Richard Hanania on X - "82% of humanities papers, 32% of social sciences, and 27% in natural sciences are never cited. Forget DEI. This is the real reason not to go into academia. It’s a grift. Anyone who can realize that leaves, no wonder those who remain are true believers."
Brad Wilcox on X - "Revealed preference of so many 🇺🇸 parents—moving from blue states like CA/NY to red states like FL/TX—suggests blue family policy priorities are less important than policies touching on housing, taxes, growth & educational choice."
Meme - Oprah: "My friend sucked dick for the first time today & she said she cried in the toilet after because his cum taste like ham & she's a vegetarian"
Roko 🆔 / acc on X - "Plant based diets are probably very bad for you. There was always a fairly strong theoretical argument for this from evolution: humans seek out meat and animal foods over plant-based foods, and robust indicators of human health took a nose dive when we invented agriculture. But the counterargument has always been that science™ says that plant based diets are better. Well, now that it has become clear that modern science™ cannot be trusted to track the truth, the arguments for eating less meat look a lot weaker. In particular we know that knowledge dispersal tends to confound association studies into human health outcomes. In other words, the modern system for assessing health outcomes of different choices is complete bunk: a trendy magazine or paper says that intervention X is good for you. Intervention is then performed much more often by people who are high socioeconomic status, well-off, educated etc who just tend to have good health outcomes because of their wealth and good genetics. Then an association study is done and it confirms that action X is associated with good health, further reinforcing the false belief. When you look at the evidence around vegan/vegetarian/plant-based diets, it is mostly associational. Of those that are RCTs, most are short-term, and many of them use an obese population and show that a net reduction of calories causes weight loss in the short-term. I cannot find a long-term (5 years+) RCT on the effects of a vegan diet with good sample size. Perhaps the most controversial evidence that vegan or plant-based diets are bad for you is that official sources are heavily pushing them via media, books, newspapers, websites etc. The regime has a generalized tendency to lie (e.g. about covid, about HBD, about gender, about climate change, about nuclear power, immigration and so on), so the fact that theses diets are being promoted is itself a point against them."
Meme - "So I had my first date with a Vegan last night, I tried to make her feel at home, added some corn and carrots to my plate.. *large plate of meat*"
Samarth 🍥 on X - "A girl from Reddit got her Schengen Visa rejected On the second go, she needed more strong reasons to prove that she will leave the visiting country after trip is done So she added a copy of Taylor Swift show tix happening in her home country & visa actually got approved 😭"
Emil O W Kirkegaard on X - "No one wants to be told their child is retarded. So naturally when alternative diagnoses become possible for the same presentation, diagnoses shift towards that. It seems about 25% of extra autism cases in California was due to reclassifying retarded into autism cases."
Diagnostic change and the increased prevalence of autism
'Try not to let moose lick your car,' warns Parks Canada, as more moose flock to highways - ""Unfortunately, this kind of puts [moose] at risk of being injured or killed if they get hit by a vehicle," she said. "Parks Canada understands that seeing those wildlife is a real highlight for a lot of people, but we ask people not to stop … so that the moose can't get used to licking salt off of the cars.""
Meme - "I'M A LIBERAL BECAUSE I'M PRO-CHOICE... ..EXCEPT ON SCHOOLS, GUNS, TRADE, HEALTH CARE, ENERGY, SMOKING, UNION MEMBERSHIP, LIGHT BULBS, PLASTIC BAGS, WALMART, WHAT KIND OF FOOD YOU CAN EAT..."
Why are new condos/btos so obsess with balconies? : askSingapore - "Architect here. There’s actually a very simple reason. Balconies are encouraged by the URA under the Balconies Incentive Scheme (BIS). Developers get free balcony GFA for up to 7% of the living unit area — which is saleable GFA. It’s essentially free money for them so why wouldn’t they build it? As for whether they are useful or not — I find ziptrak or its equivalent really good in making balconies usable."
Hillel Neuer on X - "Meet the 2024 members of the U.N. Human Rights Council. More than 60% are serial abusers of human rights, including: 🇨🇺 Cuba 🇶🇦 Qatar 🇨🇳 China 🇸🇩 Sudan 🇪🇷 Eritrea 🇩🇿 Algeria 🇰🇼 Kuwait 🇧🇮 Burundi 🇸🇴 Somalia 🇻🇳 Vietnam 🇧🇩 Bangladesh 🇰🇿 Kazakhstan Happy New Year."
Meme - "Chlamydia: Reported rates among people by race/ethnicity
1,086 - Black or African American
613 - American Indian or Alaskan Native
568 - Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander
312 - Hispanic or Latino
246 - Persons of Multiple Races
179 - White
88 - Asian"
Racism makes people have lots of unprotected sex
Rob Henderson on X - "Bruce Lee had a cocaine habit, cheated on his wife, and was found dead in his mistress's hotel room. So often if you scratch the surface any figure from the late 60s, you find this pattern. Then people rewrite history to conceal the debauchery of the era."
Rob Henderson on X - "Anyone of any identity can believe an evident truth; but only devoted ingroup members will endorse common claims that are not supported by evidence...Hence, logic- or truth-defying beliefs can function as a hard-to-fake signal of immersion into a group"
BladeoftheSun on X - "Javier Milei continues his fascist rampage in Argentina. He has authorised the Privatising of all remaining State owned industries (thats his donors cashing in). He has also authorised the sale of all Social Housing and removed all rent controls It is going exactly as expected"
i/o on X - "When "fascism" means weakening the power of the state."
"Fascism" is anything the left hates
The fightback against Javier Milei’s radical reforms has begun - "Mr Milei is doggedly determined to destroy what he has dubbed “the caste”, a network of corrupt politicians, business cronies, media lapdogs and, most importantly, powerful unionists. On December 27th he sent a sprawling “omnibus” bill to Congress, designed to “free the productive forces of the nation from the shackles of the oppressive state”. It would allow Mr Milei to rule by decree for two years, change Argentina’s electoral system, and enforce prison terms of up to six years for those who organise protests that obstruct transport or damage property. All the better to break the caste. One month into Mr Milei’s presidency, the caste has started fighting back. Lawyers are furious about plans for divorces to be fast-tracked through the civil registry without requiring their services; doctors hate a new requirement for them to preferentially prescribe generic medicines. Art types are protesting against the closure of the national theatre institute and a national fund for the arts. Fishermen are cross about permit deregulation. Sugar producers are railing against plans to remove import-tariff barriers. Football clubs are manoeuvring to escape plans to turn them into limited companies in order to attract investment from what Mr Milei calls “Arab groups”. But no group is more affected by Mr Milei’s shock therapy than Argentina’s trade unions, or more enraged by it. His labour reforms would kneecap them by requiring employees to opt-in to union membership, rather than having dues taken automatically as they are at present. This would leave the unions out of pocket... Trade unions are central to the system Mr Milei seeks to tear down. They are powerful, and enduring, often run like family businesses."
Corruption and nepotism are good if they help the left
Meme - "will argentina become the worlds first fourth world country !? *Milei dressed as superhero*"
Argentina erupts in mass protests against President Milei's reforms - "Milei has introduced a lot of controversial changes in Argentina. His decisions and new laws suggest privatizations, cutting government spending, a significant increase of presidential powers, and reducing workers' rights and the right to protest. 9 out of 18 government departments, including those managing education, the environment, women, gender, and diversity, have been closed. The country's currency, the peso, lost more than half of its value compared to the dollar. Milei says these changes will save Argentina from the economic problems he thinks his predecessors caused."
César A. Hidalgo on X - "You need to keep in mind that academia is a game of social acceptance since all hiring, funding, and publication decisions come from secret peer recommendations. In many institutions, what that leads to is not excellence, but clubbiness. People form implicit support groups with others with whom they agree to approve each other’s work. These challenge-free environments lead to a lot of half-baked work that is usually ignored by the larger academic community. That was not how these institutions were in the mid-2000s. They were tough pressure cookers that did not care about you or your feelings. They cared about whether you really had something important to say, and could figure out how to say it and show it. It was tough, but the focus was on the quality of the work. And that is why their prestige is well deserved. There is a lot of great work and great people in them. Brilliant people pushing themselves and their teams to the limit, and in the process, generating new knowledge, technologies, and scientific leaders. But there is also an underbelly to this society. A society that is not immune to prestige and its addiction. People always went to these institutions looking for prestige. But over the last few decades, the prestige machine was supercharged with social media, displacing in part the culture of excellence. And this brings me to some of the saddest stories. I remember a colleague and friend who joined the MIT faculty in the mid-2010s. He came from abroad with his wife who had to quit her job to move there. And he was killing it in academic terms. But still, he was not happy. During a Saturday lunch, he explained to me why. He told me that when they socialized people would turn around and start talking to someone else as soon as his wife told them that she was in between jobs. That behavior was wearing them out. People in Cambridge were not there to make friends. I know this is a cliché, but I remember being told those same exact words by a senior colleague who made a habit of walking past me without acknowledging me every morning after I said hello, even though his office was a few doors away. My friend eventually left Cambridge as well. I also remember one of the most bizarre parties I’ve ever attended. I don’t know how else to call it other than a well-organized “braggathon.” About 200 people were invited to the house of a person who had made a fortune in finance. After everyone arrived, we were brought to a large library where one of the hosts got the party going. He started calling people, who would respond with their prepared pitches. “Hey Jennifer, I know you are revolutionizing the cancer industry..” and Jennifer would deliver her pitch. “And that reminds me of Brandon, who is doing amazing work on aerospace,” and Brandon would jump into action. That went on for about 2 hours. It is a strange prestige-driven society that is hard to fathom from the outside. And eventually, you get used to it. Because prestige is a powerful drug, a master of puppets that can take over your life. When you are affiliated to those institutions you get treated like royalty around the world. Saying you are a professor there provides a strong 'in' with the elites of the world. Many people don’t know how to evaluate ideas, so they rely on where these ideas come from. Prestige shapes the world. But there is another side to that coin. The crudest example of prestige addiction is the blighted and chronically addicted, those who at MIT are called lifers. These are people who joined the institute as an undergraduate, and 30 years later, continue doing odd jobs for a big professor because they understand that being low in the ranks of the castle is better than trying to survive outside its walls. They are in some ways, the most loyal members of the institutions, knowing that there is a parade of visitors that will give them for ten minutes the respect they otherwise never get inside."
Uncovering Ancient Work-Life: Excuses for 3,250-Year-Old Employee Absences in Egypt - "Most of the dates have a red word or phrase indicating why the person didn’t show up for work on that particular date. These excuses range from being “sick” to “working for the boss,” “brewing beer,” “mummifying their mother,” and even “being bitten by a scorpion.”... The most frequently recorded reason for absenteeism was illness, including “eye problems” and “scorpion stings” (mentioned over 100 times). The next most common situation was individuals performing special tasks for their bosses."
ostracon | British Museum
How Do Japanese Show They Care? By Sending a Telegram. - The New York Times - "When he got married this summer, Hiroshi Kanno, who works at a security services firm in Tokyo, wanted to make a big statement that would impress his future in-laws. So he asked for his company’s president to send a congratulatory telegram. It arrived during the wedding party and was read aloud... The telegram, a form of communication associated more with the Roaring ’20s than the 2020s, has kept a foothold in Japan, where millions of the messages still crisscross the nation every year, carrying articulations of celebration, mourning and thanks. Old friends send them for funerals. Politicians deliver them to constituents. And businesses use them to commemorate the retirement of valued employees. Unlike the much-maligned fax machine — frequently trotted out as evidence of Japan’s stubborn resistance to the digital age — the telegram is a symbol of the nation’s love of propriety. (Yes, it’s possible to fax a telegram request.) For many Japanese of a certain age, the medium — extravagant, formal and nostalgic — is the message. Kaoru Matsuda, a political consultant, said he believed that telegrams had stayed in use because they made a “more polite impression.”... Japan is far from the only country where telegrams still exist. They remain a useful, albeit increasingly rare, method of communication in places where poverty and infrastructure limit access to mobile phones and email. In wealthier nations, as well, a telegram can still carry legal or ceremonial weight. When President Biden was sick with Covid-19 this summer, the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, sent a telegram wishing him a speedy recovery. After the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday, world leaders sent condolences by telegram. But the days of mainstream use of telegrams are long past. Western Union, once synonymous with telegrams, ended its service in 2006. India, one of the last major national holdouts, shut down its state-run service in 2013 after 162 years... Today, messages are mostly composed online and transmitted digitally before being printed out and hand delivered. In Japan, senders can choose from among a variety of fonts and elegant card stocks and select an accompanying gift from catalogs full of luxury goods and branded items — Disney and Hello Kitty are popular. Flowers or stuffed animals are common choices for weddings, incense sticks for funerals. Payment schemes have also evolved: Instead of being charged by the character, as in the old days, customers are billed at a fixed rate for a fixed number of characters, and pay extra if they go over. The telegram’s essence, however, has remained: a concise message printed on a small card and (relatively) swiftly delivered. The telegram’s transformation into a vessel of etiquette was a decades-long process. Telegram use peaked in Japan in 1963, when the medium — then considered the gold standard for urgent communication — was used to send around 95 million messages, according to a government report assessing the recent state of the industry. By the 1990s, telegram traffic had nearly halved. At the same time, the messages’ content had undergone an unexpected evolution: Nearly all of them conveyed congratulations or condolences. In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, more than four million telegrams were delivered in Japan. That makes it the third largest market for the medium behind Russia and Italy... The bulk of telegrams in Japan are sent by Nippon Telegraph and Telephone, known as NTT. The company, which started life as a state-owned entity, was given an effective monopoly on the telegram business when it was privatized in 1985. In exchange, the company had to guarantee that it would provide the service indefinitely."
Do I Really Need a Toilet? - The New York Times - "Finding a place in Lower Manhattan is hard if you’re not fabulously wealthy."
Lack of breaks disrupts productivity, new study finds
Meme - "The entire enemy team *Rebels in A New Hope*
The PE teacher joining the losing *Darth Vader in Rogue One*"
Meme - ">Something good happened? Well you better thank me it was 100% me
>Something bad happened?
>I dindu nuffin it was da free willz or something"chl
Surreal! Salvador Dali's moustache remains intact, embalmer reveals after exhumation - "Narcís Bardalet, Dalí’s embalmer, said that upon opening his crypt, the body was found to be exactly as it was when it was interred 28 years ago. The handlebars of his moustache were still “marking (the time of) 10 past 10” as he wished, he said... The Spanish master was raised from his tomb in his hometown of Figueres late on Thursday night in a highly controversial operation to settle a paternity claim from a TV fortune teller that she is his secret lovechild... The fortune teller, who for eight years hosted a tarot card reading show on local television, claimed that the visionary Dalí was the source of her powers. “I have had this gift since I was little, and where else can it come from? It can’t be from anyone else but him.” Ms Abel said she believed the artist knew she was his child, relating an encounter told to her by her mother Antonia, who has given her blessing to the paternity suit. Her mother was pushing her in a pram when the pair ran into Dalí; he allegedly patted her head and remarked “So this is my daughter Pilar, eh?”. Ms Abel had crossed paths with him again as a teenager, and the pair had exchanged “looks that were more than looks”, she said."
Court dismisses appeal from woman claiming to be Salvador Dalí's daughter - "Almost three years after his remains were disinterred to settle a long-running paternity claim – and, incidentally, proving that his trademark moustache remained intact – Salvador Dalí may finally be able to rest in his own idiosyncratic approximation of peace. On Monday, a court in Madrid ruled that the fortune-teller who erroneously believed herself to be the surrealist’s daughter was liable for the costs of an appeal – and the exhumation itself. Dalí died in 1989 and was buried in a crypt beneath the museum he designed for himself in his home town of Figueres, Catalonia. His remains were exhumed in July 2017 and hair, nail and bone samples taken to support Pilar Abel’s contention that the artist was her father. Abel, a tarot card reader and psychic from Girona, had always thought she was the fruit of a liaison between her mother and Dalí in 1955. But DNA tests established Dalí was not her biological father."
Time to start a new religion
The myth of the ‘red-state murder problem’ - "If this even needs to be said, the US does not have a ‘red-state murder problem’. Yet this frankly bizarre claim has been made over and over by Democrats and their media allies in the run-up to this week’s Midterms... The US is a truly massive, federal-system country and crime within almost every state is centred on a few large and diverse cities. In both Republican- and Democratic-led states, almost all true epicentres of crime are in large ‘blue’ communities – particularly those that recently flirted with defunding the police. In Missouri, for example, Democratic St Louis posts roughly the same annual homicide rate (69.4 per 100,000) as El Salvador. This pattern is not atypical. In Louisiana, the driver of crime is ‘blue’ New Orleans, with 41 homicides per 100,000 residents (about on par with Lesotho). In Ohio, it is Cleveland (33.7) and Cincinnati (23.8). In Tennessee, the driver is Memphis (27.1) and the surrounding blue-collar suburbs. Across the entire list of the 20 most violent American cities, just two currently have Republican or independent leadership teams (Tulsa and Las Vegas respectively). This alone should debunk the ‘murder concentrated among Republicans’ narrative. But there’s more. There are 11 large Republican-led cities in the US, but only one of these – Tulsa, with 18.6 murders per 100,000 citizens – makes the top-20 list of high-crime big cities, finishing in 14th place. Other large Republican-led cities, like Oklahoma City or Jacksonville, miss out entirely, despite sometimes posting high rates of overall crime. In fact, of the 19 most violent large cities, 17 are controlled by the Democrats. This indicates that there are more problems with crime in large blue areas than in large red ones. Interestingly, this relationship exists in smaller cities, too. Famously violent places – like East St Louis, Illinois and Benton Harbor, Michigan – are almost invariably under Democratic control. Advocates of the ‘red states are going wild’ narrative will sometimes claim that blue-governed areas in Democratic states are safer than blue-governed areas in red states – thanks to tighter gun laws in the Democratic states. But there is a simpler if much less politically correct explanation for this state-level gap. Many of the largest and highest-crime red states are located in the heavily African-American US South. And for complex historical reasons, the black violent crime rate is generally about 2.3 times the white violent crime rate. This disparity is greatest in the case of murder. The rate at which blacks are killed by homicide currently seems to be eight-to-10 times the rate of whites. And it seems to have risen to over 20 per 100,000 during the ‘racial reckoning’ era, which began with the Black Lives Matter unrest in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. When we look deeply at the 10 ‘red’ states specifically cited by Murdock and Kessler, it is hard not to notice that most of them are the US’s traditional African-American heartlands. The list includes: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee. As a quantitative methodologist, I suspect that a simple adjustment for population demographics – or poverty, for that matter – would mitigate if not reverse the relationship between GOP governance and murder rate... Chicago is not a Republican city, and there is no ‘GOP surge in crime’. Almost all of the most violent metropolitan areas in the United States are under Democratic control. Adjusted for demographics and poverty, red states probably do a statistically better job of handling crime than their blue counterparts."
The failure to disaggregate strikes again. Ditto for red states / the Bible Belt and teenage pregnancy (the ecological fallacy)
Keywords: ecological inference
No, a porn star wasn't tricked into performing a sex act on her brother - "A story about an American porn star suing a production company after she was tricked into performing a sex act on her own brother has gone viral online. Naturally, it isn't true. The story, which was published by popular websites like Elite Daily, Break and Cosmopolitan, says that a porn star named Madeline Madison was suing production company called Come-and-Go Productions for $3.2 million (and a car) after she was tricked into performing a sex act on her brother on the set of a film titled Milk Maids 2. The film was apparently going to be released to the Japanese market where, according to Madison, they "love incest". The director, Jameel Mendoza, said she was lying, and called her a "third rate talent" with "no moral standards.""
The myth of the ‘red-state murder problem’ - "If this even needs to be said, the US does not have a ‘red-state murder problem’. Yet this frankly bizarre claim has been made over and over by Democrats and their media allies in the run-up to this week’s Midterms... The US is a truly massive, federal-system country and crime within almost every state is centred on a few large and diverse cities. In both Republican- and Democratic-led states, almost all true epicentres of crime are in large ‘blue’ communities – particularly those that recently flirted with defunding the police. In Missouri, for example, Democratic St Louis posts roughly the same annual homicide rate (69.4 per 100,000) as El Salvador. This pattern is not atypical. In Louisiana, the driver of crime is ‘blue’ New Orleans, with 41 homicides per 100,000 residents (about on par with Lesotho). In Ohio, it is Cleveland (33.7) and Cincinnati (23.8). In Tennessee, the driver is Memphis (27.1) and the surrounding blue-collar suburbs. Across the entire list of the 20 most violent American cities, just two currently have Republican or independent leadership teams (Tulsa and Las Vegas respectively). This alone should debunk the ‘murder concentrated among Republicans’ narrative. But there’s more. There are 11 large Republican-led cities in the US, but only one of these – Tulsa, with 18.6 murders per 100,000 citizens – makes the top-20 list of high-crime big cities, finishing in 14th place. Other large Republican-led cities, like Oklahoma City or Jacksonville, miss out entirely, despite sometimes posting high rates of overall crime. In fact, of the 19 most violent large cities, 17 are controlled by the Democrats. This indicates that there are more problems with crime in large blue areas than in large red ones. Interestingly, this relationship exists in smaller cities, too. Famously violent places – like East St Louis, Illinois and Benton Harbor, Michigan – are almost invariably under Democratic control. Advocates of the ‘red states are going wild’ narrative will sometimes claim that blue-governed areas in Democratic states are safer than blue-governed areas in red states – thanks to tighter gun laws in the Democratic states. But there is a simpler if much less politically correct explanation for this state-level gap. Many of the largest and highest-crime red states are located in the heavily African-American US South. And for complex historical reasons, the black violent crime rate is generally about 2.3 times the white violent crime rate. This disparity is greatest in the case of murder. The rate at which blacks are killed by homicide currently seems to be eight-to-10 times the rate of whites. And it seems to have risen to over 20 per 100,000 during the ‘racial reckoning’ era, which began with the Black Lives Matter unrest in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014. When we look deeply at the 10 ‘red’ states specifically cited by Murdock and Kessler, it is hard not to notice that most of them are the US’s traditional African-American heartlands. The list includes: Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Missouri, South Carolina, Georgia, Arkansas and Tennessee. As a quantitative methodologist, I suspect that a simple adjustment for population demographics – or poverty, for that matter – would mitigate if not reverse the relationship between GOP governance and murder rate... Chicago is not a Republican city, and there is no ‘GOP surge in crime’. Almost all of the most violent metropolitan areas in the United States are under Democratic control. Adjusted for demographics and poverty, red states probably do a statistically better job of handling crime than their blue counterparts."
