity of place, both of which they have replaced with a homogeneous landscape of concrete, steel and glass.

And why, perhaps just as importantly, do the vast majority of architects appear to be resigned to this animosity, content to bury their heads in the latest gadgets for digital modelling and 3D-printing while the Tower of Babel they have built is everywhere crumbling into dust?

New Atlas.

A self-propagating series of explosions, contained between the blades of a high-speed rotor, promises a leap in power and efficiency during hypersonic flight – provided this radical new engine can be built strong enough to withstand its own power.

New York Magazine, a Voice of the Crust.

After her mother was diagnosed with stage-four breast cancer, Anna watched for years as she fought both the illness and the health-care system until her death in 2020. “The fight with the insurance companies was, in many ways, worse than cancer,” Anna says. “It took over my entire family’s life.”

She recalls her mother’s time-consuming struggles to get new treatments approved. “It was just so maddening to know they were shaving years off my mom’s life because of the paperwork,” Anna recalls.

So on Wednesday morning when she heard the news that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was shot dead in Manhattan, she had a perverse reaction.

“I am ashamed to admit it, but there was a little surge of Schadenfreude,” says Anna, who, like several others in this story, asked to use a pseudonym to protect her privacy.

In many cases dealing with insurance companies is like dealing with welfare-state agencies: Charged with providing benefits but fenced around to make sure that such benefits don’t go to enrich the Undeserving, it too often winds up as a mud-wrestling match between bureaucrats and the underclass who depend upon assistance to get through life.

Axios, a Voice of the Crust.

The proglodyte dogma that having a lot of money is a sure indicator of moral depravity is on full display.

SciTechDaily.

A new study on human brain evolution reveals that modern humans, Neanderthals, and other recent relatives in our evolutionary lineage developed larger brains at a significantly faster rate compared to earlier species.

The study, published in the journal PNAS, overturns long-standing ideas about human brain evolution. Scientists from the University of Reading, the University of Oxford, and Durham University found that brain size increased gradually within each ancient human species rather than through sudden leaps between species.

The team assembled the largest-ever dataset of ancient human fossils spanning 7 million years and used advanced computational and statistical methods to account for gaps in the fossil record. These innovative approaches provided the most comprehensive view yet of how brain size evolved over time.

Read it.

I’d agree that representatives selected from party lists drawn up by capitalists, whether “state” or “corporate”, are hardly the best people to advance democracy.

But can democracy provide a satisfactory and complete political system within itself?

The problem with democracy is that it doesn’t really do what we all want it to do, and yet nobody seems able to come up with a better alternative.

Read it.

Roger Scruton is a marvel.

Read it.

Imagine that.

The Foundry.

Many Democrats dream of ways to ensure they never lose power again. This is why they want to eliminate the Electoral College, pack the Supreme Court, and make the District of Columbia a state.

As D.C. celebrates 50 years of “home rule,” here are five reasons that autonomy—let alone statehood—isn’t a good idea.

Read it.

The Biden regime has quietly revoked the veterans hiring preference for civil service jobs and promotions, which since the 1944 Veterans Act gave eligible veterans preference over others for appointments in federal civil service selection, a memorandum obtained by American Greatness shows.

Read it.

It appears no liberal Christmas is complete without the ultimate stocking stuffer: an actual stocking to wear over your face while rioting. While not yet selling face coverings for anonymous violence, Crooked Media, co-founded by former Obama staffers Jon Favreau, Jon Lovett, and Tommy Vietor, is selling a line of Antifa items for liberals wanting to make a statement against any “Peace on Earth.” (As of this posting, Antifa items were still being sold on the “Crooked Store” site). You can now proudly wear your “Antifa Dad” hat to signal your support for political violence and deplatforming. It is the ultimate naughty gift list for putting the slay back into your Sleigh Bells.

Read it.

Hey, it worked for Bloomberg. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.

The Foundry.

“Pretty disgusting” and “grotesque.” That’s how a Florida parent described an online session for students on “gender” provided by two K-12 virtual public schools in November—a session that virtual school officials held without first informing parents.

These schools’ attempt to sidestep families is just the latest in a long list of examples demonstrating that some educators and academic publishers will simply go around parents to push lewd content on K-12 students.

Yet this particular incident has implications for local, state, and even federal policymakers.

This ought to come as a surprise to nobody.

Read it.

This is one of those “Hey, wait a minute….” situations that cases even even proglodyte governments to wake up.

Read it.

A 37-year-old Iraqi asylum seeker has been arrested in Augsburg, Germany, for allegedly planning a terrorist attack on the city’s popular Christmas market, local police confirmed.

Authorities acted after discovering evidence that the suspect, named as Ali Al-G, had scouted the market and engaged with Islamic State (IS) operatives online. The arrest has highlighted ongoing security concerns surrounding Christmas markets across Germany, which have been targets for Islamist terrorism in recent years.

Die Welt reports that Ali Al-G was detained on Wednesday evening at an asylum seekers’ residence in Augsburg. Police cited a warrant issued by the Augsburg District Court to secure his deportation under Section 58a of Germany’s Residence Act, a rarely invoked measure for individuals deemed an imminent security threat. According to law enforcement, Al-G had taken photographs of Augsburg’s Christkindlesmarkt and discussed using a vehicle to ram into the crowd, a method reminiscent of previous IS-inspired attacks in Europe.

Imagine how peaceful the world would be if the Religion of Peace didn’t exist.

Read it.

In a shocking video released by Project Veritas, an EPA official appears to confirm what many have long suspected: taxpayer money is being shoveled out the door with reckless abandon, all in the name of climate policy. The official’s words paint a damning picture of an agency prioritizing speed over prudence, all to sidestep political obstacles. His cavalier attitude suggests that the real motive is not saving the planet, but safeguarding their funding from potential Republican oversight.

Read it.

A scathing and detailed new watchdog report has found the condition of the Navy’s amphibious ship fleet — the fleet Marines rely on to be America’s rapid deployment force — is so degraded that it has already cost the Marine Corps decades of training and deployment time.

Half of the Navy’s 32-ship amphibious fleet is considered to be in “poor” condition by the Navy’s own standards, according to the Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday. “In some cases, ships in the amphibious fleet have not been available for years at a time,” which also means that “these ships are not on track to meet their expected service lives,” the agency said.

The figures come at a time when the sea service has become increasingly tight-lipped about the state of its fleet as a whole and insights into the state of amphibious ships come only when they publicly and visibly break down on camera. However, even then, officials have downplayed the issues actually facing their ships.

ZMan lays out how The System really works.

We just went through an election and people are stunned to learn that no one in Washington noticed it. It is business as usual in the imperial capital. The only change is they will have to throw sand in the gears of the Trump transition, but the purpose of which is to make sure it remains business as usual after January. Exactly no one cares that the people have spoken.

The main reason for this is elected office holders have little say in how anything is done, not even in how legislation is passed. This is done by an army of staffers, agency people, lobbyists and the semi-permanent political class. The people in charge are the people you rarely see on television or in the news. They are the people who make up what Sam Francis called the leviathan.

That is the show this week. The stuff we learned in school about how our political system functions has been reduced to nonsense. It sort of worked that way decades ago, but the full flowering of the managerial state has put the system in the control of the army of people who make their living running the leviathan. Elections are just something they now hold to distract us.

Read it.

I was shocked — shocked, I tell you! — to learn that an Islamic cultural center in the southern Swedish city of Malmö teaches little children to hate Jews. And I’m sure that the good citizens of Sweden are as appalled as I am.

This particular Islamic center happens to be a Shi’a establishment, but the doctrine in a Sunni madrassa would be much the same: We love Hamas, and Jews are the offspring of apes and pigs.

Read it.

A Europe-wide bust targeted high-level people traffickers, some of whom were operating out of an asylum center in Germany. It makes sense as a business model: immigrants trafficking immigrants means that the entrepreneur stays close to his customer base, right?

The Washington Poop, a Voice of the Crust.

President Joe Biden and his top staffers are discussing whether to grant preemptive pardons to figures who might face the hostility of the incoming Trump administration, concerned that President-elect Donald Trump and others in his circle have threatened to go after their political adversaries.

Of course they are.

Among those being weighed for potential pardons are Anthony S. Fauci, who helped coordinate Biden’s covid-19 response; retired Gen. Mark A. Milley, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who has called Trump a “fascist”; Sen.-elect Adam Schiff (D-California), who led the first impeachment effort against Trump; and former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), an outspoken GOP critic of Trump.

Obviously, they are expecting the Trump administration to bring the sort of manufactured charges that the Democrats raised against Trump. “Mommmeeee! Donald hit me back!”

The Foundry.

A House task force probing the attempted assassination in July of Donald Trump held a final hearing Thursday that contained some fireworks, promises to improve, and unanswered questions.

Ronald L. Rowe Jr., acting director of the Secret Service, was the only witness to appear before the task force, which includes eight Republicans and six Democrats. Rowe replaced Kimberly Cheatle, who resigned after the first assassination attempt against Trump on July 13 at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

The panel, formally called the House Task Force on the Attempted Assassination of Donald J. Trump, focused primarily on the attempt on Trump’s life in Pennsylvania. A second assassination attempt occurred Sept. 15 at the former president’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.

After the hearing, the panel voted unanimously to make its final report available to the full House. It wasn’t expected to be made public immediately, however.

God forbid ordinary taxpayers should be allowed to read it.

Read it.

The Party of Tax & Spend does what it does best.

UPDATE: Republican Leaders Demand Biden-Harris Admin Freeze Lame Duck Green Loans Following Free Beacon Report

Good luck with that.

New York Times, a Voice of the Crust.

The fatal shooting on Wednesday of a top UnitedHealthcare executive, Brian Thompson, on a Manhattan sidewalk has unleashed a torrent of morbid glee from patients and others who say they have had negative experiences with health insurance companies at some of the hardest times of their lives.

It is unclear what motivated the incident or whether it was tied to Mr. Thompson’s work in the insurance industry. The police have yet to identify the shooter who is still on the loose.

But that did not stop social media commenters from leaping to conclusions and from showing a blatant lack of sympathy over the death of a man who was a husband and father of two children.

“Thoughts and deductibles to the family,” read one comment underneath a video of the shooting posted online by CNN. “Unfortunately my condolences are out-of-network.”

Read it.

An explosive new report from Sen. Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, who chairs the Senate DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) Caucus, notes that fewer than 1 of out every 10 federal employees (6%) work in an office full time, citing an April survey.

“If you exclude security guards & maintenance personnel, the number of government workers who show up in person and do 40 hours of work a week is closer to 1%!” posted Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur leading DOGE with fellow billionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, in response to the report. “Almost no one.”

Read it.

Amid the swift and stunning collapse of Aleppo following an assault led by Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is internationally sanctioned as a terrorist group, it is important to pause and recall that we have been here before. The advance by HTS and Turkish-backed rebels in Syria suggests that Turkey is playing its cards before US president-elect Donald Trump takes office, driven by its existential fear of a Kurdish enclave in northern Syria.

Turkey had been frustrated with Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s repeated refusal to come to the negotiating table and meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyib Erdogan, although both Syrian and Turkish defense and intelligence chiefs have met regularly in Russia. Al-Assad has been negotiating through his ministers while relying on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Russia for the diplomatic push. Yet, while the finger of blame has been pointed at Turkey, the Israel factor cannot be discounted.

Read it.

What do you get when the world’s third richest man buys Tolkien’s local? Oxford is about to find out.

The Eagle & Child is Oxford’s most storied inn. It was here that the Inklings met every Tuesday lunchtime – a writing group including J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Hugo Dyson, a lecturer in English who infamously dismissed one plot twist in the Lord of the Rings with “Not another —ing elf!”.
Larry Ellison is the billionaire behind US database giant Oracle. He owns the sixth largest island in Hawaii, hired Steve Jobs as his wedding photographer, and was compared to a lawnmower by a disgruntled ex-Oracle engineer. He also doesn’t drink.

All this makes him an unusual candidate for an Oxford pub landlord. But then the new Eagle & Child is going to be an unusual pub.

Sarah Hoyt:

Children weren’t some airy-fairy “the culture tell us it’s good.” For most of human history children were economic goods, an addition to the parents comfort and their ability to survive. For a head-spinning moment, go and read colonial biographies. “I’m so sorry my four year old died. He was doing most of the work looking after the cows and horses, and he was very advanced in his study of Greek.”

Read it.

The University of Michigan has eliminated diversity statements from its hiring, promotion, and tenure processes, Provost Laurie McCauley announced Thursday morning. The decision comes hours before the board of regents is expected to weigh changes to the university’s bloated diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) program, a consideration that has spurred protests and intense debate on campus.

The University of Michigan has one of the most aggressive DEI programs in higher education. A New York Times Magazine investigation published in October found that the university’s efforts have cost more than a quarter-billion dollars over a 10-year period. More than half of that was spent on salaries and benefits for DEI staff.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion are three of our core values at the university. Our collective efforts in this area have produced important strides in opening opportunities for all people,” McCauley wrote in a statement Thursday. “As we pursue this challenging and complex work, we will continuously refine our approach.”

The provost’s decision follows an eight-member faculty working group’s Oct. 31 recommendation to end the statements, arguing that they limit free expression and diversity of thought.

Oh, ya think?

Read it.

Although Donald Trump’s election was widely seen as a rebuke to the Left’s obsession with race, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has promised to “Trump-proof” his state, and that likely applies to the Democrat’s ongoing plans to give race-based handouts.

This year alone, Newsom signed a slate of reparations bills into law. And although California won’t be handing out checks, its laws are sure to spark more calls from California liberals to take money from Hispanic, Asian, and white Californians and give it to black Californians.

Time to leave — unless you’re black.

Read it.

In August, the nation’s second-largest school district announced a major policy shift that caused the soon-to-be-unemployed minds at The Los Angeles Times editorial board to collectively explode last month. Why?

Because in the wake of a federal civil rights complaint filed by Parents Defending Education in 2023, the U.S. Department of Education forced the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) to open up its $120 million Black Student Achievement Plan tutoring program to all students with academic need—no longer conditioning participation on skin color alone.

Read that again: a public school system—underwritten by public tax dollars—is no longer allowed to discriminate on the basis of race. In 2024.

The horror!

Read it.

American defense industries lack the capacity to supply the missiles and other weapons needed for a war with China and U.S. forces would lose the conflict as a result, members of Congress and private defense experts warned Thursday.

 

Reuben Navarette.

Democrats are fiercely determined to flood the company with underclass immigrants who will be dependent on Democrats (The Party Of Free Stuff) for their welfare and will vote accordingly.

Unfortunately, Biden can’t issue a blanket pardon for people who have entered the country illegally, because that would encompass a bunch of criminals and terrorists, many of whom have already been convicted in American courts and are serving time. Democrats would not be prepared for the blowup that would happen if that turned out to be the case. And Biden doesn’t have enough time left in office for his minions to sort out the goats from the wolves.

Read it.

America’s ports have fallen behind. Not a single one ranks in the top 50 worldwide.
A big reason is that dock unions stop innovation.

This fall, the International Longshoremen’s Association shut down East and Gulf coast ports, striking for a raise and a ban on automation. They got the raise.

Now union president Harold Daggett says longshoremen will strike again in January if they don’t get that ban on automation.

Read it.

Boeing’s plea deal with federal prosecutors, aimed at resolving the US Justice Department’s investigation into the 737 MAX fatal crashes that claimed 346 lives over a five-month span in 2018 and 2019, was rejected by a federal judge in Texas on Thursday due to an alarming DEI provision.

According to a Wall Street Journal report, US District Judge Reed O’Connor rejected the plea deal, stating that it improperly constrained the court by requiring diversity considerations in the selection of an outside monitor to oversee Boeing’s future legal compliance.

O’Connor wrote that DoJ prosecutors gave him “shifting and contradictory explanations” of the role DEI would play in shaping the selection of a monitor:

“In a case of this magnitude, it is in the utmost interest of justice that the public is confident this monitor selection is done based solely on competency.”

Read it.

The Arabic name, which is shared with the Prophet Muhammad, overtook Noah to become the most popular name for boys in 2023.

Although it is being reported that this is the first time Muhammad has topped the charts, it would have actually come in at number one in multiple previous years had all the different spellings of the name been combined.

Time to leave.

UnHerd.

Discussing Donald Trump’s election victory with a panel of TV pundits, Princeton professor Eddie Glaude explained it with reference to race. “There’s this sense,” he said, “that whiteness is under threat.” He went on to elaborate, if not elucidate, what he meant by this. “All these demographic shifts,” he said, “all these racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.” They are “confusing the hell out of” white people, and these white people, confused by children’s faces on Cheerios boxes, and threatened by this confusion, reacted against this “sense” of threat by voting for Trump. Glaude gave no evidence of white people confused by children’s faces, or of the feelings of threat these young faces were supposedly causing.

You’d think this professor would feel an even greater need to ground his claim in real evidence this election year, given that Trump did better with black and Latino and other non-white voters than any Republican presidential candidate in recent memory. But apparently not. When another panelist suggested that inflation better explained why Trump was elected, Professor Glaude was both derisive and adamant. The idea that Trump won because of inflation — historically a cause of trouble for incumbent parties — was nuts. The scientifically obvious answer was whiteness, threatened as it is these days by racially ambiguous children on Cheerios boxes.

Glaude’s claim seemed both obviously wrong and symptomatic of the extreme insularity of progressive elites, who talk in abstractions like “whiteness” as they consult each other, even as those abstractions look like delusions to the less sophisticated people who merely consult things in the real world. He aired his apparent delusion for these regular people, who mocked and scorned him on social media.

ZMan does some parsing.

In the 18th century, no one could have imagined a jury drawn from vagrants, imbeciles and lunatics, so there would have been no need to provide against it. Juries were composed of respectable people, almost always men. Since crimes were all state crimes, it made sense to defer to the states on the process. By the time the Constitution was adopted, every state had a court system, and they were generally modeled on the English system for obvious reasons.

This is one of the many flaws in the Constitution. It was created by men who lacked the imagination to provide for the rise of a universal and timeless moral code that included men pretending to be women and drug addicts having an unquestioned right to roam the streets, harassing the citizens. They failed to appreciate the need to have two-digit IQ people, barely able to dress themselves, sit on juries in cases involving complex technical issues in narrow technical fields.

Daniel Penny is on trial for his life in New York City and his fate will be decided by people who may not be able to read at a high school level. New York City is now famous for madhouse juries, lunatic judges and ideological prosecutors who use the former two conditions to persecute their ideological enemies. Everyone outside the ideological fever swamps understands that Daniel Penny is on trial because he is a white and the crackhead was black.

Read it.

Former Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz encouraged people to kill health company executives just hours after the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Biran Thompson.

Don’t hold it in, tell us how you really feel.

Read it.

Amnesty International accused the state of Israel of committing genocide against terrorists in the Gaza war in a report published Thursday, an allegation Israel angrily denied.

Well, at least we know whose side they’re on.

The Great Sort continues.

ZMan looks at the elephant in the room.

One of the remarkable things to happen in the last election cycle was the preference cascade that quietly happened regarding immigration. Five years ago, the best you could hope to hear from normie and the people who prey on him in the political system is that “illegal immigration” is bad. They still clung to “legal immigration” as some sort of magical incantation that put them on the side of angels. Then suddenly, normie was holding up signs that read, “Mass Deportation Now!”

There is a practical reason for the change. Trump ran on the immigration issue in 2016 and to the surprise of the beautiful people, it was not disqualifying. They were sure they had properly anathematized the issue but there was Trump talking about Mexican rapists and Muslim bans. They responded with violence against Trump supporters and the usual stuff about Hitler. Meanwhile, the Trump administration was using the administrative state to clamp down on immigration.

That created a contradiction. On the one hand, the Cloud People were attacking the Dirt People for being anti-immigrant bigots, even though the Dirt People continued to hold romantic views on immigration. On the other hand, the negative results of immigration were slowly declining as immigration declined. Then like a windstorm, Biden comes in, opens the border and suddenly everyone is now getting to see the results of open borders policy in their neighborhood.

Read it.

The Biden administration is racing to disburse financing from the government’s biggest clean energy bank to get ahead of possible cuts once President-elect Donald Trump takes office.

On Monday the US Department of Energy agreed to lend a project backed by automaker Stellantis up to $7.5 billion for two electric-vehicle battery factories in Indiana. The deal follows nearly $12 billion in other clean energy loans and guarantees announced in the last week, adding up to $41 billion in conditional commitments to about 20 projects the office is now racing to finalize before Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

Realistically, most of those deals won’t close before Trump takes office, creating a risk that the new administration could pause or rescind them. Current and former DOE staff told Semafor they worry that the Loan Programs Office (LPO), a bastion of outgoing President Joe Biden’s climate agenda, could be drastically scaled back under Trump. They fear the incoming president may decide to leave roughly $340 billion in remaining loan authority either untouched or directed to projects favored by the fossil fuel industry.

Politico, a Voice of the Crust.

Why not? If he can pardon Hunter, he can pardon anybody.

UPDATE: Fauci, Schiff, And Cheney May Receive ‘Preemptive Pardons’  We now have a list of the people who ought to be brought to justice.