2.25

Many people in the West have been surprised by the events of the last week in which American TV presenter Tucker Carlson followed his interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin with a series of increasingly bizarre videos. Tucker discovers that Moscow Metro stations are grand and impressive, that Russian supermarkets have shopping carts that can be rented with a coin that you can retrieve on returning the cart, and that food is cheaper in Russia. I don’t wish to bore the time-starved reader by addressing this silliness but if you’re interested, read this footnote1. Instead, let me explain why I am not surprised. I appeared on Tucker’s show twice during his tenure at Fox News. On both occasions we discussed subjects on which we agree: the erosion of freedom of speech in the West and the dangers the woke left poses to our society.

The people who are the most likely to attend religious services weekly are those with graduate degrees.

The Royal Canadian Navy is trying to fix a series of problems on its new Arctic and Offshore Patrol Ships including anchors that aren’t effective, a refueling system that’s too heavy to use, and areas on the vessels that are leaking.

The Republican and Democratic parties have distinct strengths within different subgroups of the U.S. population. However, Democrats have lost ground among some of their traditionally stronger support groups while gaining ground with others. This is based on analysis of Americans’ party preferences, which includes those who identify as Democratic or Republican and those who are independent but lean toward either party.

What’s more, says Frank, if car designers could draw better, cars would look better. The creative flow from mind to medium is less constrained using pen and paper than with a computer: more human and more inventive. ‘Using pen and paper, you’re less inhibited. You’re expressing your inner thoughts in the purest form.’ | Only one student, sponsored by a Chinese car maker, challenged his championing of paper and pen. She said that, in China, sketching was unnecessary. They increasingly use AI. ‘And it shows,’ said Frank.

One of Britain’s oldest steelmakers has developed a manufacturing technique that it claims could drastically reduce the time and cost to produce mini nuclear power stations, which have been proposed as one way to bridge the nation’s energy gap. Sheffield Forgemasters has become the first to use the so-called electron beam welding method to produce one of the core parts of a small modular reactor (SMR) at scale.

“Finland plans to open more than 300 new shooting ranges to encourage more citizens to take up the hobby in the interest of national defence.”

In the world of corporate medicine, Diamond, who has spent his whole medical career at One Medical, is what is known as a “friendly” or “straw” doctor, a physician who lends his name and license number to corporations seeking to comply with regulations requiring medical practices to be owned by licensed physicians. His name appears on the articles of incorporation for Amazon-owned clinics in Oregon, Florida, Virginia, Connecticut, Ohio, and about a dozen other states. Separately, a Florida straw doctor in one of Millstein’s other recent cases had attached his name to more than 200 practices.

However, in five years, when we look back, we will recognize that Apple’s Vision Pro, with its powerful spatial computing features, advanced optics, and 3D immersive imaging, was a game changer and a catalyst for moving computing from 2D to 3D. Given Apple’s evolutionary product roadmaps, they will make the Vision Pro more like regular glasses with lower price points when the technology becomes available to allow this to happen.

We’re just over a year into the existence (and proliferation) of ChatGPT, DALL-E, and other image generators, and despite the obvious (and reasonable) fear that these products will continue to erode the foundations of the already unstable economies of the creative arts, we keep running into the problem that these things are interesting, surprising, but not particularly useful for anything.

Been staring at it all morning trying to draw assumptions from it.

Wow. That’s quite a list of illegal activities you’re allowed to do as a CHS (“for investigative purposes”) when “authorized” by the FBI. Sounds exciting. Where do we sign up?

“It takes a rare breed of a leader to not sell to the highest bidder,” he said.

Really good to see this line in the PM’s speech yesterday. Of the 8 former eastern-bloc OECD members, NZ now is less productive than half of them.

Americans were sold the promise that electric vehicles would bring production companies and an influx of jobs to small towns nationwide as part of a modern day goldrush. However, as interest in EVs has slipped, lithium and nickel facilities – metals used in lithium-ion batteries for electric vehicles – are taking cost-cutting measures including mass layoffs and suspending operations. The demand for electric vehicles surged in 2022, rising by 76 percent in April of that year, but by the end of 2023, the number of vehicles sold dropped to just 50 percent.

No one who knows anything about America could imagine that it will reelect an administration ostensibly headed by an incomprehensible, senescent, sticky fingered, superannuated servitor. America and the world are on a glidepath to better things, whatever the Americophobic Guardian and the rest of the moronic euro-Left think of it.

Never before in history has a declining empire beaten a rising empire, ever,” he said in a recent interview.

The United States would do well to expand the Civilian Marksmanship Program – for those not aware, you can buy a government-surplus M1 Garand from them for $700 with free shipping!

In other words, they don’t define themselves by their victimization but by their aspiration. Democrats are the party of victims, Republicans are the party of men.

The missile was supposed to have flown several thousand miles before landing harmlessly in the Atlantic between Brazil and West Africa. Instead, it dropped into the ocean near to where it was launched.

Pollster Scott Rasmussen has done a deep dive on “the one percent”—urban dwellers with post-graduate degrees and incomes over $150,000. These, by a four-to-one margin, support Joe Biden and his climate policies and progressive agenda. These professionals, particularly women, are increasingly the base of the Democratic Party. Whether as professionals or the ultra-wealthy, these Democrats may be voting their consciences, but also their class interests. Government, social assistance, and healthcare account for 56 percent of the 2.8 million net new jobs over the past year, notes the Wall Street Journal, and for nearly all employment gains in blue states such as New York and Illinois.

The numbers are stark. Two years ago, in February 2022, GM said it expected to sell 400,000 EVs by the end of 2023. Eight months later, it rolled that date back to mid-2024. (In October, it abandoned the 400,000 number altogether.) But its actual 2023 sales of Ultium EVs were a mere 13,838. Of those, 9,155, or two-thirds were one single model: the Cadillac Lyriq. Sure, GM sold 76,000 electric cars altogether, but a whopping 82% of them were the aging Chevrolet Bolt EV and  EUV—which it took out of production late last year.

Brooke Rollins, a former Trump domestic policy adviser, pitched Dunn in 2021 on a new think tank, America First Policy Institute, with a mission to perpetuate Trump-era policies for generations to come. The West Texas oilman, whose efforts in his home state have been both successful and polarizing, responded with both enthusiasm and money. “He’s a visionary,” said Rollins, who previously worked with Dunn building a political think tank in Texas. “His ability to build organizations and structure and culture is so incredible. I’ve relied on him more for that than his funding.” 

Trump’s attorneys have Special Prosecutor Nathan Wade’s cell phone data. At least 35 visits to Fani Willis’s condo before the “relationship” started. 2,000 calls and 12K texts between Wade/Willis in 2021.

Using big Medicare databases has never been cheap or easy. Under the current system, researchers could have the data transferred to secure university computers for about $20,000–that’s a lot but once the data was on the university computers it could be accessed by multiple researchers, cutting costs. A professor could buy the data and their PhD students, for example, wouldn’t have to pay again. Under the new system it will cost $35,000 for one researcher to access the data which will be held on government (CMS) computers. Moreover, it’s unclear how complex statistical analysis will be performed or how congested the CMS systems may become.

And so as part of that maturation, Marc and Ben—now Silicon Valley elders by today’s standards—decided that the spirit walk was over, and they had to return to the world of political fundraising, too. In December, seemingly out of nowhere, Horowitz wrote in a blog post that he and Marc were back, but this time that they would pledge to be “single issue” donors. “We believe that advancing technology is critical for humanity’s future, so we will, for the first time, get involved with politics by supporting candidates who align with our vision and values specifically for technology,” 

LT, “If the Bank of England governor can’t be sacked and the Prime Minister can be sacked, then the BoE will have more power than the PM. That is a problem in a democracy”

Yes, most Americans want to end the flood. Yet the federal government–that is, America–as a matter of national policy, maintains the frontier open. For example, as I write Washington forbids Texas to use barbed wire to stop the influx. This is official policy. From a Mexican point of view, America’s refusal to protect its borders is a major problem as it draws immigrants from all of Latin America, no favor, and then Mexico has to put up with America’s anger at Mexico’s failure to do what America should do for itself.

Egypt has agreed to a $35bn deal with the United Arab Emirates to develop the town of Ras el-Hekma town on its northwestern coast, Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly announced on Friday after weeks of speculations.

Over the past 19 months, a Reinsdorf-connected company has spent $44.7 million buying vacant lots from two politically connected families that have long offered discounted parking deals to fans of the Bulls and Blackhawks, records examined by the Chicago Sun-Times show. A third family has refused to sell its parking lots. More than half of that money has been paid to family-owned companies connected to longtime Bridgeport businessman Joseph Feldman Sr., whose late sister headed the political campaign fund for former Mayor Richard M. Daley.

In demanding these companies’ data, EIA appears to be responding to political pressure rather than a genuine “emergency” implicating public harm. But the Paperwork Reduction Act allows emergency exceptions only in limited circumstances—not including political pressure. So, EIA’s unlawful scheme must be set aside for good.

If the legacy primes can’t figure out how to build high-performance spacecraft at a reasonable cost, new companies like Astranis will have to build them instead.

Gov. Kemp just sent a letter to the White House demanding details, such as the immigration status, of the suspect charged with the murder of a student on UGA’s campus.

For a broader examination of the way Israel has engaged in a systematic propaganda campaign about the events of October 7 and beyond, see my recent piece, “Israel’s Ruthless Propaganda Campaign to Dehumanize Palestinians:”

Addressing industry figures, government officials and dozens of reporters at the ceremony, Chang recounted his very first trip to Japan. He arrived in 1968 as vice president in charge of Texas Instruments’ integrated circuit business to start a joint venture with Sony in Japan. The first person he met during that visit was Akio Morita, the legendary founder of the electronics titan. During their two-hour conversation, Chang recalled, Morita told him: “You will be pleasantly surprised by the yield you will achieve in Japan.”

Requires each county to maintain on its website a list of its policy procedures and expectations for administrative approval of Live Local Act-eligible projects.